putting new floors in the chicken house & cattle barn

hi i'm pete and welcome to just a few acres farm today i have for you a good old-fashioned work video hilary and i have started putting new floors in the chicken house and the winter cattle pen i ordered two truckloads of bank run gravel for the cattle pen floor and a truckload of number two clean stone for the chicken house floor and at 7 30 the next morning the quarry started delivering it first we went to work on the chicken house and this is our winter house for the chickens it has outdoor runs on both sides we built it in 2013 and it looked like this when we built it the grass was nice for about a month but after that it was a dirt floor and we've had problems for years with first rats tunneling through the dirt and up in and eating some of the chicken's feed and then weasels and minks followed the rats and a week before we moved the chickens out to pasture this year we lost 30 laying hens to either a mink or a weasel i never even saw him so it was definitely time to put in a concrete floor this is not the first loss we've had out of this house in the winter in fact we lose more chickens in the wintertime to predators than we do in the summer when they're out in the field the other problem with this house was that the chickens always pecked holes in the plastic we put chicken wire up six feet on the inside but when they roosted they would inevitably pick holes and the rats chewed holes through the plastic so the plan is with this house to put in a concrete floor to make that predator and wrap proof and then to run steel roofing panels about three foot up the sides one row of them and then above that to put in some of the mesh reinforced plastic that supposedly lasts at least 15 years before we could start working on the chicken house we had to take down the fence around one of their runs we needed to do this to access the side of the chicken house to take off the plastic and because this is where the cement truck will go when we pour the slab the fence is six foot welded wire mesh and t posts the messes fastened to the t-posts with fencing wire loops so i'd cut those first then we rolled up the fence fabric we took down three sides of the fence but we left the fourth side up because it's not in the way i need another piece of wire to tie this up [Music] sometimes i can pull t posts out by hand but not these the fast hitch on the super c is awesome for removing fence posts just wrap a chain around the post in the hitch then raise the hitch and it pulls the post out [Music] the chicken house plastic secured on the sides and the ends with wood batten strips screwed to the baseboards i had to go all the way around the house and remove the battens while i did this hillary removed the chicken wire inside the house we put up this wire to keep the chickens from pecking holes in the plastic and we got that idea from joel saladon [Applause] then it was easy to pull the plastic off i'm amazed the plastic held up this well it's been on the house for seven years and was designed to last four years but it's not brittle at all after that we took apart the roost and cleaned everything out of the house that was in the way of putting down stone now it was time to put down the number two stone which will serve as the base for the concrete slab the floor of the chicken house slopes from one end to the other so the stone will level everything up as well as filling in the holes the chickens have dug in the ground but before i could start loading in stone i had to get the bucket loader ready my dad made a set of forks that bolt onto the loader bucket on my 504 tractor and loading manure is just about impossible without forks on a bucket because the bucket straight edge won't bite into the manure with all the hay that's mixed in with it the only time i take the forks off is to move dirt or stone and they hadn't been off in a few years the manure corroded the bolts so i sprayed them with some pb blaster and hoped for the best [Music] this is one job i don't mind using an impact wrench for [Music] even with the impact wrench some of the bolts wouldn't budge so i cut those off with a cut-off wheel on the grinder [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'll have to get all new bolts before i mount the forks back on i ask a lot from my little farm all 504 tractor but it always delivers although it does complain quite a bit when i'm loading stone [Music] loading stone in the chicken house may be hard on the tractor but it certainly is a lot easier on my back and for me it's the easy part [Music] [Music] after i've dumped about half the stone in the house i start leveling it by hand with a shovel and rake many times i've regretted that i made this house too small to drive a tractor in rather than bending the pipes myself i should have bought a wider and taller high tunnel kit but in my defense when we built this we thought we would have no more than 150 hens and now we're housing 300 to 400 in the winter shoveling stone is one of the harder farm jobs good thing i've got a wife with a strong back [Music] we add and level the stone in stages bringing in more stone with the loader to fill in low spots [Music] and this is as far as we got with the chicken house i still need to run the plate compactor over the stone to compact it down i need to put in screed boards along both sides so that we can screed the concrete to a level when the concrete truck comes i need to put in welded wire mesh to reinforce the slab all this before the concrete truck can show up to pour now onto the cattle barn i looked at the dexter cattle gestation chart the other day and we're past due to let the bulls out with the cattle so before i do that i need to fix the barn floor because it is a muddy mess over the years because i clean it out three times every winter with the bucket loader the dirt floor and it's gotten lower and lower because inevitably i pick up some of the dirt when i'm loading out manure so we're going to fill the floor in the barn so that it is higher than both the front and the back of the barn so the whole thing is raised up and stays drier when it's wet outside and we'll have a lot drier pen in the winter time before i ordered material i did some research a lot of the old dairy farms around here used concrete floors in the barn but i felt concrete would be too slippery at times and the hardness would also hurt the cattle's hooves over time i worried about spraying legs from slipping and i don't have any place to drain the water really and concrete's impermeable so i'd wind up with more wetness problems i also looked at using sand which a lot of the modern dairy farms use in the freestyle barns sand wouldn't work well i'd pull it out with the loader every time and it's hard to compact if it's just sand so i went to looking at stone dust limestone dust on top of a bank run base where the limestone dust compacts kind of like a concrete slab but it's more permeable but i worried about the loader picking it up and it's expensive so that option was out i looked at crusher run gravel which packs really nice it's used for driveways a lot around here but i worried about the stone getting caught in the cattle's hooves and causing hoof problems so what i settled on in the end is bank run gravel bank run gravel is just what the name says it's material taken out of old river and creek banks and it's a nice mixture of silt on the finer end moving up to sand moving up to small pieces of gravel all the way up to large pieces of gravel which run five or six inches in diameter sometimes bank run gravel is really cheap in this area and that's a definite plus in my book if i pick some up with the manure spreader and spread it in the fields it's not a lot of money out the window the issue with bankrupt gravel is it's really squishy until it's compacted so you have to put it in in lifts or layers and after you put in each lift you have to compact it to get it to stay hard and once you've compacted it it's really hard the cows won't punch through it so it'll be a good surface [Music] even though the barn has two cattle bays i'm just going to fill one to start because the bulls need to be kept on the other side the end of the bay was really mucky and i should have put down geotextile fabric to keep the gravel from mashing into the mud i have a role in the other barn but i didn't think to do it in time [Music] in order to compact the gravel properly i have to spread it in layers about six inches thick [Music] [Music] it's tough to level with the loader bucket because the bucket catches on the larger stones until it's compacted it's really soft and the tractor tires rutted up i borrowed a plate compactor from the same contractor who drove the heifer yard fence post it vibrates the gravel in place the reason bankrupt gravel compacts into a hard surface is because it's a mix of materials ranging from fine silt up to four five six inch stones and everything locks together once it's compacted a little water spread by the compactor helps the material pack down then it's just a matter of repeating the process adding layers and compacting the gravel between each [Music] the big stones in the background wound up being a big pain in the butt i either had to pull them out and put them to the side or dump them in the deepest areas of the fill because the loader kept catching on them if i was to do this again i would use a material called new york state dot item four which is a sieve graded mix of fines to course without any of those giant stones in it it's a little more money but it would have been worth it in terms of the hassle this is what we wind up with nice hard surface cows shouldn't be able to punch through this and hopefully it'll stay drier and we wind up with piles of little boulders which i will sell you cheap and we're left with a hard high surface this will make the cattle pad much less muddy in the wintertime the only thing i worry about is catching some of those big stones in the loader bucket when i'm picking up manure and them winding up in the manure spreader but fortunately my old manure spreader isn't strong enough to pick up those stones and fling them out they just get caught against the beater bar on the back of the spreader and then i have to pick them out by hand so that's as far as we got with these projects it's always hard to get big projects done in between all the other farm work that we have to do you know when i started farming i was worried that i would get bored with it after a while because it is very repetitive feeding the animals it follows a pretty regular yearly cycle but i found that one of the things that continues to keep me interested in farming is making something better every year so projects like this make our lives better and also make the animals lives better and we're constantly undertaking these to help our farm run more efficiently and they keep me interesting they keep me learning things they keep me finding better ways to do things so i think that's where it's at always changing and evolving i hope you enjoyed this video it was good old work video and i got to get back to work so i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 143,655

Rating: 4.9618583 out of 5

Keywords: small livestock farm, small farm life, farming, farm, homestead, just a few acres farm, barn floor options, cattle pen floor, bank run gravel barn floor, farmall super c, farmall 504, chicken house floor options, farmalls at work

Id: 1y3eBYqXMDs

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020