A Tour of the New Barn!

hello everyone and welcome to garok farms in today's video my father's gonna show you his heifer barn slash dry cow barn he's gonna go through his thought process of why he built it the way he built it and set the gates up the way he did and show you guys the mangers and uh just the entire layout of the barn to give you guys a quick overview this barn was built two years ago and the old barn that was in the same spot was about half the size it was um it was falling apart it was really old and he needed to upgrade so uh he built this it was timed out really well it was right before the lumber shortage it's a very pretty looking barn i know a lot of you have have been commenting about it so we thought we'd make a video about it but anyways i hope you guys enjoy the video thanks for watching okay so we built this building in 2019 we could call it our covet project the kids got out of school early that year nothing was going on no graduations no nothing so it was a perfect time and at my age i thought if we don't do this now we maybe shouldn't do it anymore i mean if if it's just for my career but anyway so we decided let's do it so in june we started this where we tore down the old one the old one was a 32 by 56 i think it was and it was added on to several times and so this building actually for square footage is about double and we have a hard time squeezing it in here because we're in between two large hills and we got a waterway in the middle so we had to take that all in consideration when we were trying to make more room here we are 40 by 90 that's out out to the end of the the rafter but the actual post from close to post it's it's 36 by 90 and then we got two foot overhang on each end which i really wanted that for the sake of the door so the snow doesn't come up so tight and i wanted the eight foot overhang over our mangers so we got an extra four feet out here so this lamplight truss we hung out further to get that we got to split into two different pens which we have our breeding pen which is in the front so we can see it from the yard when we work you can see when animals are in heat we usually have a wool and if we don't then i can see them in heat and i'm able to artificially inseminate them on time and in the back half or the back two thirds is our dry cows and our spring and heifers or anything we know is pregnant short red and and up and then there's a lot on each end and on this end we really got to thinking with these steel wheels and we ended up with quite a bit of this stuff back in the day when you could find them everywhere and we started thinking let's put them in something practical and it was a little bit of thought but we were able to get these things cemented in and these are literally forever up on that gable we were kind of thinking of putting that clear and you can see in the back there's that clear stuff you see that in barns but i've seen that stuff even the really good stuff gets so faded and brittle and we weren't so sure if we should do this on the north side so we put oak boards up there and we put a veneer varnish on them and it really it's got a little bit of a crack in between each board from the board shrinking after they were sawn but again that's just ventilation but we're going to show you how we would catch an animal in here if we had the treater for something ever or any kind of vet work of some kind so when we built this barn we mounted some gates to the wall we mounted them high enough because in the bedding pack in the winter months the winner will get the betting and that would get higher so we got a long chain here and i just got a simple hook on the end just to hook it for storage but for instance we could get an animal in behind here and adjust this gate to whatever size the anime is so she's sandwiched in there so she's not able to be wobbling around and hurt herself during whatever we might have to do with her and all this is a gate mounted to the wall and it neat thing we made this so it fits tight here opening over there we could use it to catch her to get an animal caught and on this side the same thing and then the wall here i put like an old horseshoe or any type of old iron we cemented into our concrete we actually stapled it to the forms so i'm able to have a place to tie stuff on and again i can adjust i can adjust that however i need to adjust that or i can even put it through here and re-hook it back and that prevents my animal from backing up against me if i had to get in there to artificially inseminate or have a checker for a calf or something it makes it very easy to take care of our enemies so now this this wall splits our pens and what we have down in here i have two of those were plates for our skid steer bucket that we wore down i put down into the concrete and we both bolted these oak planks to it to get a little extra height off our four foot wall we got a rear little tie in here and then over here this is just some scrap iron from an old plow that we had cemented into our curb and angle iron up here onto our bunk and then we always and i was like because every gate comes with a chain and they've been known to break so we always put another chain and then we put the snapper on the back side so nothing can actually undo it and we could go one step further and put like a bolt here so this chain never gets lost from the gate like when you're cleaning pens we've had them where we shut the gate and then where's the chain it's out with the manure some way so just an extra something and there's nothing worse so you got two large groups of cattle completely mixed up and causes a lot of stress on the cattle trying to sort them back out so here like this is the north side of our barn so like in the winter months where storms are coming in the wind's really blowing hard i like to shut it at night they get out for a little sun a little exercise outside the barn but i made this latch because i used to have a bullet used to always stick her head behind us and rip these things right off the hinges so on the other end again it's just some scrap iron that the door tucks behind so there's no the theory is is if the door moves they play with it and they just eventually ruin it now on this side we have another catcher and that's just some scrap iron to put it up high enough so no cattle can get hurt by it and we don't have any handle on this door nothing for the cattle to bump against a rub against and even on our corners of our buildings here i put angle iron because this is always a spot that they end up ruining the steel in the tin so it's all it stays more secure into our pocket and then on this side i designed something where i cut a groove into this plate took a little fabrication bolted it and the same latch holds the door from the wind and then we have a gate here [Music] [Applause] ruin our door we'll just tie it to one of the rungs here on the bottom i got a piece of old baler belt so it can flex a little as the frost lifts the concrete as the manure builds up and freezes down we can still get our door open and shut without having problems there's maybe three or four inches there that for um build up here we're going to show you our openers now some people have curtains and there's other things you can buy but they never seem to last and i made these this is only open during the summer usually by early october we just shot them we leave our doors open on the end that's more than enough ventilation but the summer the more you can get the better so and that's between every post all the way down it took a little while to build but that's just standard roofing steel on the sides two by fours and then the hinge is a small strap welded to like a oh it could be a piece of re-rod or something maybe about four or five inches long drilled into the post it's a little bit of trick to get everything figured out so it balances right so it actually stays open by the weight of the so you got a little more on the top half than the bottom once you get it once you get a pattern figured out it isn't too bad and then up here these latches i mean again that's just some light steel drill the hole through don't tighten the bolt too tight it's a lag bolt that's just uh keep the wind from pushing it open it doesn't no cattle can come against it or anything like that so they're going to stay good forever they're high enough so that the tractors can't buff them on the outside okay so now this is our mostly our dry cow heifer pin now this pen we got a division in here now and sometimes we put corn stock bales here or hay or maybe some maybe a small group in the middle we can put but what i did when we put this barn together when we poured our floor i got to thinking what if i want to divide this pin up or not you don't know sometimes so what i did is we put like a piece of pipe in the concrete but it's just temporary and there's another one right here and i got a block of wood down in it so it didn't pack full of manure so i could dig it out with a crowbar or something and then on the wall here i've got they had a piece of a plow beam and another piece of uh hollow pipe that fits down in those holes so i can prop my gates and it's deep lined up directly with another water cup so that if i had cattle in this center pen they still got water and then we put it up against this door edge we put a door in the side like right right now we got a few extra milking cows that just come here to load and then these auto latches we bought now these are really slick these are kind of the cadillac of them and when there's one guy they can go both ways and they don't get them open they're flush on top so it's just a finger that gets them open these are some heavy game these are custom made they're very expensive but we don't use them everywhere but we use them in critical places okay so then in here we made an extra catch area so now we got several different lots so when i want to clean that barn out i can put one half of that barn into this pan the other half of that barn into that pan and we're able to clean our barn out with no cattle in our way and we made it here so we put a post here we got a gate up here that comes around to close this area off this is permanent this part and that's just an old gate with the bottom rung rusted off it's just lag bolted to it chained to it nothing special and on this side we need like a a place to hang because the catalan this is where they come outside for recess or whatever and without this gate hung they have a tendency to play with it they it's really hard on the hinges so that almost psyched and then i made it so that i can pull this pipe out if that gets in the way if we gotta get in here with a concrete truck or some load of feed or something if it happens to be a problem we're able to remove it make ourselves and then i make a lot of these chains up gates always come with a chain but they're never very good we always use another one and we got oodles of these around the frame to always make sure they're snapshot so they're not lost they don't get lost in the manner and then here's where this other gate would tie this one would come around and just a big bolt that goes through the post some simple linkage stuff i mean it doesn't take much it cost a few dollars and you got a good secure quick system this is off an old corn picker again there's thread on the other end it's just a big huge u-bolt is what it is it really doesn't matter what you use just work pretty good here where it went through an old plank i just got a big log hook with its own self locker to keep it locked and a piece of log chain and like again i never trust these when they got large groups of cattle in a pen and then we got concrete here and i thought how am i going to drill through that so we went through a higher now the back door you put a little thought to this the old barn that used to be here was only about half the size and it was coming apart it was rotted off post and there was a door in the back that ended up getting so busted up i ended up cutting off the back half and i really liked that or the bottom half the cattle could come outside but you could shut the door to block the wind and then i put a piece of baler belt here on the bottom so if the cows are riding they're not like banging the door gives it they only need just enough so they can clear it and the skid steer won't fit under it but that's okay usually we gotta open it anyway for that so in here i didn't have to make as heavy of a hook i just got a simple little hook just to keep the wind from banging it because up here higher the cattle aren't going to do nothing way up here so that's just open like that and it just glides open so you do your skid steer work we have this barn designed so i can drive through one of my chopper wagons full of corn stalks or a bail rack behave so we can we got 12 foot doors so we can go through with something i made sure that we could and drive out the other end or vice versa and then here kind of did the same thing absorb it comes behind the latch again so the summer this is open it's secured down it's not flopping in the wind and then this little hook that's here set in the same place i got a bolt there it's just tight enough so it cannot hook by itself real simple but yet for the cattle don't get the best of it and then here again on the corner we put these angle irons on because on the old barn all the steel here was always wrinkled and tore up like it will get so we protected that it took a lot of thought when we put this barn together because you're pouring concrete it's always an afterthought to get this bottom hinge through there i cut pieces of pipe just slightly under eight inches because it's eight inch wall and i had to figure out my inches from the floor which i i think i'm at 16 inches there's a little bit of adjustment in some of these gates but not a lot but there's a piece of pipe through there so i didn't have to drill that one but the upper one was going to go through wood so i wasn't worried about that one i could i could drill through the wood wherever i needed so we were able to mount our gates and that's done on the other end the same way and there's several other places where i wanted to put gates so it took a lot of thought and a little bit of measuring ahead of time and it saved a lot of drilling concrete which if you ever had to drill concrete you'll be you'll be tired so then out here these rafters are designed for 12 foot span and ever since they had all the big snows and the roots caving in here several years back these companies that build these rafters start telling the buyers put it to where you think you should have it what kind of weight load you want so we were gonna go to 10 foot we decided well maybe for an extra thousand dollars let's go to eight foot that's that much more secure we may not have to shovel this roof off if it gets if it gets like that again which it probably will so then on every other rafter we got a light bulb right above the manger all the way down and on the inside we have another roll light bulbs just over the row of top of the cattle and they're both on a separate switch so you don't necessarily have to have everything turned on but we had a little experience with the old barn where we ended up with a drinking cup and i think this one of these were in the back just like this i had on a big block i ended up a little higher but you always had the crawl in there it was dark back there and it and you you always have to crawl under check it especially when it's cold or make sure in here just you're here you see water in it you know you're good and then we put our wiring inside an old inch and a half milk stainless steel milk line that goes right down into the concrete and then there's an elbow on the end actually i think i got a a milk line elbow inside the concrete that goes into the tube that's underneath this so my wiring is 100 protected so whatever bumps this or you get the salt from the feeds or whatever or the mice or whatever it's protected here this whole ranger now this is two by tens full two inch by ten inch white oak that came out of our woods the one on the bottom one on the top now the manger's six inches higher than where the cattle stand and this curb is 16 inches off of where the cattle stand and with the 10 inch planks here 26 inches up to her brisket here and typically this breeding size heifers and up so that works pretty good then we got a full two by four white oak again and i just have them spiked to this and then they're bent on the back side you could bolt them too we thought of it i mean i guess if they we had this like this in the old barn it held up pretty good so we decided to go the same route in any kind of cattle barn i'll always swear by this where you have the iron on top the curb get your posts out of the dirt get them up on the curb get them up on the wall well worth it you're going to be building your barn again if you don't and then on top some were talking well we could put steel up there we could leave it open and we decided to just decorate at the same time and it actually really gets a lot of conversation out of it that's just one by eight boards again saw it from white oak where we cleared some pasture for some old trees and it's a simple cut it's all square cuts we just figured out a pattern and um so every every cut is the same and this mirror found this was already here with the old barn and i don't necessarily recommend them they work and we have them so we've been we just kept continued using it but again we we used to just have a gate with a couple rungs cut away but then we got to thinking we're gonna have to figure out something better so we got some old scrap iron and we i designed this whole thing in the shop and it's actually a two-piece system we brought over here with the pallet fork and pieced it together set it inside our forms this was several days to get this all lined up but it's kind of the yard frontage for ventilation on top we overhung from the peak to the overhang is three feet and then there must be about an eight inch gap up there and i didn't want to buy no fancy vents or anything like that but it's facing the east and then our valley goes north and south and our other barn was built that way back in 93 and there was only one winter storm that i had snow coming in that hole otherwise it seemed to blow the other way it worked pretty well and that was something that i had our rafter company custom make that overhang so that that we didn't need a ridge cap or any type of ridge venting extra and then up here we left that ridge open too about eight inches on both sides our ventilation is more in the top you want air movement but you don't want it to be windy drafty all right so there's something really important that we forgot to talk about that's really unique to this building so the entire building is built to grade and for those of you that don't know what that means in a conventional construction like setting or site to start off an excavating crew would come in and create an entirely level pad or place to build the building so most buildings are built on a completely level surface but this barn was built on a slope and the reasons for that it allowed us to utilize a lot of room because it's kind of in a tight spot if we were to level out the entire site it would take up a lot of extra room we would lose a lot of ground you know creating banks in the front or the back of the barn so it fits our yard very well building it to the grade all right so some key things to touch on from front to back the building is at about a four percent slope so with a 90 foot long building that's uh just under four feet of drop and then from the far betting pack side of the barn to the manger that's at about a two percent slope which with the width of the building that would be just under a foot of slope so the barn is sloping downhill from the far back corner all the way to the far front corner the rafters in the post are all level so the building was built using strings in order to make that happen it obviously took a lot of thought and a lot of planning in order to get this right because we wanted the rafters and the building itself to look level but the concrete pad and the mangers and the lot area all to slope downhill all right so that is it for the video we really appreciate those of you that stuck around to the end i hope you guys uh maybe took a couple uh things away from it and uh might implement it into your own barns or setups anyways thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Gierok Farms

Views: 64,848

Keywords: Barn tour, Farm tour, Heifer barn, Dry Cow Barn, Cattle Barn, Barn Set Up, Dairy Farm, Grazing, Winter, Winter on the farm, Winterizing, Drinking Cups, Cattle barns, Feeding Cattle, Grazing cattle, Fencing, Electric Fence, Four Wheeler, ATV, Honda, Fencing tools, How to put up a fence, rotational grazing, raising cattle on grass, Barn Upgrades, Farm Improvements, cows, cattle, Milking Cows, Dairy Farming, Cows, Milking on a small farm, Grazing Cattle, Hobby Farming

Id: gQmyGA6nAhQ

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021