Square & Furrow restores the farm building plans America once handed out for free, and makes them buildable again.
From the 1940s to the 1980s, the USDA and the land-grant universities' Cooperative Extension services drew thousands of building plans for working farms: coops and hog houses, feeders and gates, cold frames, greenhouses and harvest bins. They were drawn by agricultural engineers, built on real farms and refined over decades. They are also in the public domain. Most survive today as faded scans: one dense sheet of tiny hand lettering, with lumber sizes nobody sells any more.
What we do
We take one original sheet at a time and turn it into a complete, modern build guide:
- The original drawing, restored and reproduced in full, so you can always check our work against the source.
- Dimensioned views of the finished build in feet and inches, with metric sizes in the materials list, cut list and steps.
- A materials list and hardware schedule in today's actual lumber sizes.
- A cut list, so every piece can be cut before assembly starts.
- Illustrated, step-by-step assembly: one job per step, every part drawn and every fastener marked.
- Where it helps, a modern-build track (screws and current hardware) that keeps every original dimension.
- The Remix: the same structure re-imagined for the garden or backyard, from a potting shed to a strawberry tower.
The original is the authority
Every dimension, count and part in our editions is checked against the original sheet. Where something on an old sheet is unclear or doesn’t add up, we work it out from the rest of the drawing.
How the plans are made
Each edition is researched, restored, edited and checked by us, using AI-assisted tools for parts of the drafting, illustration and layout. The finished-object renderings in our listings are illustrations of the build, not photographs of a specific build. Every plan credits the public-domain original it was adapted from.
Why "Square & Furrow"
The carpenter's square and the ploughed furrow: building and growing, the two halves of a working place. That's what these plans were made for, and what we hope you'll use them for.