Field Milkhouse

That's our field milk house.

For a while in the spring I was walking the does up and down from the backfield to the barn for milkings. It was a pain, and invited disaster. It was a time consuming, we had to go by plants the goats liked but we didn't want them to eat and there was opportunity for mishap at every turn. There is a better way.

So I brought the milking stanchion up to the backfield and put it under a tarp covered stock panel arch. It gave me a place to hang the scale, store milking supplies and keep everything dry.

To improve on that, I built the field milk house. It's a hemlock deck (locally sawn, hemlocks the best choice available from my rough sawn guy). It has uprights for attaching the arch and is built on skids so I can pick up the whole thing on my loader forks, carry it to a new location and set it down. The skids also keep the rest of it out of the dirt so it will last longer.

It is certainly nice bringing the house to the animals instead of the other way around. Much faster and more productive. And it gives me a dry place to store nik nacs in the field. I moved it this afternoon for the first time. As advertised, slid under it with the forks, lift and carry.

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.

The south end of a north facing goat house

We like stock panel structures. They help us house goats and chickens, dry and protect firewood. They provide a wind break and keep their contents dry. They are easy to erect and economical on a small scale. They are easily adapted for a variety uses. They allow us to provide for our animals needs with flexibility.

Pictured above is Goat House North. It has a goat house in each end with access to seperate paddocks. There is a human section in the middle where we store a week or two's worth of hay, minerals, etc. We can feed the goats from the human side and check on things. The goat house is made from six arched 4 X 16 stock panels sitting on top of some wooden side panels that give us an extra foot of headroom. the wooden sides are attached to posts. the posts help us keep the first two feet of stock panel vertical. For this year we also added pillars at the ends and a 2x4 ridge pole to insure against heavy snow. I have been successful in the past just using bailing twine cords to keep the arch in shape. But now that we have a total of 4 goat stall houses, a green house and a woodshed made from stock panels, I decided I didn't want to have to stress about keeping the roofs clear after snow storms.

We get between 20 and 40 degrees of temperatur difference from inside the goat house to the outside, depending on how sunny it is. That often makes the difference between frozen water bucks and not. It also keeps the animals comfortable on hard winter days and nights.

Winter has arrived here also

Looking around at blogs, a lot of people are talking about winter having arrived. It is here too. -10 F this morning at 7:30, no idea how cold it got. We have more than two feet of fresh snow over the weekend. And tonight there might be freezing rain to top it off.

I like to leave the snow on the stock panel structures as insulation. But with the recent fiasco with the garden green house, I didn't risk it. I cleared the snow off each with a push broom. Which is not hard, but it can get deep on the backside.

But the wood is all stacked and dry. What a difference from last year. Last year we were burning birch that I cut from standing dead trees late last year. I was hoping the standing dead would be a little drier than green wood. And I am sure it was, but not enough. Those birch logs were frozen and we tried all winter to have them warmed up and dried out a little before we put them in the stove. This years wood is mostly oak that I cut early last spring. Some of it was standing dead, others were nuisance trees that would threaten the new fence. But more than anything, they have been under cover all summer and are dry dry, ready to go in the firebox. If the fire dies down, you can just stick these logs in and they catch. Not like last year, trying to nurse a fire back up with tomorrow mornings kindling. A little preparation prevents poor performance as I have been told.



Certainly glad I fixed the snow blower prior to this weekend. I did clear a lot of snow. I have been known to put things off on occasion. Just lucky on this one, I guess.

Some nice weather

We had a string of at least two weeks of good weather that spanned all the important days of kidding. Going into April, my wife pointed out that last year we had three significant snow storms in April. Not this year. We are completely melted out except the patch of snow on the north west corner that gets dumped on by both the house and the barn roofs. It is down from 8 feet to a foot and a half, soon to be gone. My mother in law looks to have won the pool on that, it will be gone before May.

The string of sunny days has been broken, though. It started raining at about 9 AM and has been going pretty steady ever since. The drainage over flow in the back yard is brimming. That's where the whole backside of the house and two thirds of the barn rain water ends up. We usually have two 55 gallon drums to catch it, but I haven't set that up yet this spring. Today's rain would have easily filled it.

We do have the spring line setup. When I bought this house the main house was still supplied by the surface well in a cleft up above the house. It will gravity feed into the firs floor of the house. One of the conditions to buy the house was to put in a drilled well, the state frowns on surface water. So I dug a line from the spring to the garden and we now have a supply for the garden that is separate from our drinking water.

We moved the greenhouses today. We had two greenhouses in the garden this year, one for the chickens and one for plants. During the coldest winter days, the plants go dormant since the greenhouse is unheated. But they are that much further along when temperatures do allow. This year, we got a solid extra month of growth over unprotected ground in the garden. Most people in this area are just starting to talk about working their gardens, but my wife already has greens to harvest, radishes, leaks, etc. All cold hearty stuff to begin with, but we are already getting daily salads out of the garden. So, today we took down the chicken green house and moved the plant greenhouse to a new set of beds. We also constructed two new raised beds in the garden to match the greenhouse foot print. The cold hearty stuff is ready to be out on its own and my wife will be moving tomatoes and peppers out to the new green house location. I am really impressed with the amount she already has growing in the garden. I'll try to put up some pictures when we takes some.

Out back, we are adding some new goat "pasture". Last year I put up a 75' square pasture for the goats and we tried to go rational grazing in that. But it was too small and we really weren't getting enough time between rotations. So I am adding another similar sized fenced area and then we will have two smaller pastures in between the two permanently fenced ones. That will give us a four month separation which is much better from a parasite perspective. Unfortunately, it is not optimal for forage nutrition, but the parasites are a more important consideration.

Kinda of proud of myself

I have written here and here about stock panel arch buildings we use. It is a simple adaptable design for out building that is easy and inexpensive to put up. Made from arched sections of 52" X 16 foot that create a variable length building 8 feet wide and six feet tall. With a 6mil plastic or poly tarp skin and some internal stays, it creates a dry shed that can withstand our VT snow loads. As solar heated green houses, they extend our growing season a month in the spring and a month plus in the fall. As animal shelters, they provide shelter from wind and rain, retain body heat and gather solar energy to make comfortable winter housing.




















The Goat house is a little more elaborate than the Green houses. The Goat house has a human end and a goat end with seperate entrances. The Goat end is half open, half covered by a canvas tarp. There is also a wall of old hay bales on the closed side. The hay feeder is hung on the wall between the goat and human ends. The Human end gives us a place to store feed hay and hay waste. We can load and cycle the feeder from the human side. Their are also two slots for the goats to reach through for water and minerals. And brackets to hang mini feeders of grain on.



















For the Goat shed, we had some new design constraints to meet. We wanted clear spans inside (no supporting posts) given the limited space. With such a thin wall, condensation can be an issue. Since goats are suseptable to pneumonia, keeping their housing dry was important. We also wanted to maintain a solar warming design. So the sunny side has a layer of translucent plastic and the shadowed side has a layer of heavy canvas. The Canvas helps buffer the condesation while the clear side allows the heat of the sun in. For cold or foul weather, there is a poly tarp that covers the whole goat end. The canvas stretches around the open end and can be positioned to suit the weather. Now that the sun has changed it's swing enough, the tarp stays open most of the time to catch the afternoon sun.















Today was a good day to drag out the old bedding and replace it with new. It just means going into the goat end with a wheel barrow and pitch fork and loading up the soiled bedding. We compost the bedding to add to the vegetable gardens. Even in the depth of winter, the compost generated enough heat to melt it's way through the snow. We change the bedding on a schedule to interupt parasites. We replaced the old bedding with a new layer that is the waste hay we collect from the hay feeder. Goats a picky eaters and only eat about half of the hay that we put out.

Exciting news

We had the vet over the other day. And not for lunch....

We are coming up on a year with our goats and it was time to get some injections, preventative care for the hopefully pregnant goats. I also wanted to get tested for CAE (the goats, not me). I also wanted the vet's professional opinion of the health and general condition of the goats. I am still developing a critical eye for goat flesh.

One of the things that has been nagging us is whether or not our goats are actually pregnant. I have been poking and prodding them looking for a sign one way or the other, but I haven't been convinced. But I had to dry them off (stop their udders from producing milk) two months prior to the assumed due date. That was about a month ago. Ever since, I have been thinking about "what if they aren't pregnant" They wouldn't go into heat again until fall and kid spring of 2009. That would mean all the work around maintaining and feeding them with no milk for more than a year. That would have been a big disappointment since dairy products is the reason we got the goats. I enjoy the girls, but they are a big responsibility. Without the milk it wouldn't be worth it.

So anyway, the vet did an ultrasound and we confirmed both goats are with kid. Hard to tell if it is one kid or more, but at least one each. So be looking for pictures of new kids come May.

A sunny day in the snow

Have I talked about our cattle panel goat shelter? (CPS) I generally call it the goat cave. It consits of several 16' sections of cattle panel fence bent over lengthwise to form an arch. We use bail ties as internal stays to keep the arch in shape and support any snow load. For the summer, it has a tarp canopy to keep the rain off.

But in the winter, we get a little more elaborate. The outer shell over the goat half is the silver polly tarp. Under that is a layer of translucent plastic. On the north side the inner layer is a canvas tarp that can also cover the open south end in foul weather. The canvas helps buffer condensation and keeps things more confortable for the goats. On a nice day like today, we roll up the outer poly tarp on the southeast side to let the warm sun in. That's the point of today's post.

When we woke up this morning temps were about ten degrees. They had risen to about 32 when I took pictures. In that same time period, the goat cave had risen to almost seventy degrees. Passive solar gain in action.




















It's not like the Goat Cave can hold anything like that over night. The South end of the shelter is generally at least half open, so fresh air is always breezing in. This helps prevent moisture and ammonia from building up. But inspite of that open door, the bedding in the goat side never freezes.

Stockpanel Arches

It's fall and time to think about coming frost and putting the garden together for the winter.



Over the last couple of years we have been working on developing a greenhouse design we like. We needed something that would extend our growing season into the fall, provide our chickens with a protected area in the winter, open the garden earlier in the spring and be easy enough to remove for the growing season. It also needed to be inexpensive.



From a couple of sources, we worked out the arched stock panel design we use now. My brother had been talking about arched hoop houses he uses to winter his chickens and a friend of mine showed me arched stock panel sheds he uses to house his yard equipment. I put the two ideas together into a hoop house made of stock panel over our raised beds to house the chickens in deep winter and a greenhouse on either side. And during the growing season, the plastic comes off the greenhouse and it becomes a trellis for climbing plants like beans and tomatoes. And since the stock panel is only staked down, it's easy to lift it out one panel at a time and set it up in a different location. Interestingly, my friend showed me the article he had gotten his idea from, an article about greenhouses... All my life's a circle, so to speak.



To make these stock panel greenhouses, we use three sections of stock panel (hog panel) 16 feet long and 52" wide. The panels are bent into arches about 8 feet in diameter set in a line to form a 12 foot long greenhouse. We drive a couple of 4 foot stakes that enter the stock panel 2 feet off the ground and go through the lowest rung of the panel. The stakes help define a 2 foot high vertical wall. A series of guy ropes (cords for geometry students) pull the panel in to form and stabilize the curve of the arch. This year, we also added some 46" spars that follow the same path as the guy ropes. The guy rope / spar arrangement use up about 6 inches of the headroom, but they also make the arch strong enough to handle our snow load. A couple of pieces of bailing twine lace the sections of panel together. A 10 by 9 foot piece of 6 mm plastic goes across each end and a 13 by 17 foot piece over the arch. Around the rim of the arch, we use those metal binder clips to clip the plastic to the arch. We run battens the length of the arch to keep the plastic from luffing in the wind. A couple of 8 inch long blocks of wood screwed to the battens from the inside secure the battens to the arch. For extra insulation, a second layer of plastic can go over the battens, forming about an inch of air gap between the layers of plastic. I frame up a door on hinges but it could also be just a flap cut in the end. A vent window will also be necessary to prevent over heating in warm weather.


Our 2006-2007 greenhouse as it finished the winter and started our spring plants


2007 tomatoes and peppers starting in the greenhouse in May

Frame for the second greenhouse going up on new raised beds in June

Young plants growing in the new East greenhouse as a trellis

West greenhouse with plastic removed and tomatoes and peppers uncovered.

Tomatoes and peppers growing in the west trellis in July. Beans hanging from the panels.

A variety of plants growing in the East trellis in July

The east trellis covered in plastic against frosts in September.