Why are barns painted red?

Answer 1

now, it's just tradition, dog. But it used to be the "paint" used was colored with red berries

Answer 2

Red ochre is a naturally occurring pigment, so this is a color early settlers could easily make and it was cheap. There choices were red or nothing. White paint or stain was difficut to get and was expensive. It has now become traditional for barns to be red

Answer 3

Back in the "olden" days, all the farmers were poor and the red paint was the cheapest color of paint. It had nothing to do with it being a favorite color or had any other meaning. It was just cheap and they painted everything red. That is why all the farmer's barns were red.

Answer 4

Blood red actually. It wasn't paint at all ..... after slaughtering all those farm animals for market there was a bi-product surplus of a paint like substance......

Then by reason of the industrial revolution and mass manufacturing, by pure laziness and teh realisation that paint lasts 15 years wheras blood lasts 2 or 3 years... we now have a traditional farmyard barn using red paint.

Well I thought it was a good yarn. The berries answer lacked a little punch don't you think?

Answer 5

If you want to get into it, in the olden days, people would paint their barns red as a sign of a friendly farm that would let you work for a meal or work to stay a night in the barn while you were traveling. The regular wood, or metal shingled barns meant that they kept to themselves and was a nice way of saying "keep off my property, stranger!"

Answer 6

barns are red because iron oxide was the cheapest pigment to use to make paint at the time...whitewash was another cheap alternative

Answer 7

Farmers learned that red is a color that retains heat well, thus keeping animals warmer in winter. Here is the web link that has some more interesting answers. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_are_barns_painted_red

Answer 8

well the paint is really a stain made from plants today it just a fav color and is real paint