1. Modern Day Farm Yard Farming in the 21 st century @homeed101

2. Introduction The role of a farm has been the same for thousands of years, the only change is how we farm it. The prominent role of a farm is to produce the raw ingredients for food making. This will never change. Not all farms produce the same things. Some only produce Milk, some only produce meat and some only produce grain. Farms produce different items all around the world as the climate is different. We will take a look into all aspects of the modern farm in much more detail as we go along. We will talk about farm machines, animals and storage. @homeed101

3. Machines Machines have evolved from simple horse drawn single plow’s to the massive harvesters and tractors we use today. There is a different machine for nearly every job on a farm today. Different harvesters for different crops and a machine to replant the crop. The cows are milked by a machine and the fields are worked by them. Some of the machines can even drive and work themselves using GPS. @homeed101

4. Tractors Tractors some in many shapes and sizes but they are all built for the same purpose. The tractor is the most versatile machine on a farm. It pulls trailers, ploughs, planters, cultivators, sprayers and much more. With out a tractor a farmer would have to do all the really hard work by hand or with a horse like they did before tractors were invented. The picture to the left is a mega tractor, it has extra wheels and a much bigger engine so it can pull heavy equipment over soft soil. It is important that the modern farmer chooses the correct tractor for his needs. A little tractor wont be able to pull the biggest plough and if he buys a tractor that is to big it could sink into the soft mud be to big to fit in a smaller field. @homeed101

5. Combine Harvester The combine harvester is very special machine used on a grain farm. Once the plant has grown and the weather is dry, the harvester cuts the plant, separates the grain from the plant then sends the grain into a storage tank while sending the rest of the plant out the back to be collected by a tractor pulling a baling machine. All this work used to done by hand and took weeks to do a single field with hundreds of people working it. Now it can be done in a matter of hours by just two people. One to monitor the harvester and another to drive the tractor with a trailer to collect the grain when the harvester’s storage tank is getting full. Harvesters can have different cutter attached to the front for different crops but the job it does stays the same. @homeed101

6. Other Machines The seed planter does exactly that. It is pulled by a tractor and plants the seeds into the soil then covers them over with soil. It can plant thousands of seeds in a day very quickly. A plough is pulled by a tractor, it digs down into the top soil then pulls it up and turns it over. This is important for a farmer as it means all the old soil is put under good fertile soil that was below. This is done before planting seed to give the seeds the best chance to grow a strong crop and high yield. This is used to spray feed and pesticides onto crops as they are growing. Feed makes the plant stronger, also known as fertiliser. A pesticide kills the bugs and disease before they can damage the crops and give a low yield. The baler, pulled by a tractor, picks up all the cut plant left behind from the combine harvester then squashes it up into bales. A bale can be round or square and are used to store the hay or straw until they are used for animal feed or bedding. There are several other uses for bales like seats and even for building houses. @homeed101