Straw Bale Hutches Keep Calves Warm And Dry

Straw Bale Hutches Keep Calves Warm And Dry BUILDINGS Livestock 27-6-18 For the past nine or 10 years, calves at Leroy Clark and Michelle Wieghart's Cave Creek Jersey Farm have been housed in low cost hutches. Clark says he got the idea from an article in a farm magazine, but modified it to fit his northern climate. He started with welded wire panels 3 ft. high and 16 ft. long, and pieced seven of them together to make four 4 by 16-ft. pens. "I fastened them together using hog rings," he says. Once the panels were fastened together, Clark arranged them so the pens ran from east to west. Then he laid straw bales on edge along the north wall as high as the hog panels and two bales thick. "I staggered the edges of the bales, to keep the wind from blowing through the cracks," he says. He also built a 5-ft. wall of straw bales on the inside of each of the pens, using hog rings to fasten the twine to the hog panels. Over these walls, he laid 4 by 8-ft. sheets of 1/2-in. exterior grade plywood to make a roof over the back 8 ft. of the pen. Once the plywood was in place, he covered it with a sheet of plastic and then laid old tires over that. "The plastic protects the plywood and the straw from the weather, so they can be used later for other things, and the tires keep the roof from blowing off," he says. Last year, Clark made four of these four-pen constructions, for a total of 16 hutches. "I used 16 sheets of plywood and about 300 bales of straw," he says. Clark says he reuses the hog panels year after year. "I usually get two years out of the plywood, and then use it for something else. When the calves were weaned, I used most of the straw as bedding in the heifer barn," he adds. While hog panels work great for his Jersey calves, Clark recommends taller cattle panels for Holsteins and other larger breeds. He says it takes very little time to put the hutches together, and the cost is minimal. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Leroy Clark, Cave Creek Jersey Farm, Spring Valley, Wis. 54767 (ph 715 778-5044; email: ccjersey@svtel.net).

To read the rest of this story, download this issue below or click here to register with your account number.