Building on a budget with outside handling unit

Keeping startup costs to a minimum is a top priority for any prospective suckler or beef farmer with margins so tight. However, young farmers do not have to spend a fortune to construct suitable housing, as is seen on the farm of John Moran from Gortnadeeve, Creggs, Co Galway.

Having completed the Green Cert a few years ago, John always had plans to put up a shed to house his mainly Angus suckler herd. Working full-time off-farm means the system has to be kept as simple as possible. “We calve the majority of the cows outside and it works well. The Angus are hardy,” said John. “We had no issues with scour last spring which really helps to keep the workload low during the spring.”

John and his father Eamonn both work off the farm, collecting milk for Arrabawn. “When you are working off-farm you have to make the farm simple and make it suit,” Eamonn said.

Design

A simple four-bay slatted shed was chosen by John. However, he decided to go for 4.4m slats to allow bigger capacity in the pens. Pens are 4.8m wide with a span of 5.2m. “You could fit eight cows in each pen comfortably, probably nine if you wanted to,” said John. In a bid to keep costs down, he decided against putting a roofed creep area to the back of the pens. An outside handling area was chosen instead. The entire unit has been installed with the help of a 60% TAMS (Targeted Agricultural Modernisation Scheme) grant.

All pens were fitted with Easyfix rubber mats which came fitted to the Banagher slats. Spaced sheeting was installed throughout the roof of the shed. “We had seen the spaced sheeting in other sheds and liked it. Anything that can help ventilation in a shed is worth doing,” said John.

The shed is on a fairly exposed site but the plan down the road will be to construct other sheds adjacent to the current one. “I would prefer a shed that is open and has a good airflow through it than one that is closed up and stuffy,” said John.

The shed stands at 4m to the eaves with a 15° slope on the roof. The apex of the shed rises to 5.6m.

Vented sheeting runs above the back wall of the shed to provide inlet ventilation also. The shed is 19.2m long with an agitation point stretching out 1.5m at either side of the shed. The tank is 21.6m long internally and 4.1m wide internally. It has a depth of 2.4m. For nitrates purposes the shed must have 200mm of freeboard at the top of the tank, meaning that only 2.2m of slurry can be stored. This gives net capacity in the tank for slurry of 194.8m3.

As the farm is located in Zone B, 18 weeks of storage is required. With each cow requiring 0.29m3 per week, if each pen were to hold eight cows (32 in total), there would be enough storage for 21 weeks. In reality, there will be a mixture of stock in the shed so there will be ample storage for at least a five-month winter.

If eight cows were in a pen there would be feed space of approximately 600mm per cow, which is more than enough, especially as cows are generally being fed ad-lib silage.

Pens

John decided to put a large pen out the back of the shed to act as his handling unit. There is access to the handling unit from the two pens at either end of the shed. “The doors at either end work really well for testing cattle as everything can be rotated around,” John said. Both doors are on sliders as opposed to hinges for safety.

Running along the back wall of the shed is a 12m-long race, fitted with a skulling gate. An anti-backing bar that slides in and out was supplied by Gibney Steel. The system is fitted to the gates along the side of the race and can be slid in behind cattle. This way they do not have to push by the bar. For any handling unit put up through TAMS there is a requirement to have the middle rails of the race fitted with notches to hold a retaining bar or if a wall forms one side it must have suitable sockets. The other option is to have an anti-backing bar that can be secured at a range of distances along the race.

The race is made up of five different gates. For safety reasons, all rails or sections of a race must be fitted with a quick-release mechanism so they can be removed in the event of an animal becoming trapped.

There is over 3m left between the front of the crush and the penning and 3.9m at the back of the crush. The pen itself is 19.2m long and 6.4m wide, divided into two pens. As sheep are also kept on the farm, sheep gates have been put around the edge of the enclosure.

The floors of the pens have been designed so that they are sloping towards a channel that diverts any slurry into the slatted tank. The enclosure is cleaned following each use. Creep gates are in place at the back doors of the shed to allow weanlings out for creep-feeding.

“If it wasn’t for the grant there wouldn’t have been a hope of this shed going up,” according to John. The total cost of the shed came to approximately €60,000 including VAT. The VAT element will be approximately €8,000, which can be claimed back. The remaining €52,000 is eligible for a 60% grant which will leave the net cost at approximately €21,000.

“We were probably eight or 10 months waiting to get planning permission,” John said, “and then it took another three months to get TAMS approval. We knew that it could take time to get the applications done so we gave ourselves plenty of time. There is no point trying to rush things as you are only putting pressure on yourself.”

All penning for the handling unit and all barriers and penning for the shed were supplied and fitted by Gibney Steel.

“It is a nice simple system, especially for a young farmer starting out,” according to Philip Smith of Gibney Steel. “You don’t always have to go with a fancy system. Something simple and practical can work very well as John has done here.”

The shed was supplied and erected by Halcon Steel while Enda Ward did the concrete work for the job. John O’Connor completed the TAMS application while O’Brien Survey and Design Services completed the drawings for the shed and the planning application.

The one drawback is that the race and crush are not covered, where in an ideal world they would be, but for anyone trying to get a foothold in farming, cost has to be factored into every decision. Also, such large pens would not have been possible if it was a creep area; the larger pens are needed, especially for handling sheep.