Monthly Barn Report: August

Whew, half way through as I bring you Monthly Barn Report: August! Crazy to me that by August we had already been building for 4 months. With the heat of late summer we were enjoying even play time under the shade of the barn roof. Mason and Nolan have been having fun with finally having great concrete places for all their wheeled toys!  We started off August with pouring the bottom of the small manure collection tank. August 3rd the wooden trusses arrived for whole office area. It was fun to watch the huge crane lift. Mr. equipment Nolan was in heaven watching them all go up. It was a bit of a stressful morning for the crew as they had to be offloaded within a certain time or the delivery crane would cost double. That was good incentive to move quickly and they were done just in time.   With the trusses all up the crew started plywood so the roof could go on next. This also included the arch work for the office entryway and adding the covering for the front walk way. The walls to the small manure pit were poured August 10th and the final ground work took place for the big manure tank. We were hoping the tank builder would be here in summer while it was nice and dry, but another job kept him at the coast for another month. We definitely had our finger crossed this wouldn’t be an issue. August 11th saw the first stall loops installed along with the feed rail brackets and one set of stanchions. Feed rail is an open system for the cows to eat through. Instead of now currently where they eat through stanchions. We do like being able to have stanchions or head locks as a safe and effective way of handling cows. But the cost of putting throughout the whole barn made us choose the feed rail system for the milking herd side of the barn. The catch pen, dry cows, calving and special needs pens will all have stanchion head locks so that we still have that option. By August 19th half the stall loops were installed on the milking cow end of the barn and the roof also arrived for the office area. August 22nd the windows for the office area arrived and so did a very special delivery. One of the guys on our crew is a very talented concrete working and in fact has since left construction full time to do his own concrete business. Counter tops, signs, pretty much anything you can think of he can design with concrete. We decided to commission him with a sign for the new barn. Placed dead center in the barn is a tribute to our past and our excitement for the future. It features our current farm sign that sits at the entrance to our driveway. Jonathan did an amazing job and the piece is everything we could have hoped for. If you are in the area be sure and check out his work Solid Rock Castings on Facebook, can’t recommend him enough. The siding metal also arrived for the whole office area. When we first started this project I had orignally sigured that we would go with yellow to pay tribute to our current barns and farm’s history. The yellow that was offered from the metal company was not a good yellow, so I had to pick a new color. Staying neutral my second choice was brown. Not wanting to go too dark we ended up with with sandstone. I will admit I kind of had some second thoughts as it starting going up August 25th, but I have since come to think it will do just fine. With the roof on and machine room ready to go DeLaval moved in all their installation equipment August 28th. Fun to see pallets and pallets of boxes that would all eventually become our barn!  The last day of August saw my special request tackled as I had the crew install some tongue and groove wood for the ceiling of the entryway to the office. I am so excited with how it turned out and it just has such a good feel about it! By this point we were really coming to the reality of our expectations of being in my the end of summer were not going to happen. We were really hoping for our sake and the cows and just perfect timing that they could move into the new barn as we had to come off of pasture with fall rains approaching. That was hard, but also with a project this big it is so easy to get behind. So far the only really major set back was the robot rooms. We had ordered forms and unfortunately the company did not fulfill our order after multiple times of telling us it was shipping next. By this point we had to move to plan B or was it C or D. Frustrating, but that really was the only really big problem we ran into. So we were optimistic for September and crossing our fingers for lots of installation to be coming together on the interior of the barn. That’s the Monthly Barn Report: August. Hopefully the internet connection won’t give up and me and September’s will be up next.