Monthly Barn Report: July

Here’s the Monthly Barn Report: July. Are you feeling overwhelmed by this many posts at once? I am definitely regretting not finding the time to make this happen while all of this was going on, but it feels great to finally get most of it recorded now! My apologies for the post overload! After lots happening in the interior of the barn in June, July saw us moving outside the barn to get the machine room and office area built. I should have mentioned the awesome construction crew in my previous posts. Kroes Construction is who we chose to build our barn. They have not built a robotic facility before but have been serving the Northwest’s dairy community building needs for two generations now. The whole crew was just an outstanding group of guys. After having everyone here pretty much for the entire month of June it was hard to see some of them move to other jobs in July, as we didn’t need the full crew for this area.

The main 4 guys of the crew had the whole area pretty much completed by the end of the month. It wasn’t a super easy job either. Lots of underground drainage and conduit work. The concrete was all careful pours to make sure drainage would be correct as well.     The concrete floor was poured in the office area July 8th. After all the underground work the machine room was poured July 14th. The last floor in this area was the milk room which was poured July 19th. With all the concrete poured walls started going up that same day!  It was fun to see the first real load of wood to arrive for this area. The whole office area was framed up by July 20th. It was especially exciting to see the windows where our desk will sit on a raised platform. This view will where a little bit of time is spent everyday checking all the reports the robots generates from the cows. Desk and computer work is one important part of robotic dairy management. We were definitely pleased with the view we ended up with, might make desk work a little easier! July 21st saw the machine room room framed up. We purposely left the milk room open so that we could place the milk tank in before closing the walls. The milk tank was placed July 22nd. We were able to get a great deal on a used milk tank, that was greatly appreciated. All went well with the move too, very thankful for heavy equipment making an easy move! Besides the robots having the tank placed as the second piece of milking equipment was exciting. Having it there meant sometime soon it would be seeing milk!  With the milk tank in the rest of the framing could be finished in the milk room. The crew also moved on to digging the hole for the small manure collection pit off the barn. We finally ran into some earth moving issues finding some bed rock before we were to the depth we needed. Two diggers and a skidsteer mounted jack hammer later we finally had the pit dug. Moving outside the barn July kind of felt like a slow progress month. In reality it really was great to see our whole office area constructed. Up next is August!