Excerpt from Farm Buildings and Building Construction in South Africa: A d104-Book for Farmers, Agricultural Students, Teachers, Builders, Etc Farm buildings and what are generally known as "permanent improvements" to farms, such as water-supply, drainage, fencing, roads, shelter-belts, wood-lots, and so forth, are, as Mr. Cleghorne rightly intimates in the preface to this book, matters of the first importance to owners or occupiers of land. The necessity for certain buildings and other works of an engineering character on a farm is of course evident to everybody connected with land, for, without them, farming except of the most primitive type would be impossible, but probably few people - even experienced farmers - fully realise the immense influence the laying-out and development of a farm has upon the quantity and quality of the produce obtained from it or on the cost of working it. Unless a farm has been laid out and subsequently developed so as to permit of the carrying on to advantage of the style of farming for which it is best adapted by the soil, climate, and other factors affecting agriculture, it will obviously be impossible to make the best of it. Owing to the manner in which they occur, the benefits arising from a well-selected and developed farm, or the losses occurring from the reverse, are apt to escape immediate attention, but they are none the less real, and the fact of the arable land being cropped to a little better advantage, or the stock thriving a little better, or the carrying capacity of the veld being slightly increased, or of economies being effected in manual and animal labour, or in various other directions, may mean all the difference between profit and loss on the year's working. In South Africa the early settlers devoted great attention to the selection, laying-out, and development of their farms, and particularly to the location and designing of farm houses and buildings, and the beautifying of their surroundings, as may be seen from the distinguished old homesteads still happily remaining in the neighbourhood of Cape Town. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.