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Anyone have a rough figure for a small horse building. Let's say nothing fancy for 4 horses. Maybe 800-1000 sq ft?
Would $20,000 cover that?
Thanks
If you go to mqsbarn.com you can check some of their prices on various buildings. You could probably get what you are looking for at or below your 20,000.
Kayaker, I took some pics with my phone of the tree clearing progress but am too computer illiterate to figure out how to post them on my iPad.
If you go to mqsbarn.com you can check some of their prices on various buildings. You could probably get what you are looking for at or below your 20,000.
Those are interesting. If this ignorant suburban boy can ask something . . .
Are pole barns built on a concrete slab, or is the concrete laid down after construction is finished?
It depends on the barns use.
If a barn is for livestock, the floor is very seldom concrete, as that's a hard and slippery surface, dangerous for animals.
A typical livestock barn floor is usually hard packed dirt with a little pea gravel mixed into it sometimes. The barns have to be cleaned often, and hard packed dirt makes it a lot easier to use a pitchfork and a scoop shovel. Stalls are must often strawed with wheat straw, which makes it easier to fork up the manure, and allows for good bedding.
And most livestock barns aren't insulated; as long as the livestock in them are sheltered from the winds, they are very comfortable. Insulation could make them too warm. A 4-horse barn in the middle of a cold winter is warm enough when its full of critters that a human is comfortable in just a shirt if the barn's well built. The critters put off a lot of body warmth. Livestock barns usually have some big ventilation for use in the summer so the barn offers shade, not a steambath.
For chickens, the reverse would probably be the best, as a concrete floor makes for much easier hosing out and cleaning.
Chickens are somewhat more prone to dying from cold and draft, but again, it's more the draft than the cold. Insulation and good ventilation would be a bigger help in summer, when they can get too hot.
For other uses, I guess it would all depend on what the person's plans are and how big the barn is. A hip-roofed barn as a building design is a very efficient way to maximize interior space. I've seen lots of really old barns that were used as implement storage after tractors displaced draft horses. Some had concrete floors, but most didn't, except for the occasional pad that was poured for a forge or to support something real heavy, like a bolt and parts bin. The machine shed barns usually had all the stalls removed.
The old barns with high lofts, which were used to store feed, added some warmth from the insulation from the feed. Hay bales, bags of feed, and loose hay all act like heat sinks. An empty loft can get mighty hot in the summer, but the heat tends to stay high, so a couple of open loft doors or windows usually ventilate well enough.
The horse stall barns that are 1 story often have a celestory on the roof, a long line of windows that can be glazed of just open year round for ventilation. A typical stall is usually quite snug. These days, when hay is baled, a haystack is outside, not inside.
Mostly for safety. Hay is prone to spontaneous combustion, which cause a lot of barns to burn down in the past.
The old barns were the first recycling centers; the straw, full of manure and urine, was piled up as a big compost heap, with household garbage, egg shells and all the other stuff forked into it, and then in the spring, was spread on the fields with manure spreaders to fertilize the ground before planting. The heat from the compost was a weed killer as well, so weeds didn't have much opportunity to seed in the fields.
Last edited by banjomike; 08-01-2016 at 08:38 PM..
You always give such good, useful, and insightful information. Pretty sure Idaho does not want me to have animals. That would be a disaster . . . for the animals. I was asking for a selfish purpose . . . to serve as a hobby workshop and a place to store my "baby" when the sun don't shine, (i.e., classic Mercedes coupe).
Using manure to kill weeds? Always wondered why people put that stuff on their lawns. I just thought it was inexpensive fertilizer.
You always give such good, useful, and insightful information. Pretty sure Idaho does not want me to have animals. That would be a disaster . . . for the animals. I was asking for a selfish purpose . . . to serve as a hobby workshop and a place to store my "baby" when the sun don't shine, (i.e., classic Mercedes coupe).
Using manure to kill weeds? Always wondered why people put that stuff on their lawns. I just thought it was inexpensive fertilizer.
The composting killed most of the weed seeds. Manure is always full of weed seeds. Composting creates the heat that kills them. The other 'heat' is the strength of the fertilizer; it's so strong the young germinating weed seeds can't take all the nutrients and burn up chemically, not physically.
By the time a field is good for planting, the manure that was spread has lost enough of it's strength that it won't burn up the planted seeds. The old farmers had ways of knowing when everything was mellowed and ready for seeding; some would just pop a mouthful of dirt into the mouth and chew on it. Yum!
Weeds are weeds. No matter what they did, weeds were always a fight.
Back when I was quite small, beginning around age 7, I would go out with my mother into our wheat fields to 'rogue' them. We would walk up and down the rows with a pocket knife in hand and cut off the heads from the weed stalks as we came across them. This killed the seeds before they matured.
Needless to say, I had been well taught on how to use a knife safely. It was always fun for me; with my little brother and our mother, we could rogue a field in a half day, usually going out in the mornings while it was still cool. It was always much more a nice stroll in the fields than a job of work.
Then, at lunchtime, Mom would go fetch up Dad, who was always driving a tractor nearby, and we would all have lunch together. Then the 3 of us would go down home while the old man stayed at it until it was too dark to see before he'd come back to the house.
The first thing my bro and I would do after we came back was Go Play In The Hose. (Always Mom's idea.)
We quit cleaner than when we started, all refreshed, and our dirty clothes got most of the soil hosed out of them before they went in the wash.
Smart Mom. She's still pretty good at figuring out stuff like that.
Looking back, a lot of every day life was quite organic in comparison to today. I think I was in the last generation to get a taste of the old ways everyone once did.
One little habit I still have is carrying a pocket knife daily. I've packed one around all my life, but I haven't rogued a field in about 60 years.
Last edited by banjomike; 08-01-2016 at 09:56 PM..
Our pole barn shop has a concrete floor poured after we built it.
The horse barns both have dirt floors. Bad news for horse legs on concrete. Too hard, even with mats and bedding.
One mistake I've seen horse newbies make is putting the manure pile close to the barn. As BanjoMike says, it creates heat via composting and they can spontaneously ignite and burn down a barn if not far enough away. We always take our manure from the middle of the pile because it's heat there has burned out the weed seeds and by that time, it just smells like good rich earth.
We have a hayloft in our big barn and it's the best way to store hay. Dry and dark. But we did have to be super careful about making sure the hay was perfectly dried. Still damp hay also causes heat and can cause a barn fire. But with horses, you have to make sure their hay is dry anyway. They can't consume moldy hay like cattle can with no ill effects.
My youngest was homeschooled and it was her job to feed the horses in the mornings. Oftentimes she'd be gone way too long and we would know that she'd gone back to sleep in the hayloft.
She is 21 now and was remembering last night how nothing smells as good as the hayloft. Sweet summer sunshine and grass scents even in the dead of winter.
Our pole barn shop has a concrete floor poured after we built it.
The horse barns both have dirt floors. Bad news for horse legs on concrete. Too hard, even with mats and bedding.
One mistake I've seen horse newbies make is putting the manure pile close to the barn. As BanjoMike says, it creates heat via composting and they can spontaneously ignite and burn down a barn if not far enough away. We always take our manure from the middle of the pile because it's heat there has burned out the weed seeds and by that time, it just smells like good rich earth.
We have a hayloft in our big barn and it's the best way to store hay. Dry and dark. But we did have to be super careful about making sure the hay was perfectly dried. Still damp hay also causes heat and can cause a barn fire. But with horses, you have to make sure their hay is dry anyway. They can't consume moldy hay like cattle can with no ill effects.
My youngest was homeschooled and it was her job to feed the horses in the mornings. Oftentimes she'd be gone way too long and we would know that she'd gone back to sleep in the hayloft.
She is 21 now and was remembering last night how nothing smells as good as the hayloft. Sweet summer sunshine and grass scents even in the dead of winter.
Yup.
Well dried and cured hay is essential for horses.
What's strange about hay is any moisture above a critical percentage can cause spontaneous combustion on a hot and very windy day. Baling does not prevent this at all. The hay that burns is fine for feeding horses until it goes up in flames.
That's one huge advantage of loose hay in a loft. The hay is protected from the wind, and the hay is naturally allowed to reach it's proper moisture level because it's loose. Overdry hay soaks up the moisture it needs, and underdry hay sheds the moisture off.
That's why lofts smell so sweet. Mold can't get a start in properly stored loose hay. A loose haystack can be tarped, and as long as the hay is able to do it's atmospheric thing, it smells just as sweet.
These days down here, a lot of hay is being grown to go down to the California dairies- Cali is the largest dairy producer in the nation- and those in the Twin Falls areas.
There is also a lot of foreign demand for Idaho hay world wide. Our climate grows hay as good as our potatoes.
Stacking is good for human efficiency, but not so always so much for the critters who eat it. The latest thing is a huge plastic balloon-like bag, which gets full of chopped cured hay and is semi-premeable. These things all weigh tons; one makes up a full semi-load. The hay stays sweet. Dairy cattle can eat moldy hay, like Misty said, but the mold can affect the flavor of their milk, so the best hay fetches the best price for dairy cows.
The bag allows the hay to stay well cured, prevents hay loss to all the natural forces of nature, eliminates stack depredation by wildlife and domestic animals, and also prevents theft.
Stealing a haystack down here has become very profitable theft, and one that's less vulnerable to being caught than other high-paying theft. Alfalfa restores depleted soils, so potato growers always plant it somewhere, and though less profitable than spuds, its also cheaper to grow and harvest.
And since there is equally strong domestic and foreign demand for it, hay has become a very reliably profitable crop, much less prone to the booms and busts of the potato market and the grain markets, especially on all the old lands that have grown nothing but spuds for decades.
A ton of good hay can fetch $2,000 or more in a late spring. I've seen it go for $2700 a ton a bunch of times.
With a few strong guys and some stolen equipment, a ton can be loaded on a flat bed truck in minutes. Haystacks are very easy targets, as they're often stacked in a remote corner of a field. A 20 ton stack can be stolen and gone overnight before the sun comes up, and once gone, it's impossible to track down.
$40,000 for a night's work is tempting. 5-6 guys who know what they're doing can easily make off with 2 20-ton stacks if they have the right implements and work hard. The implements are as easy to steal as the hay, and if the thieves put the implements back, a farmer most often doesn't even know they were stolen and returned.
Hay growers are fighting back in all kinds of ways- some are microchipping their hay with microchip pellets, others post guards, others place their stacks close to highways used heavily and light them up, and a lot of stacks are wrapped with layers of the same sheet plastics that are used to wrap homes. The bigger the single-unit size is, the less prone to theft it becomes.
Out on the Arco Desert, a lot of Peruvian sheep herders are now getting good winter jobs as guards. The smaller hay growers out there are now moving their stacks into a cluster with other growers, and share the cost of a guard. It's cheaper than buying all the spendy wrapping alternatives. For the Peruvians, it's better pay than a half-day's wages feeding the livestock.
Last edited by banjomike; 08-02-2016 at 09:06 PM..
Sad coincidence...
2500 tons of hay and a tractor with a front end loader just burned up early last night from spontaneous combustion. Yesterday was hot and very windy. All was a total loss.
hay and forage. com Forage Markets shows idaho hay priced at $130/ ton.
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