Normally the camera dies in a liquid related accident (i.e. #1 bottle milk when Rachel was 9 months old. #2 I washed it! #3 I can't remember but it had something to do with water #4 wet clothes). But this one was not liquid related, the screen just stopped working altogether.
My digital camera has a screen on the back, that's what I look at to see what I am taking a photo of. For those of you used to the old cameras, it's the "window" you looked through (or don't/didn't depending on your photography style and how much actually cared about what you were taking a photo of) to see what you would be taking a photo of. Anyway, my screen is now just white, I can no longer see what I would be taking a photo of. I don't know what I did to it. Quite honestly, I was just holding it and it crapped out. So, please excuse me while I shoot blind.
This weekend, before we go get our big* load of hay, we need to change the barn around a bit. I hadn't planned to do much to the barn at all. As you can see it's about 1 1/2 times as deep as it is wide. Keep in mind, the previous owners had horses so everything was made for horses. We've had to lower gates and rig fencing, etc.
*big is an under statement from what were used to. Because hay prices in our area go up over winter, because we have the space to store it, because we don't have the time to go get hay once every month or so, because I have no idea what the winter will be like, and because we cannot just go to the feedstore to pick up hay if in the event we need a few bales (because feed stores don't carry hay!) I want to stock up as much as possible (which I am hoping is enough to last until next March when the pastures start to green up), that's about 8 months worth of hay to the tune of about 240 bales!
There are two front "stalls" with gates that swing shut (as you can see one is closed, the other is open inward against the wall). My original plan was to attach a piece of plywood to one gate and close it for winter. The goats would enter the stall though the one opened gate and enter the other stall through the opening just on the other side of the green water bucket there on the ground. The plywood would create a wind block.
I am not very concerned about cold temps. They've arrived in plenty of time to acclimate to the cold. They'll have each other to keep them warm, a dry shelter and to be quite honest, they'll have it made in comparison to some. I won't be kidding in the dead of winter- aiming for late winter/early spring with most of them- and there is electricity in the barn if in the event it's needed.
At any rate, the back portion...
is mostly hay storage. 1/8 of the barn is taken up by the tack room (my new milk room) which can barely been seen in the photo above in the upper right hand corner and in the photo below in the upper right. It's basically a box built within the barn- concrete floor, lights and outlets.
In the photo below I am standing at about the milk room door looking into the stalls with the current hay storage area to my right. (Please excuse the mess. That big wooden gate on the left used to be where the tube gate is now)...
the tube gate used to be located here...
to separate the stalls and the place in the lower left hand corner that looks wide enough for a horse to walk through (though not tall enough) was actually blocked by a big galvanized water trough that could be accessed by both stalls.
The opening where the tube gate was (center screen photo above) is where I had planned for the does to enter the stall that was draft free (see plywood on gate). The new plan though is instead of the front of the barn being totally for goats (as it is now), we are going to use the stall that I am currently standing inwhen I took the photo above (where they currently eat) as the new hay area. We will be splitting the barn in half lengthwise instead of width-wise which takes care of a lot of the concerns I had in regards to kidding and warmth and electricity and ease of use, etc with all the goats being exposed up front.
Where the hay is stored right now...
...will become 2 kidding stalls that will open up right into the loafing area.
With the new configuration, the goats will have half of the barn on the entire west side. The east side will be my milk room in the back (approx.) 1/8th, the front portion will be hay storage and the last (approx.) 1/8th in the middle is an area I will leave open as an aisle-way/open area (to be used as the possible location of show shaving later on, etc. since there are outlets there).
There is a gate...
on the outside (as well as a red sliding door that will be closed in the winter more than likely). I can bring the does in for milking from a gate along the new center wall from the loafing area into the open area and then into the milk room. They'll exit the barn completely from the big orange gate (or door, depending on time of year). This would be helpful if the gate on the front of the doe's area of the barn was shut so the milked does couldn't get back in causing havoc, which isn't usually a problem since they go back to eating once fully milked and always establish a milking pecking order but it's just a thought anyway.
The gate on the new hay storage side will be shut to keep the goats out (and deer and anything else that would like to get in to eat my yummy hay). The gate on the front of the barn on the doe's side will still have plywood installed on it as a wind block but this will also allow me to shut them in (and shut out cold and other creatures). I don't find locking them up totally important, but in the winter it may be necessary for warmth as well as when we have small kids. The property isn't fenced to keep out coyotes and the barn isn't so close to the house that I could hear something before it was too late. And for a host of other reasons.
It may be necessary to exchange the one large gate on the front of the barn on the west side where the does will be for 2 shorter ones so that one could be shut to block the wind and the other could be open so they could come and go.
We can load hay from the front of the barn and I will access the hay area from a gate in the open/aisle way for feeding. I can feed from the hay storage area as I plan to have feeders along the center wall. I haven't yet decided what the wall will be made out of, but it would be nice, quite honestly, if it were just cattle panels. The hay wouldn't be so close the goats could reach it but the wall would be easy to take down if we ever wanted to (and not as expensive or labor intensive as 2x4's and plywood).
As I've mentioned before, for those who don't know, the cattle panels have large enough openings of 6" x 6" on the upper portion (from about 2' high to the top) . It's plenty of room for a goat without horns to stick his/her head through. Cattle panels are normally 16 foot long and 42" tall with graduated spaces starting small on the bottom.
We figure we can get 10 pallets (2 deep and 5 long or 5 deep and 2 wide depending on how you look at it) or more into this new hay area. Stacked 8 high, we can get 160 bales. Stacked 9 high we can get 180. Providing they are snug up against the east wall of the barn, that leaves me plenty of room for an aisle between the center wall and the wall-o-hay in which to feed the goats from (and enough room that they cannot stick their heads through and feed off the bales). We have a lean-to that is about 20' wide and 8-10' deep that has 2 fenced pens. One side of that lean-to will be additional hay storage
We could leave just as it is with the back portion being hay storage and we could get more hay in there but this new configuration gives us 2 kidding stalls at the back of the barn where we can insulate and it allows for a better flow for milking and easier hay loading. As it is right now, the trailer has to be backed up to the sliding door and unloaded from there which is somewhat of a pain.
In regards to the kidding pens: The "walls" separating the 2 pens from each other and dividing the pens from the loafing area will just be horse panels. Horse panels are just like cattle panels but the openings are 4" x 4" all over which will be safer for birthing mama's and tiny babies (i.e. kids cannot go through the openings, cannot be born into the openings possibly hanging them, etc.). I can hang water buckets off the panels. Feeders can be attached to the panels without having to drill holes and install mounting bolts. It will allow the does to see her herd mates and interact, be close to them, but keep new kids at a safe distance from other does and offer security to the new babies and mamas. I can remove the panels completely if I wanted to for cleaning or whatever the case may be. The walls along the actual barn itself will be insulated and plywood or chipboard will be installed 4 foot tall for an extra buffer from cold.
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As a side note, once the kids are old enough to be separated from mama at night (I usually start this from 2-4 weeks) this will be an area that I can place the kids.
I have found that it is much less stressful to A. separate at night when most of the time away from each other is spent sleeping and B. the kids and dam can see each other. Why do I separate? For those of you who don't know, I take the morning milk for household use. The kids, by 2 weeks of age (and for those kids that are dam raised and not bottle raised they are often nibbling on hay the DAY they are born) should be eating hay and grain. It's not a lot, but they do eat it. In the wild, the dam spends much more time away from their kids as captive goats do. They leave kids unattended to go eat themselves just like deer (they are related after all). When the kids are old enough to venture out (usually by 2-4 weeks) with their dam, they are eating forage much more often and are not so dependent on the amount of milk they normally would get in domesticated situations. By separating, I cannot mimic nature exactly but it is a way for the doe to provide us with milk before weaning and a way to get the kids eating naturally without being any more unnatural as possible.
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The floors in this barn are just earth except the milk room with the concrete. I like concrete floors with straw for bedding and while this barn is good shape for its age, I think we'll just go with rubber mats to keep the dirt in and for ease of clean up. Which, as you can see by a few of those photos, I have not bee doing. Stall and feeding area clean up used to be, normally, a daily thing. Right now they don't sleep in there unless it rains so most of this waste hay isn't soiled or wet.
So, there's our project for the weekend. It shouldn't be too labor intensive or expensive but does need to be done because the load of alfalfa is just about ready to be picked up and I don't want to load hay into the back of the barn just to have to remove it later.
So, without further ado here is the new hay barn layout! You're probably going to wish you had skipped all that rigmarole before this I'm sure. You know me, have to make a short story long. And sorry, it's a bit off kilter. I blame the scanner.
P.S. You can click on the "photo" below and it will enlarge it for ya.
P.P.S. This is NOT to scale. As I mentioned, the milk room is approx. 1/8 of the whole barn, the "open" area is about 1/8 and this barn is about, I don't really even know for sure but I am going to say about 24' x 36'. The kidding pens will be about 8' deep x 6' wide each. They could be made deeper, but with the width, I'd like to get 2 in side by side in between the milk room outer wall and the inside wall of the barn but this is the general plan.
In the rafters above the spigot on the inside there is an electrical outlet in which a tank heater is hung in the winter to keep the water from freezing. The heater's cord will be placed inside a piece of PVC pipe to keep from the goat's chewing on it and cooking themselves.
Right now I have a long hose attached to the spigot but in the winter I will have to reattach the hose that is only about 2 foot long so that the water inside the hose can drain off so it doesn't freeze.
That spigot is a special spigot. It has a valve inside the pipe at the bottom of the whole piece (where it attaches to the main water line which is below the frost line) that allows the water to siphon back into the main pipe so that water is not left in the vertical pipe to freeze.
As for the bucks, their set up isn't so nice at this point and I may just be bucketing unfrozen warm water over to them but, at least for this winter, that's what it'll have to be. I can move them over to the other lean-to though where there is electricity (and where the excess hay storage will be on one side) but that's not top priority right now.
I was talking about those old water troughs earlier. We have probably 9 of them! My thought is to flip them upside down, cut a u shaped opening on the face of a couple of them and a square shaped opening up top, place metal screening over the square opening on the top and a head lamp can sit on that. It then becomes a heated kid house to sit in the kidding pens, or just outside with an opening in the cattle panel for the kids to get though into the heated house which would save space in the pen.
I have no idea what winters will be like. I am bracing for the worst. I don't want to kid so late in the year when it warms up (in JULY) that the kids won't be ready for fall breeding, but I also don't want frozen kids. Ca. average winter temperatures will have nothing on this place, or so I expect so I am daily thinking about ways to survive comfortably.
Anyway, there it is. And that's all for today.
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