For as long as we’ve been farming we’ve been making do with existing buildings, whether they were designed for farming or not. The freestanding car garage was transformed into a brooder house for egg-layers, then into a five-pen farrowing barn, then into a workshop. At various times a building we call the lumber shed has been a lambing barn, a hog barn, equipment storage and hay-drying barn.
In some cases the changes were as simple as pulling the baler out of the building and setting up portable chain-link panels for the sheep. Voila — equipment storage is now a lambing barn. In other cases, the changes required more work. To create a draft-free environment for 130 chicks, we stapled heavy poly plastic over the walls and the bottom of the trusses and rigged up a draft free entrance worthy of the decompression chamber in a submarine. To make the same structure function as a farrowing barn, we removed the plastic, braced the walls and cut opening so the sows could go outside from each pen at will.
So accustomed have we become to making do that when the opportunity came to rent three very large, very dilapidated former chicken barns for our growing herd of hogs, we jumped at it. Never mind that door had blown off in the wind, that the electrics were wonky, or that the flat roofs had actually concaved, thus keeping water in and not shedding to the outside drains.
We shook hands with the landlord and set to work. Operating on a tight budget, we formed wood panels with boards milled from our property, we jury-rigged a drinking water system, and, if I may say, creatively dealt with the roof water problem by sawing holes in the low spots of the sagging roofs, directing the rainwater into funnels made of old cone-style fertilizer spreaders, and sending it outside via a system of piping worthy of a Roman aqueduct.
It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.
In learning to make do, we’ve become: innovative, resourceful, efficient. But, too, we’ve become: slipshod, lazy, sloppy and guilty of thinking in the short term. I mean, when you are strapping salvaged PVC pipe to the side of a rotting ban, are you going to work to the building code or do you do what works?
So, when we were evicted from the barns, and we decided to build a barn specifically for hog production, we embarked on a project that demands a set of vastly different skills. So-long, making do; hello, planning.
Though the barn is only half complete at the time of this writing, the construction has forced us to deal with three unfamiliar dynamics: options, paper concepts and the fear of getting it right.
Options. When you order 100 chicks from the hatchery on May 1 and they arrive on May 20, you don’t have time to ponder the location and design of the ideal brooder house. Maybe a tarp gets stapled over a drafty window, but you work with what you have. However, when you build anew, you face a host of choices. Building location? Building size? Design? Purpose? How much to spend?
Concepts. Until we launched the new barn, the closest I have come to paper planning was to rough out a jobsite sketch with a carpenter’s pencil on piece of plywood. Toying with pencil and paper in front of the woodstove this winter has been hugely stimulating but for anyone used to dealing with things, there is a terrifying paucity in just two dimensions. It is the difference between ordering groceries online and picking apples from the vendor at the farmers’ market
Getting it right. The foundation of the barn we are building is made of 200 lock blocks each weighing 2,000 kg, and tied together with tonnes of rebar and close to 100 yards of concrete. It is my lucky privilege to lay awake at 2 a.m. wondering if we got it in the right place.
It is too soon to say for sure, but the new barn may be making a new farmer of me.
- Tom Henry