barn-sweepings

Updated: July 20, 2025

You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish.

Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom: your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish.

- Sacred Books of the East

I have seen fruit, barn-sweepings, butter-milk, bran, &c. &c. wasted about a farm in Australia, in quantities sufficient to feed and fatten a hundred pigs, which would have kept the establishment in meat for half the year. Indeed, it is a common saying in the Colony, that the waste on one of its farms, would make an English farmer's fortune.

G. F. Davidson - Trade and Travel in the Far East: or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java,: Singapore, Australia and China.