216 SHEEP BARNS. 



by placing feeding racks across them so that in reality the 

 sheep are all in one room. This mode is a material saving 

 both of space and expense; and it is highly convenient, 

 inasmuch as the partitions can be changed in a moment to 

 adapt them to any change which it is desirable to make in the 

 relative number of sheep in the different apartments. But it 

 must be obvious that any. considerable number of sheep when 

 thus kept breathing the same indoor atmosphere, require that 

 the means of ventilation be abundant and most thoroughly 

 kept in operation. Indeed, I should prefer, as a matter of 

 prudence, not to place more than one hundred and fifty sheep 

 in the same room, though divided into smaller flocks on the 

 floor. With different rooms, and with independent means of 

 communicating with the external air, four hundred or six 

 hundred could be kept, perhaps, just as safely, under the same 

 roof, unless during the prevalence of infectious or epizootic 

 diseases. But who can be certain that these will remain 

 absent ? On the whole, such large and close aggregations of 

 sheep are inexpedient. 



The room required for a given number of Merino breeding 

 ewes in a barn is, for Paulars, about ten and two-thirds square 

 feet of area on the floor each ; in other words, an apartment 

 twenty by forty feet in the clear will accommodate seventy-five, 

 so that they can all eat at the same time at single or wall racks 

 placed round the entire walls, except before the doors. A 

 room forty feet square will accommodate one hundred and fifty, 

 but it requires forty feet of double rack* to be placed in the 

 area inside of the wall racks. Larger Merino, or English ewes, 

 require more room in proportion to their size. Some of the last 

 would probably require nearly twice as much room per head. 



A sheep barn should open on the side least exposed to the 

 prevailing winter winds ; and its yards should be placed as 

 much as practicable under its shelter. Some persons build 

 these barns in the form of an L, to break off the winds from 

 different quarters ; others make a high stone wall or board 

 fence a substitute for one of the limbs of the L. The yards 

 are inconveniently narrow if restricted to the breadth of the 

 inside apartments ; and should, therefore, be widened accord- 

 ing to circumstances. 



The following ground plan is intentionally confined to a 



* I here use the word single or wall-rack to signify one made to set against a 

 wall, which can only be eaten from on one side the word double rack, to signify one 

 which can be eaten from on both sides, so that forty feet of one is equivalent to eighty 

 feet of the other. 



