Public Domain Source of the Month: USDA

There's something culturally essential about farm imagery. Identifying farm animals is one of the first things a baby learns - even though, in the suburbs and cities, most children will rarely encounter them. Why don't toddlers learn to point out things such as "billboard," "SUV," or "blackberry"?

For whatever reason we cling to our bucolic heritage, the toddler cannon of iconic nouns for decades to come is likely to remain: "duck," "cow," "horse," "pig," "sheep," and the like.

Thousands of photographs taken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture thus constitute an important source of public-domain imagery.

About 2,000 cherry-picked images are indexed as the Agricultural Research Service Image Gallery. Thousands more are available from the USDA Photography Center. It's everything you need for your custom-build bedtime story.

A different kind of treasure can be found in the USDA Historical Photos collection, which provides an illustrated index of a small sample of Farm Security Administration photographs of the 1930s and 1940s. These photos by Dorothea Lange and others chronicle the Dust Bowl and the lives of migrant farm workers in the west. Unfortunately, this site lacks higher resolution images suitable for use in print.

Photos top to bottom: Piglets, Scott Bauer; sunflowers in North Dakota, Bruce Fritz; Texan outside of Dallas in 1936, Dorothea Lange; cow, Peggy Greb.