We need to make a 3 sided shelter for the cows. It will be on the most weathered side of the barn--the southwest corner, near the silo.
With the milking stanchion and Ruby's stall in the barn add-on on the north side of the silo, there's a real need to keep the cows out of there during the day and even during the night. Each morning before I can milk Bessie, the cows need to be shooed out and I scrape out the manure from the night. Because the cows are outside and the barn door is shut, the manure and soggy straw goes in a pile next to the door. That manure pile, in turn, needs to be shoveled into the wheelbarrow later in the morning and moved out onto the manure pile in the pen. I COULD bring the wheelbarrow into the barn to put the manure in at first, but then I run the risk of an overly eager-to-be-milked Bessie overturning the steaming mess as she heads into the barn and to the stanchion where her grain waits. Either way, I'm shoveling it twice.
On nice days, they don't go in there very much unless I leave hay inside for them. Wherever they stand to munch on their hay ration, there will be piles of waste. Some days, they choose to hang out in there ALL DAY, leaving a soggy stinking fly-infested mess on the floor that again has to be shoveled out before they would sleep on their own manure all night. (Another reason to shovel again before night-time--Bessie has such a fondness for resting her udder in fresh manure. If I can eliminate just a small amount of that, the udder-cleaning is SO MUCH EASIER the next day!)
So, the idea is.....their barn space is on the north side of the silo. Their pen extends to the southwest corner of the barn, on the other side of the silo. The distance from the silo walk-way (which is built in as part of the barn) to the south corner is over 20 feet. The shelter will extend from the wall of the silo walk-way to 14 feet along the side of the barn. Seven or 8 feet out from the side of the barn, 14 feet long along the side of the barn, with rough-cut boards from the 3rd floor of the barn making up the partial siding under the 6 foot high outside edge.
The shelter will have a roof coming out from the barn at about 8 feet up, sloping down to 6 feet or so at the outside edge. There will be an entrance to the south side.
Then, because there are no gutters on any of our buildings, the roof of this shelter will act as a down-spout of sorts, so that the rain running down from the barn roof hits the roof of the shelter and is deposited neatly into a row of rain barrels, which will be strategically placed under the drip-line of the shelter's roof.
The purposes of the shelter? To give the cows some protection from the weather, to keep them out of the stanchion and milking area until I need to let them in, to allow them to bed down on straw which is on dirt rather than concrete (the urine and liquid wastes should soak into the dirt underneath the straw to a certain degree, instead of pooling and soaking all of the bedding on top of concrete) and to give me some space to work and set up the milking items without pushy cows trying to get a mouthful of yummy grain or alfalfa hay while I'm trying to squeeze past them (a recipe for disaster and injury!) With the straw bedding in the shelter being built up gradually all winter (thanks to Russ for this idea that I filed away to consider later!), the bedding will be back-breakingly shoveled out in the spring, but not every single day or even twice a day.
Back to what I was starting to describe with the rats. We think our barn was built in the 1920's, based on some history I've found and the type of structure and amount of cows it could have handled a hundred years ago. It was a dairy barn, originally set up for milking a herd of cows, whose milk would be sent to the creamery in Greenwood to be made into butter.
The woodworker who lived here 15 or 20 years ago almost certainly re-made quite a bit of the barn, including siding. He made it into his workshop, complete with dry-walled interior walls, a huge furnace, and a large room on the second floor of what used to be a full-sized hay loft. He sprayed expanding-foam insulation into the wall spaces of the first floor, between the outside siding and the inside dry-wall (makes sense, if he was going to run a furnace to heat the place).
Fast-forward to 15-20 years later, and we are taking out the old barn-siding because of weather damage and replacing it with "reverse board and batten plywood siding" (just the section that the cows' shelter will be next to--the rest will be either traditional board-and-batten or the ship-lap boards like it is now) .
We KNOW that there are rats in the insulation, because I found one in a different barn room last fall and instinctively chopped at it with a shovel before it squeaked and escaped. (For every rat you see, you should expect that there are at least 20 more---I read that somewhere).
And today, I uncovered a LOT of rat tunnels. And a LOT of rat damage to the vertical supports in the wall AND the sill boards at the base of the wall.
I have to admit, I don't really know which supports are the most important, like which ones are load-bearing and which ones aren't quite as necessary to keep the whole barn standing. But when I uncover what used to be a tunnel for a huge rat in the foam insulation (starting at the bottom of the wall and winding up through the expanse of that section), and then find that the tunnel leads up and THROUGH the rotted board at the top of the wall and INTO the floor supporting-boards for the second floor, I'm a little worried. Some of these rat-sized tunnels are thicker than my arm. I think the only reason we haven't had the weasels coming in to kill the chickens is that the drywall is still whole and intact inside!
In some places, the double or triple sill boards are rotted away to the point that a regular sized brick can just be slid right in, on top of the concrete foundation and under the boards that didn't rot quite so badly. The rats took full advantage of that soft wood and at one time had quite the colony there, I'm sure. Luckily, I didn't find any nests or tunnels that had been inhabited lately!
Jeff will have to look at things tonight, and we'll need to prioritize which supports or sill boards need to be replaced and which will have to wait until we rip out the dry wall on the inside of the same wall.
When the vet was out on Saturday for Lucy to be bred and dehorning little Ruby, we had a conversation about how things on a farm are a "lesson in constant crisis management". Well, the newest crisis (100 year old rat damage!) is waiting to be addressed before we can proceed with the planned cow shelter.......
Laura
http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/
| | 2012-09-04 Rat damage, Sept 2012 Sep 3, 2012
by Laura |
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