Farms

Farmers keep animals for meat, milk, eggs and other food. Some farmers keep many different animals, for example, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks and pigs, but some keep just one kind of animal or bird. There are cattle farms, pig farms, sheep farms and chicken farms.

Farmers keep chickens for their eggs and their meat. Some chickens live outside in the day time. The farmer feeds them, but they find worms and insects to eat, too. At night they sleep in chicken hutches.

In some farms chickens never go outside. They live in batteries. Their eggs and meat are cheap because it only takes a few people to look after thousands of chickens in batteries. We call these chickens battery hens.

Farmers keep sheep for both their meat and their wool. They leave the sheep to eat grass on the grasslands. Sometimes farmers keep dogs on their farms to keep wild animals away, for example, wolves. Farmers also use these dogs to herd their sheep.

A long time ago, Australian sheep farmers used to ride horses to herd their sheep. Today most of them ride motor cycles. Some also use dogs. When their dogs are tired, they sit on the motor cycles, too!

Every year shearers come to the farm to shear the sheep. This does not hurt the sheep, and the wool soon grows again. Lorries then take the wool to factories. There, the wool is washed and combed into a sheet. The sheet is then twisted into a rope and the rope is stretched and twisted into a thin yarn. Later this yarn is knitted to make ' loves, jumpers, 9 scarves and other things. In some countries, some sheep farms are very big. Some are hundreds of kilometres away from the city. In Australia some children on the farms do not go to school. They listen to lessons on the radio every day. When someone is ill, the Flying Doctor comes

in an aeroplane.

Have you seen cowboys on television? Cowboys work on cattle farms. A long time ago, cowboys used to wear big hats to keep the sun out of their eyes. They used to ride horses and catch cattle with ropes. They used to carry guns, too, because there were lots of cattle thieves.

Today cowboys still wear big hats, some still ride horses but many of them ride motor cycles or drive lorries. Now they do not usually carry guns but they carry radios to talk to other cowboys. Sometimes they go to a show called a rodeo. They ride horses and catch cattle to win prizes.