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Saturday, July 19, 2014

Renovating a Barn

Several years ago we milked cows under a pipeline system. Let me tell you, while that is much better than hand milking and even what was once referred to as a step-saver system, it is still hard on the body. You have to squat between cows and attach the milkers to the cow's teats. This allowed for the cows to kick you if they wanted to, sometimes right in the head. A series of circumstances, including growing children who did not want to farm caused us to stop milking.

We opted to raise beef and dairy heifers which required bottle feeding powdered milk replacer and training them to eat feed and hay and drink water, just like we did with the dairy cows' calves. We also planted crops for sale.

Now we have decided to renovate that old barn and where was once a calf-raising room into a milking parlor. We had changed to using the milking cow's stalls and abandoned that section of the barn long ago. In the parlor we are building there is a central pit between two rows of cows where four cows can be milked on each side at the same time. More importantly, there is no getting kicked in the head or squatting under a cow. That is better on the knees and the old brain bucket!

In the years of non-use the milk house had been ruined from hard winters of heaving frozen ground that broke the concrete. We later discovered that someone had no only built it without a proper foundation, but on sand! This means the building will be razed, the original foundation broken the rest of the way and hauled away and all new concrete poured and a new building. Fun!

                                          Trying to pull up broken concrete pad outside the milk house.
                                           A large slab moved just to discover another one underneath.
                                                              The building coming down.
                                     It's gone! Now to demo the rest of that concrete and start over.
I rented a jack hammer this weekend. The guys at the rental center laughed asking if I was going to run it. Guess what! Yes, I did, and I broke a lot of concrete. Hopefully, weather permitting, we get the new foundation next week. Wish us luck.

                                                   Our ever present helper supervisor.