Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Modern Livestock Barns

On that trip to London two weeks ago I passed a lot of big modern barns, especially dairy barns.  The agricultural landscape of southern Ontario changes dramatically when you get 30 miles south of the valley, to flatter, and much more open, with better soil for farming.  The contrast is apparent in these pictures.

This is a large, quite new dairy barn.  It has full open sides and lots of rooftop ventilation.  It also has 'drive-through' feeding and cleaning.  The large doors in the end enable the farmer to drive straight through with his tractor, to drop off feed to the cattle, and to clean up manure.

This is a different style of expansion, with the old barn retained, but new extensions added.  Still lots of open-window sides, and lots of ventilation, but without the same arrangement for drive-through cleaning and feeding.  The silo usually marks it as a dairy barn.

And on this farm they are still building an entirely new big barn.

These on the other hand, are chicken barns.  You can usually recognize them because they are two floors in height.

A LOT of large black ventilation fans on the ends of these barns!


And these last two are hog barns, long and low, with the open-window sides, and ventilation, but no large silos, just the smaller feeder silos.

These two hog barns are at the far distant back of the same farm.   This reflects Ontario's 'minimum-distance' separation rules, whereby new hog barns must be 1000 feet from existing residences.  The rules are a little more complex than that, but they result in many hog barns being sited a long distance from the roads.  It's because of the odour.

Linking to:

The Barn Collective



13 comments:

  1. Modern barns on today's factory farms are everywhere to be seen. Of course this has been and will continue to be the way farming is conducted. At the same time I will continue to enjoy my romantic image of rural New York State. Thanks so much for linking up this week and I hope that you will return again. Tom The Backroads Traveller

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  2. Great shots of modern farming and livestock in your part of the world.

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  3. A very interesting post. I loved seeing all the photos, and reading about the different barns.

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  4. It all looks very prosperous and well-managed. Odour? You mean stink.

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  5. Some good info on the different types of barns. Think I learned a few things this morning:))

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  6. I'm glad you have such interest in barns, I learned something this morning from you. I didn't think there were still barns being built anywhere, as I thought modern farms didn't use them much any more. Silly me. :-)

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  7. Wonderful landscape and great designs for those barns.

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  8. Nice big new barns but they lack the charm of the old ones. : )

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  9. A nice variety of newer barns. They are more practical than the old ones but not as 'pretty'. :)

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  10. The new barns may be utilitarian, but they sure don't have the character of the older barns -- and they probably won't last well over 100 years either. How good it is that Ontario was wise enough to require a decent distance between the hog barns and private residences.

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  11. I shudder to think what's going on inside those chicken barns. I buy only cage free eggs and have a lot of disagreements with modern farming practices. When we had our hobby farm having the chickens wander the property was my favorite thing about it all, those were happy chickens and they laid the BEST eggs!

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