I am going to become a FARMER.... Yikes, it will be a redub of Green Acres...

Mike,

Enjoy!  Lots of possibilities in a farm scene.  I thought about making my own barn but couldn't figure out how I was going to do the silo, so went with the WS structure.  Other than the home-made fence, all other scenic elements purchased from various sources.

I am 18 and I raise 21 egg hens.  I have found a couple really cool farm models, maybe they will give you some ideas. I also show a dairy cow through Lapeer county 4-H. All of my layouts must include a farm of some type.

March 2020 classic toy trainsMy farm

Erik C. Lindgerden has a really neat farm in his profile pic. I found a couple pics of it a while ago, but cannot seem to find it now :{

Pelle Soeberg is a great resource for rural America and farm country.

https://www.facebook.com/Pelle...te-1285855161560659/

Here some of my farm .

Guy

I lived in serious farm country for 30 years.  I had my own 50 acre place (which didn't have crops planted on it, and was thus referred to in the South as a "place").

Real working farms always have rough gravel driveways leading up to the house and other buildings, so no smooth pavement.

And, the business of agriculture is an extremely messy, gruesome, day to day, affair.  So working farms are not neat and tidy as you might see in pictures and movies.  Stray pieces of large and small equipment here and there, old tractors or row crop machines (that "someday" will be repaired) are parked askew in various places, with tall weeds licking the tires, worn out gray wooden sheds that have been repaired and re-repaired for 50 years, in convenient locations, and houses that are sad and neglected because the farm work always has to come first.

Typically there are two or three mixed breed dogs (always with a dash of beagle genes) sit on the porch or under an old tractor.    And there will always be a pick-up truck, not totally beaten up but definitely worn.  Cats are generally not welcome and are often shot on sight.  (Stray cats can multiply like rats and kill almost all small game in the area.)

Interestingly, you almost never see an abandoned junk car on a farm, as you always see in hillbilly country.   Farmers spend all of their time working on crops and farm equipment and have no interest in trying to get a junk car "going again," so when one is on its last legs they sell it to a friend or relative for whatever they can get.

Most farmers I knew didn't raise chickens.  As you know, they are alot of work, extremely stinky, constantly under threat from fox, coyote, weasel and bobcats, and the days of slaughtering a chicken for dinner are long over.  (Takes an hour to kill,  pluck, and dress one.  And the eggs you can get are not worth the money you spend.)

Extremely few working farms have a horse anymore.  They are all big-time trouble, very expensive to keep, and contribute nothing to the razor thin profit margin. 

Very few large areas of patchy weeds or woods are left on any real farm these days.  Sadly, they clear, level and plant every square inch of ground they can, often right up to the edge of the road pavement.  As one weary farm wife told me,  "It's all about production."

Farmers always wear hats.    99% of the time, it is a baseball type hat, from the feed store or tractor dealer.

Unless it is a dairy farm, the only type of cattle you will find are "feeder calves."   The large dairies have to keep their milk cows pregnant most of the time to keep the milk coming, so every few months they sell the bull calves, for $100 to $200, when they are only a couple of weeks old.  You can buy them at the local livestock auction barn, or often by just calling up the dairy farm.

Farmers buy these, and their wives bottle feed them for a month, then put them on sweet feed, and then grain (corn), and then they are neutered.  When they reach the age of about 8 months, or 500 to 600 pounds, then the ratio of the weight of the corn you have to feed them, to the pounds of weight they gain from the corn, really increases, so it is not economical to feed them anymore.  So, they are all loaded up and taken to the livestock auction to sell, generally for only $500 to $700 dollars.   This is why when you drive by farms, you will see 20 or 30 medium sized steers, all of the same color and weight.

Hope this gives you some ideas, if you want to depict a real farm.  Your wife and kids may want a fantasy farm though.  :-)

Mannyrock

Really great replies and I LOVE the pictures. It has occurred to me (probably NOT to my wife) that a barn and silo will require a house to live in, maybe a windmill, fences, animals, tractors, fields, plants, a chicken coop, and etc.

My current layout runs 5 trains, 45 buildings, 50 or so cars and trucks, 3 Fastrack loops, one double tracked (traditional) trolley bridge, 3 helicopters, one jet, and 60-ish cars/trucks.

So, in  a real sense, the accessories jack up the cost of model railroading as a hobby. So it will be with the farm.... But, it takes you ins so many directions that are all FUN!

Plasticville has a nice set of farm outbuildings that, with some paint and maybe a little detailing, really add to a farm scene.

Andy

Keep Manhattan, just give you that countryside!  

Well, if the cows you are raising are for beef, you can have a lot of green and pasture around, but if milk cows, and you have them near the milking barn, be sure to put plenty of brown around. Unless perhaps, you are modeling an Amish farm, they seem to be always neat.  They don't sell those rubber boots for fashion you know.  I have beef cow pasture on 3 sides of my property, the barn area is not too gummy and muddy, and they are not that bad compared to a milk cow operation which I had to deal with for about 32 years as a consequence of my work.  Nothing like misjudging the ground and go sliding through a foot of mud and you know what, busting through  a closed farm gate in a 4WD truck, then have to get out in it to fix that gate before going on.  But I wouldn't  trade the worst day of that job for anything else.  32 years of jeans, overalls, and boots and the only suit I own is for marrying, burying and church...sometimes.

My grandparents farms always had several feral cats that served as mousers in the barns.

Many farmers where I grew up had several acres that were hilly & wooded.  Today they rent out those acres to hunters during deer season.

Many farms along the Illinois expressways today also have the white windmills for electrical power generation.

Besides MTH, Lionel, Woodland Scenics, & Plasticville, Ertl also makes a variety of farm buildings.

Fleet Farm, Farm Fleet, Tractor Supply Company have lots of farm toys.

Some farm vehicles & implements are available in 1/43, 1/48, & 1/50 scale.  Many more are available in 1/64 scale.  

I will also have a farm on my eventual layout.

Thanks to all contributors to this post.

@Mannyrock posted:

I lived in serious farm country for 30 years.  I had my own 50 acre place (which didn't have crops planted on it, and was thus referred to in the South as a "place").

Real working farms always have rough gravel driveways leading up to the house and other buildings, so no smooth pavement.

And, the business of agriculture is an extremely messy, gruesome, day to day, affair.  So working farms are not neat and tidy as you might see in pictures and movies.  Stray pieces of large and small equipment here and there, old tractors or row crop machines (that "someday" will be repaired) are parked askew in various places, with tall weeds licking the tires, worn out gray wooden sheds that have been repaired and re-repaired for 50 years, in convenient locations, and houses that are sad and neglected because the farm work always has to come first.

Typically there are two or three mixed breed dogs (always with a dash of beagle genes) sit on the porch or under an old tractor.    And there will always be a pick-up truck, not totally beaten up but definitely worn.  Cats are generally not welcome and are often shot on sight.  (Stray cats can multiply like rats and kill almost all small game in the area.)

Interestingly, you almost never see an abandoned junk car on a farm, as you always see in hillbilly country.   Farmers spend all of their time working on crops and farm equipment and have no interest in trying to get a junk car "going again," so when one is on its last legs they sell it to a friend or relative for whatever they can get.

Most farmers I knew didn't raise chickens.  As you know, they are alot of work, extremely stinky, constantly under threat from fox, coyote, weasel and bobcats, and the days of slaughtering a chicken for dinner are long over.  (Takes an hour to kill,  pluck, and dress one.  And the eggs you can get are not worth the money you spend.)

Extremely few working farms have a horse anymore.  They are all big-time trouble, very expensive to keep, and contribute nothing to the razor thin profit margin.

Very few large areas of patchy weeds or woods are left on any real farm these days.  Sadly, they clear, level and plant every square inch of ground they can, often right up to the edge of the road pavement.  As one weary farm wife told me,  "It's all about production."

Farmers always wear hats.    99% of the time, it is a baseball type hat, from the feed store or tractor dealer.

Unless it is a dairy farm, the only type of cattle you will find are "feeder calves."   The large dairies have to keep their milk cows pregnant most of the time to keep the milk coming, so every few months they sell the bull calves, for $100 to $200, when they are only a couple of weeks old.  You can buy them at the local livestock auction barn, or often by just calling up the dairy farm.

Farmers buy these, and their wives bottle feed them for a month, then put them on sweet feed, and then grain (corn), and then they are neutered.  When they reach the age of about 8 months, or 500 to 600 pounds, then the ratio of the weight of the corn you have to feed them, to the pounds of weight they gain from the corn, really increases, so it is not economical to feed them anymore.  So, they are all loaded up and taken to the livestock auction to sell, generally for only $500 to $700 dollars.   This is why when you drive by farms, you will see 20 or 30 medium sized steers, all of the same color and weight.

Hope this gives you some ideas, if you want to depict a real farm.  Your wife and kids may want a fantasy farm though.  :-)

Mannyrock

Mannyrock, excellent account of today's  modern farmer.  I've always lived in the suburbs, so I learned a lot. Arnold

My buddy, Chet Lichota created this farm scene for a corner on my new layout. To date, it is still the only completed scene on the entire layout. I really need to start spending a whole lot more time on that project!

Plasticville barn and Produce Stand, and K-Line country home with smoking chimney.

The O Scale corn stalks, shown here and in Steve's photo, are a Scenics Express product. Arnold

P.S.- In my 30 years in farm country, I never saw a pen at a farm with a pig in it, except once.  And it was a pet.  A full grown pig can weigh 400 to 500 pounds and is danged dangerous, both sexes.   (They have huge teeth.)

Pig farming is now the exclusive venue of large- scale pork farms, which have huge "farrowing barns".  They will often have 500 pigs inside.  The females are constantly bred, throwing off 4 litters a year of up to 10 piglets each.  The pigs are sold the feed lot when they get to a uniform size of about 250 pounds.  The meat processors all want them to be the same size and weight, because they have to slaughter and process them in a factory "conveyor belt" fashion.

Smithfield had a very large pork processing facility, in West Point, Mississippi.  And I kid you not, they processed 5,000 pigs a day!

Mannyrock

Hey Arnold, I still love your little idyllic slice of rural heaven there!

If you’re going to a redub of green acres, you could put a MTH Hooterville station down the line a bit. Could be a great scene!

@Dave Warburton posted:

Keep Manhattan, just give you that countryside!  

I keep thinking of the lyrics, "All the lights on broadway don't amount to an acre of green." I Am Bound to Be A Country Girl Again." Buffy St. Marie...

My brother Bob, works for USDA, Dept. of Agriculture, Vermont, which surprisingly is a big dairy state.  The smallest dairy herd, USDA works with, is 800 cows.  Tough to model 800 cows on any layout.

The 1950 though early 1970 dairy farm could be model.  That part of American history is gone for ever.

Bob arranged a tour for me, of a modern dairy farm. I was overwhelmed. Bob's expertise, is in designing, and supervising the build of manure storage ponds, Part of a dairy farm, most wouldn't model.

Have fun, I did a nice display with an Ertl farm set, painted/weather/the right price, etc.   Would work better for S scale but IMO, O.K. for O. 

@NSRailfan100 posted:

If you’re going to a redub of green acres, you could put a MTH Hooterville station down the line a bit. Could be a great scene!

I would go the other way down the tracks to Petticoat Junction; more scenic possibilities.

@Mike CT posted:

My brother Bob, works for USDA, Dept. of Agriculture, Vermont, which surprisingly is a big dairy state.  The smallest dairy herd, USDA works with, is 800 cows.  Tough to model 800 cows on any layout.

The 1950 though early 1970 dairy farm could be model.  That part of American history is gone for ever.

Bob arranged a tour for me, of a modern dairy farm. I was overwhelmed. Bob's expertise, is in designing, and supervising the build of manure storage ponds, Part of a dairy farm, most wouldn't model.

Have fun, I did a nice display with an Ertl farm set, painted/weather/the right price, etc.   Would work better for S scale but IMO, O.K. for O.

How about manure scented smoke fluid!

LOL, Arnold

In my opinion, classic Plasticville farm buildings still shine with all that were (are) available. In addition to the log cabin series, farm buildings and houses came in various color choices, they give you an almost infinite variety of options for farm scenes.  

Here is mine on my "retro layout"

Michael, Here are a couple of previous threads in case you missed them:

https://ogrforum.com/...c/the-cows-came-home

https://ogrforum.com/...nt-by-the-farm-today

One grandfather operated a dairy on a tobacco farm in prime burley tobacco country; another operated a dairy (milked 20-30 dairy cows, Guernseys, because he thought they gave richest, creamiest) milk.  Nowadays you mostly see black and white Holstein cows on large dairy farms, because they produce more milk.  Cats were always around the barn to lap up a milkcan cap of milk squirted from the cow.  And yelping hounds would chase the '37 Chevy pickup out through three farmgates, where my brother and l would bounce out of our rough ride in the truck bed with clanking mikcans, to open and close. He had a hogpen in which he raised hogs,with a loading ramp, but some hogs wound up as hams hung in the smokehouse. Once there was a major " hog killing", in which a number were butchered out in the barnyard, with a large caldron, and bacon and all sorts of "delicacies" prepared. My grandmother raised chickens, sometimes sold eggs, as long as they lived there.  He had to retire to raising beef, when cheese factory closed, this after rules made small dairy milk producers impossible (huge equip. Investment: stainless tanks, etc.).  This grandfather, who when working to buy farm, put interiors into cabooses for the L&N, built his barn, machine shed, and brooder house He also overhauled the engines on his 1940 Chevy coach, 1952 Chevy pickup, and Case tractor. He WAS a jack-of-all-trades. Conversely, the other grandfather was not mechanically inclined ( but he raised a lot of tobacco, once "yellow gold", so he had a large tobacco barn built for him). Tobacco barns, in Ky., southern Ind., etc .are distinctive for large size and the slim, vertical vent doors down the side.  They often have a "stripping room" shed attached, as the dairy barns did feed rooms. Tobacco barns were for hanging tobacco to cure before sale. Dairy farms were constant work, cows have to be milked twice a day....no holidays, days off, or vacations!

Arnold,

For the safety of your farmer people, please put that huge black Angus bull in a pen.  :-)

(Bulls are absolutely vicious and are second only to tractors in killing farmers.  This is true even if you bottle feed them and hand raise them from birth.   Once they become "teenagers," they will immediately turn on you, . . .  kinda like kids.)

Mannyrock

Here are a couple more sources.

Rix makes HO kits for blue silos (based on A O Smith’s Harvestore silos) with white tops, corrugated metal grain storage bins, and grain elevator machinery.  

Walthers also makes a much wider corrugated grain storage bin, also in HO.  

All of the above kits can be built as tall as you want by combining parts from  more than 1 kit.

In the absence of any O scale kits, these HO kits are a reasonable substitute for O gauge farmers.

@Mannyrock posted:

Arnold,

For the safety of your farmer people, please put that huge black Angus bull in a pen.  :-)

(Bulls are absolutely vicious and are second only to tractors in killing farmers.  This is true even if you bottle feed them and hand raise them from birth.   Once they become "teenagers," they will immediately turn on you, . . .  kinda like kids.)

Mannyrock

Very interesting.

I'm unfamiliar with bulls and farm life. However, earlier this year I went on a hike with a group of about 10 to 12 people. During this hike, something unforgettable happened. We past a herd of about 10 to 15 black bulls with nothing but a flimsy wooden fence between us and the bulls.

The bulls watched our every move, staring at us without moving a muscle. We proceeded on our hike without saying a word. I was awestruck.

We passed by the bulls as they stared at us without incident.

Arnold

No bull, l' m far from the farm, but one bull and a lot of cows, or a herd of steers is more likely than bulls together, as they might act like the crashing heads you see in wildlife films.  As for a bull, my dad had one chained by a ring in his nose in a field where he was trying to burn out a stump, and he got called for a "run" as a Southern fireman.  He left and stump fire spread into field.  Bull got excited as fire approached him, and my mother was the only handy adult that could save bull.  She, with considerable trepidation, approached bull, unchained him, and led him away from the fire, she said as docile and as willing as a dog.

All of the 1/64th scale farm buildings and farm vehicles from ERTL are reasonably priced and can be used in the background of O gauge railroads.

You can use brown corduroy fabric for farm fields.

Andrew 

Thoughts, realistic cattle & horses are the first priority. Only gentlemen’s acreages have white plastic fences. In the 50s the barn had surrounding fenced pens. Usually hog wire with a 10 inch board at top and one in middle. The pen should not have grass, it’s dirt or mud. Save your grass for the pasture. A manger is where cattle reach through to eat hay peeled off stacks by handwork  using a pitchfork every day. In the pen cattle are crowded not spaced out. Out in the pasture cattle still look better in a group as room is limited. Attend is a partially finished scene away from the barn.

@Mannyrock posted:

For the safety of your farmer people, please put that huge black Angus bull in a pen.  :-)

So a couple from the Big city was driving in the country one sonny summer day, and they can across two big fields next to each other, one of them filled with beautiful wild flowers.   About 100 yards from the road was a huge bull looking at them as he grazed.  In the other field was a farmer on his tractor plowing the ground.

The young lady Ooohed and Ahhhhed over the flowers and asked her man to go pick so for her.  As young men will do for young ladies, he leapt from the car and then leapt the fence.

As he walked toward the densest bunch of the flowers, he saw the bull staring at him intently and snorting.  So he angled over to the fence separating the fields and waved the farmer over.  The farm got off his tractor and walked to the fence.

The young man asked him:  "Sir, is that bull safe?"

The Farmer looked at the man, looked over at the bull (which was now snorting quite loudly and pawing at the ground), looked back at the man, looked once more at the bull, and then looked finally at the man, and said, "Well, sonny, I guess he's a durn sight safer 'en YOU are!"

(I've got another one if there's interest and the mods don't object.)

A couple pics of the farm inside the big curve at Notch Junction.  My son left the gate to the pasture open, and the horses began roaming.  Fortunately, Ozark Railroaders keep an eye out for livestock on the RoW. . .  "Horses!  There must be hunnert-thousand of 'em, maybe even a million!"

The house is the K-Line Ranch house, derived, if memory serves, from a Marx kit.  The barn is an Ertl kit.  The split-rail fencing is a K-Line accessory.  The tractors are Athearn 1/50; the old, horse-drawn implements and wheels by the barn are Ertl, the auto is a Matchbox, the tree is a G-scale but I forget the maker, and the horses came from who-knows-where.

Like many Ozark farms, the homestead was built on the bluffs above the White River; the fields are down in the rich-but-prone-to-flood bottoms.  The road that leads down to the fields circles the house to the right.  When the farm is resurrected after Christmas, there is a plan to put in a pumpkin patch next to the barn to make a few bucks off the city slickers next Fall.

Another pic from a different angle showing a few of the homestead details as MoPac #1310 passes Notch Junction heading on to the North Indian Creek Bridge with a caboose hop:

Arnold,

Thanks for the story, . . . however, those were not bulls.  They were steers.  (I.e., neutered bulls).  They can grow to a very very large size, but are not aggressive.  They were being raised for meat, to send to the stockyard. 

Nobody has a herd of bulls, because they can't.  Bulls kill each other.

Every see a western movie when the cowboys have a Spring Round-Up, rounding up all of the cattle that grazed on the plains for the winter and their calves?   When you see the cowboys tying of the calves and branding them, they are doing more than branding, they are also "fixing" the bull calves.

If a farmer is in the business of breeding cattle, or keeping his dairy cows pregnant, he buys ONE bull, and puts it in the pasture with his female herd.    That bull takes care of that herd, and keeps them pregnant, 24/7.     But, when the farmer goes into that field, he has to be super careful.  He has to maintain a safe distance from the cows, or the bull will get aggressively jealous and charge him.       When the farmer wants to round up his cows, he stands on a hill and calls them.   ("Whoop  whoop").  The cows have been trained to come to the call to get fed or milked every night.  They calmly walk in a line up to the barn, led by a large matriarch cow, and will often go right into their stalls.  (My father-in-law raised dairy cows.)   After they have been trained long enough, you don't need to even call them anymore.  Right at dusk, the matriarch cow knows it's time to get fed or milked, and just leads the herd up to the barn.

The bull which generally follow in the rear, trailing the herd, and the gate can be closed before he gets to it, or he can redirected to another pen by using a metal fence chute.

Bulls on farms are being more and more rare.  The reason is that most farmers now just buy the particular semen they want, using UPS or FedEx, and it comes frozen in small flexible containers and packed in dry ice.  They then just insert a packet into every cow,  (by hand and arm!)  to impregnate it.

So, . . if you want a realistic farm scene, you may want to show a line of cows, with their heads tied or in lock chutes, while a farmer goes down the line, . . . er doing this from the rear.  :-)

As I said, being a farmer is a really messy affair!

Mannyrock

My farm is all scratch built and includes a Maple Sugar House and a Covered Bridge.

A stout stick in hand goes a long way to keep bulls intimidated. Cows too. Just the sight of it usually works. I never kept a bull that u couldn’t walk around

A lot of misinformation here about bulls. “Bulls kill each other”  to pick out just one example

@wb47 posted:

A stout stick in hand goes a long way to keep bulls intimidated. Cows too. Just the sight of it usually works. I never kept a bull that u couldn’t walk around

We have a few that will get "testy" every once in a while but you're right, that stout stick will make them think twice!

My father- in -law carried an axe handle!  :-)

(Maybe we can find one that can be glued to the farmer figure's hand.)

  I guess this guy should have carried two axe handles:

CBS News, June 28, 2018

"MULLINS, South Carolina, May  -- The body of a 43-year-old man was found Wednesday morning in South Carolina after he was gored to death by two bulls, the coroner's office said, CBS Florence affiliate WBTW reports. Brian Collins' body was taken to a hospital for X-rays, but no autopsy was planned, Marion County Coroner Jerry Richardson said."

In all my years, I never saw an entire "herd" of bulls kept by anyone.   Most large farm operations I saw had very few.

Last Spring I made the mistake of petting a group of cows that came up to the barbed wire fence in the 100 acre dairy farm behind my house.  In a flash, a bull came running up and slammed head first into the fence post I was standing behind, angry as a hornet.  Then he backed up five feet and threw snot and dirt on me,  pawing the ground.  Man, I was shaking!  I backed up very very slowly to get away.  Those 5 strands of barbed wire looked mighty thin!

Maybe that would be a great scene for me to recreate on my layout.  :-O

Mannyrock

Mannyrock

Wisconsin State Farmer Newspaper, Sept. 2020.

"Animal danger

Bulls, which account for only 2% of cattle, were responsible for 48% of the deaths from cattle, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries and the Surveillance of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses databases.

In 2000,  four of the six deaths by cattle  involved bulls, according to statistics compiled by the University of Wisconsin Healthy Farmers, Healthy Profits Project.

Since then, bulls have killed at least 19 people in Wisconsin, according to UW Madison agricultural safety expert Cheryl Skjolaas."

Apparently, the sticks ain't workin.  :-)

Mannyrock

Here's another alternative:

An oldie but a goody.