Winter’s set up

We invested in our micro-sized farm yard last December. We added some terraces and 2 large manure composting areas below our barn. Since we keep the cows under a fabric barn for the winter, it takes some forethought and infrastructure for things not to become a complete mud/poop pit as winter progresses. There was a time, not but a few years back, that we had no barn at all. Neither did we have a tractor! We had to haul in hay weekly from a neighbor farmer and we would then drive out into our steep pasture and push 1 round bale from my truck and and 2 round bales from my trailer. Things got muddy and poopy, and really muddy and really poopy if it rained for a day(or for a full winter.). This is not an ideal set-up. As they say, you do what you gotta do. But once you get to a certain point, there is no going back. Currently, I could never live without a tractor, a cow barn, and now a hay storage barn(that one got completed last spring!)

The investment we put into the winter’s feeding and manure infrastructure makes life that much better all around. Hay comes in from the top. Manure gets pitchforked out the bottom. Gates are everywhere for easy tractor movement. Ballast, geo-fabric and road bond are now down as a base to keep things from getting muddy. There is a terrace below to drive my tractor to the lower composting areas to turn them in the spring. And below that, there is a large terrace that I’ve been adding and planting trees on. In the end, it increases the efficiency of the space and minimizes the work, which seems to be more and more a goal of mine.