This week, with the weather getting better, we are going down on the farm, just in time for #NationalAgricultureDay on March the 24th, though in actual fact this entire week is #NationalAgricultureWeek, starting on Sunday March the 15th and ending on Saturday March the 21st.
If you are reading this in a town, you may wonder what agriculture has to do with you, but the truth is that it provides your food, or a great proportion of it, cereals, vegetables, fruit, and, sadly, meat. It also, especially these days, provides a source of food for many and varied insects, and a home for wildlife.
Our first clue card, on Saturday the 14th of March, contains three links to this week`s theme on this card. The most obvious one is that this is Kyle FIELD, however, if you read the description on the back of the card you will find out it was named after Edwin Jackson Kyle, a former Dean of Agriculture at the college. Whilst the third link comes in the name of the team whose home field this is, that being the Texas A&M University, A&M standing for "Agricultural and Mechanical".
Our second clue, of Sunday the 15th of March, showed this curious set, supplied me many moons ago by my chicken connoisseur Malcolm Thompson, and it is definitely the least known of all the "Domino" branded sets. As for why we have a chicken, they are the most common agricultural bird, and they actually outnumber the human species by four to one, which makes it rather a shame that they cannot rise up and use this power to demand a lot better treatment for some of their non-free range brethren.
And thirdly, on Monday the 16th of March we had this card, which shows the home of agriculture, the farm house, and that means any type of house located on a farm, it is not restricted to any specific type of house
In fact the word comes down from a ninth century Old English, "fearm", which meant an estate, or household, and is technically nothing to do with having any fields.
On which note, if anyone else would like to send us any information or scans from their collection which relates in any way to our theme of the week, please do - simply email us at webmaster@card-world.co.uk - and this is the same for any corrections, or for general cartophilic correspondence and chat.