Visiting The Farm Museum

On Good Friday, I paid a visit to the Canada Agriculture And Food Museum, which is housed on the Experimental Farm here in Ottawa. Today I am starting a series on the visit. I approached through the Arboretum, which is part of the farm property.

The federal government conducts research farming here on the Experimental Farm, with most of the buildings confined to the northeast area, while crop fields and pastures take up the rest of the land. As one of the national museums here in the region, this museum is a working farm, offering visitors both information throughout and a look at animals through a series of barns and other buildings. The main entrance is by this barn, the Dairy Barn. We'll get more looks at it through this series. Since this was the Easter weekend, there were a number of Easter related activities going on, and you can imagine it was very busy.

The Small Animal Barn houses pigs, goats, sheep, rabbits, and some chickens in sections. Over the winter the larger animals are kept indoors. I'm starting off with pigs, some of whom are kept in stalls with informational panels close by, including on the use of toys for the animals, and installations to keep piglets safe in their stalls with their mother during slumber- the idea is to keep piglets from being crushed by a sleeping mother. The barn has several breeds of pigs, something that turns out to be typical for the other animals here, which we'll see as we go along.

There were new piglets with their mothers in a section closed off to the public, but viewable through a window. 

This pair were quite content to snooze and ignore the human company passing through. I am adding this to Tom's Barn Collective theme, with more to come.