I’ll apologize in advance because I am going to whine. Ready?
Why is this so hard?? All we want is to start a small farm, that’s it. We’re not trying to change the world or anything like that.
We have the best of intentions, we really do!
This time, it was to have a cow barn built—well, the shell of it anyway—before the end of October when we had a calf due. We succeeded with that goal. The barn (shell) was done October 25th and Pumpkin arrived on the 28th.
It did rain before the roof was installed, so the barn was full of mud, but we had some crappy hay and I was putting that down as bedding to keep the cows off the mud, assuming the barn would dry out.
The gutters were installed a month after the building was complete.
And then it rained. And rained. And rained.
And we had several inches of standing water inside the building…inside and out to be accurate.
At first I thought it was because the downspouts on the new gutters emptied onto the ground. When we had our garage built—and that has more roof surface than the barn—we had the downspouts installed that way and we’ve never had a problem. The water is absorbed into the ground without even puddling.
But—I reasoned—the ground had been compacted by the equipment during building so that must be the reason the water from the downspouts wasn’t draining. We installed PVC pipe to carry the rainwater away thinking that would help to decrease the standing water from future rains, as a temporary fix.
Nope. We are getting just as much water simply from the rainfall.
So. Our two cows, one heifer and one calf are all trying to crowd into the milking shed for shelter, which is also flooding now.
To be honest, I am stumped. We’ve had the milking shed since we bought our first cow in 2020. Yes, we’ve had far too much standing water and mud because it has been the only shelter, but nothing like this! And now it’s flooding behind the milking shed too, where we’ve never had standing water before.
I understand the ground probably was compacted by the equipment? Maybe?
When summer gets here and the ground dries out, we will have a contractor come in and do something to drain the water away from the buildings. We will put in plenty of gravel to build a base inside the barn. We will add a lean-to to the front to keep weather out and get the doors installed. We will, we will, we will make this right.
But for now and the long winter months ahead of us, the cow barn is flooded.
ARGH!!!