CPS Erection

I really like cattle Panel structures. We use them for green houses, animal shelters and storage buildings. CPS structures are robust, inexpensive, simple to erect, flexible and reusable. This is a pretty good example. These materials were a wood shed over the winter, a shelter for young kids this spring, a tool shed and now an on site milking shed in our new pasture away from the house. In about an hour today, by myself I disassembled it, hand carried it to a new location, sited and re-erected it all with just a sledge hammer to drive the stakes.

This shelter consists of one 16 foot by 52 inch panel that I bend into a U six feet tall and eight feet wide. I used an eight foot section for the back wall. There is a tarp over the top with bail ties to hold it on. Two stakes anchor it to the ground. That's about $45 worth of cattle panel and $5 worth of tarp. If I wanted a larger structure, I would add successive panels, each adding about four feet to the length. The back wall is not strictly necessary, but I had the panel available and it is a convenient way to make the structure resilient. The tarp will last about a year, the cattle panel I expect to last ten or more years. The stakes and the bail ties are leftovers from previous uses.

To move the existing structure, I just untie the tarp and remove the back wall

Remove the stakes and tip the arched panel on it's side.

I folded up the tarp and stacked it with the back wall on the main panel. I lashed the stakes onto the bottom of main panel to make skids so I wouldn't scrape the galvanized coating off. Then I simply dragged it to the new location, maybe 500 feet away, up a hill and into the new pasture.

In the new location, I erected the arch, lashed the back wall on and staked down the front opening.


Stretching the tarp over it and tying it down finished it. Under an hour and nothing more complicated than a lashing. It will give us a sun shelter for the goats in their new pasture. When the goats move on to their next paddock it will become a milking shed. After that, the sky's the limit.