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The Championdrive Podcast
Episode 3.4 - Barn Renovations PART 1 + Repro Plus from Essential Feeds
01:03:04
All things Barn Renos with Jake Warntjes (Warntjes Sheep Company), Chad Charmasson (Charmasson Club Lambs & Clinics), Brian Reilly (Impact Hamps), and Cody Schminke (Schminke Genetics)...plus learn how you can utilize REPRO PLUS from Essential Feeds into your program. Part 1 of a 3 Part Series!
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- [00:02]
A
Now entering the ring, another episode of the Champion Drive podcast presented by Novel Designs.
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B
Everyone, State fair season is winding down. College football is back. The fall majors are just about to start up again. Breeding season starting to come to a close finally. So we thought now would be a great time to do a roundtable podcast. This time our roundtable is about barn renovations and we're going to split it up into three different episodes because it was pretty lengthy. The guys that I caught up with were great resource and a bunch of knowledge. Several of us even found ourselves taking notes while we were recording it. It was about a three hour recording and it's really, really valuable information. I hope you find it as valuable as I did. Before we get into this week's roundtable, let's go through our product spotlight. This week is about Repro Plus. Repro plus is a feed from Essential Feeds. It can be used on to help grow out ulams or it can be used to help achieve reproductive success with AIUs donors, recips and stud bucks. And it's been used with quite a bit of success with various breeders across the country. I caught up with Barrett Carlisle, who's a rep for Essential Feeds and visited with him a little bit about their product. Let's go ahead and take a listen. Well, Barrett, a question that I hear a lot of times from breeders is I wish there was a good feed to feed to my ewe lambs or I wish there was a feed that I could feed feed going into my AI season or to my recips and donors. What sort of product does Essential have for that?
- [01:38]
C
Yeah, Repro plus is a feed that we've been pushing pretty hard for breeders to utilize, and some pretty significant breeders across the country have seen great success utilizing Repro plus and their donor program. We've also seen an advantage when fed to studbucks and we like to think it's priced at a price point where we can also utilize it for those recips as well to help make them just a little more sticky. One area that's kind of arrived as kind of a good place to position Repro plus is with those ewe lambs and developing those through the summer and into the fall. It's a good feed again at a pretty good price point to get them off a show feed and kind of transition them to get them ready to breed.
- [02:21]
B
How much would I feed per day? Is it once a day? Twice a day? How does it come?
- [02:26]
C
Yeah, Repro plus is a pelleted feed comes, it's a bagged feed Normally I recommend feeding Recips especially a little easier doing recips about a pound a day. You can bump up to about a pound and a half. Or if you've got some bigger kind of western type ewes with a little more frame, they're a little harder doing. You can get up to 2 pounds. Normally donors are fed anywhere from 2 to 3 pounds a day. Recommended on repro plus.
- [02:54]
B
Okay, and then what about on Bucks? Are you feeding that as a supplement?
- [02:58]
C
No, we feeding stud bucks just straight Repro plus top dress with foundation. Like the combination of the two has really shown to help kind of bump fertility, especially here in these hot days.
- [03:12]
B
And then what about when we're feeding it to ewe lambs? How are you recommending breeders feed this?
- [03:16]
C
Yeah, traditionally breeders have kind of kept them on a creep feed for a little while or kind of put them on a show feed right after weaning. You know, after you get them weaned and kind of straightened out, we normally start transitioning them kind of 5050 on a creep or whatever they were on with the Repro plus. And then you kind of work through the summer transition them to Repro plus being their sole ration.
- [03:43]
B
Well, thanks for joining us today. Like I said, be sure to check out the Essential website for more information on Repro Plus. To learn more about Repro plus, you can go to ChampionDrive.com and find it on the Product Spotlight page. You can also view the other products that Essentials had spotlighted on their segments on this season of the podcast as well, so be sure to visit championdrive.com to check that out while you're over there. As always, there's a bunch of state fair results, a lot of updated websites, and breeder and showman spotlight interviews as well. This week for the so you suck. Now is a great time to take care of those projects that are kind of pesky, naggy ones that you need to get off your plate but never get around to when you're really busy getting your website updated. If you have any logo or signage projects that you're wanting to work on, getting your brand new sale advertising book, you're getting your social media stuff kind of planned out and in line. For many of us, fall lambing isn't far away, fall show season isn't far away, and pretty soon, before you know it, it'll be Louisville. If there's anything we can help you with at Novel Designs, be sure to reach out to us. You can find our information on championdrive.com let's go right into the first segment of the roundtable discussion. These guys are a great source of knowledge and I hope you find it valuable. Here's segment one of our three part series on barn renovations. I hope you enjoy today. I'm really excited. We have Jake Warez, Brian Riley, Chad Charmerson and Cody Schminke joining us today for our Barn Renovations podcast. Tell us a little bit about your operation, where you're located, type of barns, barn size, how many ewes you run. Let's start with that.
- [05:27]
D
Yeah.
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E
Yeah. So my name is Jake Warntjes and my wife Taylor and our daughter Win and I operate Warrentia Sheep Company. We're based out of Mulhall, Oklahoma, kind of on a small and fairly new scale. Grew up raising sheep all my life, but we've recently, in the last couple years just ventured off to do our own thing. And so we run about 40 mature blackface ewes and then we'll lamb a set of resips as well this year and have a handful of U lambs that we kept back from last year. So we'll end up lambing about 60 ewes this year. And we currently are in the process of, like I said, kind of growing our operation. So we built a new barn last year and so we'll kind of come at it from a different aspect of not necessarily renovations, but you know, things maybe we would have done different. We currently have an 80 by 80 that we have U runs built out of. Those U's can go in and out of. They're in 20 by 80 runs in a dry lot scenario. And the main purpose behind that is because we have not fenced our entire property yet. But past that they're kind of in a dry lot scenario. We lamb everything in that same barn. We've got a couple different barns that over the next few years we will, you know, renovate and get to be able to run other sheep in in separate barns that were already on the property when we bought it. But that's kind of the, the basis of our deal. We do some IVF and ET and then we'll have a set of AIUs as well. But everything's right there in Mulhall and like I said, just kind of on our way to grow this thing and see what we can make out of it.
- [07:13]
D
So I'm Brian riley, my wife JC and I own and operate Impact Camps in Shelsburg, Wisconsin. We've been at it for 30 plus years. Our son's workforce for the last 10 years full time. We would, we would Lamb right at around 300 ewes. Combination of, they're all HAMP based. But a third of those would be recips a little bit better than a third. So 100, 120 of those are recips. So we would flush 24 to 26 donors a year. No IVF yet. We would have new ish facilities. Although we've been here for 20 years. This, this would be the third time we've set a sheet place up. The other two are all renovated with old facilities. This one here we would have 80 by 200 foot building that we do most of our work in. But we'd also have several other buildings, 50 by 120, 50 by 80 that we run sheep in. Then we'd have a couple more for, for feed for bedding and hay. So yeah, we've been at it a long time and seen a lot of different things. There's things we've spent money on I wish we wouldn't have that we can get into later. And we're always looking to change or add and improve on things.
- [08:54]
B
Do you have pasture where you're at?
- [08:56]
D
We do. We have about 120 acres of pasture but it's completely underutilized in today. The way we manage the use today with all the AI and embryo work we do, we just, we don't. They're. They're on pasture till about mid June and then after that we hardly use them. So then they're all dry lotted and we have fence line feeding that we, that we can feed use with. We use a TMR wagon where we grind hay and feed and fence lines that way in the summer.
- [09:27]
A
Cody Schmincke, me, my wife Taylor and my mom and dad reside here in Van Horn, Iowa, east central Iowa. Mom and dad have been doing it for 30 plus years like Brian said. I actually came back to the operation in on and off time frame while I still sold iron. I'm back at the farm now full time and our, you know, our area is a lot like Brian's. It goes all the way down to negative 20 to 100 degrees and 80% humidity. So most of our facilities are all heated and enclosed. The big Barn up tops 54 by I think it's 320 now. We added on an AI ET facility into that. Then bunch of other miscellaneous buildings that we've done different renovations through over the years. We can get into that. There's 50 by 80s, 80 by 1/4 that all. I have hay storage and then there's different ones here at my House also there'd be about 300 plus ewes running around. Only by about 50 or 60 of them are actually resibs. And we don't really have any pasture. Everything on here would be all dry lotted. Everything here is good enough that we row, crop it and then have some pasture, make hay there on our farms that got ponds on them.
- [10:51]
B
So Chad, would you like to go next?
- [10:54]
F
Sure. So Amy, my wife Amy and I have been living here in Hennessy for I guess going on 16, 17 years now. And we kind of started our deal years ago, I guess before Amy and I actually got married, kind of operating with another family than whenever I was an ag teacher at Elgin. And so it was very, very small flock. In fact, Brian is very familiar with how we got started. He helped us out a bunch my, myself and with the Tate family and Turner family down there whenever we were raising those sheep. And so it kind of evolved from that. And then when Amy and I got married, we moved to Hennessy and moved all the use to Hennessy from various locations that we had them at. We kind of pawned them off on several folks, Brian included at one time. And so when we got to Hennessy we, we started from ground zero. There was absolutely nothing here but wheat pasture. And so we kind of just, we had that opportunity for us to look at the layout and figure out what was going to work in terms of a barn for, for ourselves. And we have added on to that and done some changing over, over the years as well. But it was, it was good for us. It was expensive, obviously having to start from scratch, but it was nice for us to have a clean slate and do what I wanted to do as far as starting a barn and building, building that operation. So I make, I poke fun at myself a lot of times because I have a lot of different barn drawings and people always ask me, you know, what do you have for this scenario or that scenario? And that's pretty much what I did through college classes is I would, I'd draw barns and different layouts of different stuff instead of paying a lick of attention to any kind of lecture. So it was a scenario there where it was nice that when I said whenever we got here, we bought 28, 20, like 28 acres from Amy's grand grandfather and started started there. We run those ewes on pasture so we have the opportunity to. We fertilize and do a lot of work on our pastures. As far as grass is concerned. We sprigged this thing like three or four times starting out about 10 years ago, keep fertilizing that. And our grass pasture at this current time is very, very good. So we have that luxury of running those ewes on grass all through the spring, through the summer. We're going to be fortunate enough this year. We're going to have those things on pasture all the way through the fall as well. The barn that we started with was basically a 60 by 100. Since then we've added on another 60 by 100. We have access to all pastures off of that barn. So that is one advantage there, that each pen can go to a different, different paddock, so to speak. And we're running close to. Whereas I give or take 2 to 250 generally throughout the year, if you include the upcoming Keeper U lambs and that sort of thing. We've started kind of downsizing. We're doing a lot more embryo work through ivf and in fact our conventional flushes have actually gotten considerably smaller than what we were doing initially just because we have the opportunity to do some IVF work. And so with that our numbers are a little, are getting smaller in terms of overall flock size. Let's. As you all have probably figured out, or some will figure out, that as kids get older and more and more activities and that sort of thing, you, you find yourself strung pretty thin at times. So keeping our numbers in check has been kind of a priority for Amy and I here recently.
- [14:55]
B
I know Chad and Jake, you said you both started building kind of from a fresh or blank slate. I know Brian, Brian does not live all that far from me. And I remember the old place where Brian used to live at. I've been to Schmincke's and I know farm is always kind of evolving. So let's talk about what type of buildings did you start with and what modifications did you make and why? What was the priority to you either when you started building from scratch or when you started modifying? How did you prioritize what modifications decisions to make?
- [15:28]
E
This is. Jake and I can, I can start on that. So when we bought our place, we bought 15 acres there in Mulhall and it had an existing shop that we actually turned part of that into like a barndominium living quarter. So that that was our first place as a place for, for us to live. And then outside of that it just had an old metal barn that has ended up being been turned into our hay barn or hay and straw barn and so wasn't really suited for sheep. So when we decided we were going to do this, we started from Scratch and, and simply just because it was kind of what made sense. And like Chad said, you know, it's expensive. Like I highly suggest, if you've got a barn that can be modified to raise sheep, start doing that. But it is nice because you can start from scratch, you can design it exactly like you want. So what we did is we built a post frame building that was kind of what fit our budget best. And, and it's 60 by 80 enclosed with a 20 foot lean to on the south side. And it's got sliding doors on the, the south side. So we can open everything up. We've got overhead doors on the east and west and, and we can open that thing up or we can tuck it up tight and, and close it up tight in the wintertime. But just honestly, what went through my mind was visiting all these farms, looking at sheep over the years. You know, spent a lot of time at Chad's over the last couple of years and saw how that barn was designed and laid out. My brother had built the barn a couple of years prior, so picked his brain a lot on what he would have done different, how he would have set things up. And 100 can confirm. If you're interested in building a barn, text Chad, because he will send you actual blueprints on every barn he's ever built because he keeps those handy. So was a lot of picking people's brains. It was a lot of, you know, knowing what we liked when we went and looked at sheep, what worked and that that's what worked for us. I already have things I would do different and we can get into that later. And I will tell you, everyone I talked to said, build it as big as you can afford. And we're a year and a half in and I think we're already planning on trying to figure out how to add on to this barn because you end up filling it up and you're going to want to build it even bigger once you get it filled up. So that's my suggestion is build as big as you can afford and eventually you're probably going to add on or renovate or do something as you go down the line.
- [18:07]
D
This is Brian. I would duplicate what, what Jake said there is. Build it as big as you can. But some of the other things that from a. Just a basic level that, you know, we thought were must haves when we renovated andor built. And this comes back from me growing up in Wisconsin, where it does get really cold in the winter. We never had automatic waters when I was a kid. We Ran about a hundred cows. We lambed about 80 ewes and ferroed hogs. And we drug a hose around everywhere to water everything and had to bring it inside at night so it didn't freeze, take it back out the next morning. So number one was I wanted automatic waters everywhere. Number two is ventilation. We've always, I think that's probably for me being a kid growing up with hogs, always, always had good ventilation, exhaust fans in every facility we've ever been in. And then when I really made the big bucks with sheep, the, the thing I really wanted was having hot water in the barn and us in a spot for, for that. So that's just from a basic level. We've grown into a lot more than that now. But starting out, those were things that were just basic must haves for us.
- [19:29]
B
Can you talk a little bit about your previous place where you and J.C. lived before the place you're at now? My reason for asking on that is that was an older barn that you kind of retrofitted stuff for, correct?
- [19:41]
D
Yep, yep. It was an old dairy barn. I don't even know what you would call those things. There's a certain style for those. But it's an old dairy barn that we gutted. That place had that, that barn and then another pole shed behind it. It was pretty small pole shed, about a 40 by 60. And this would have been the second place we, we lived the first place when we first started sheep in the, in the early 90s when we bought out Dave Anishut. We started out in a 24 by 24 foot farrowing house that we gutted and bought four Quonset buildings for 100 bucks a piece. And so that's where we started with our 60 ewes. We were there for a couple years and then moved to Shelsburg and bought this old, old dairy barn and had a pole shed on it and another very small, small building. And the very first thing we did when we moved there is we did dig water lines everywhere and put automatic waters in and every pen we could do. Pen size in the pole barn is probably exactly the same then as what we have now, although we have a little bit bigger. We would size all the pens for about 15 to 18 using lambs. That's what works best for us and was at that facility too. So we gutted the old dairy barn and we put a wall, a cheap wall down the middle of that thing and we cut a hole in the side. It had concrete walls all the way around it so you couldn't get a skid steer in it. Me and a friend cut holes, cut a big hole in that barn, framed it up so we could get a skid steer in and out on one side of it. The other side of it we set up with lambing jugs, which we would pitch those out by hand. We still do that today too, after every U. And then that one had what anybody that's in the Midwest or in dairy country, they would know what a milk house is. So milk house is just a small, usually 12 by 12, 10 by 10 room that's usually heated. That one was not heated, but didn't need to be. It was kind of built into the ground. But we were able to put hot water in there too. So I was in heaven at that old facility and, and what we have now is considerably different than that.
- [22:07]
B
Great. Chad, do you want to talk about your types of buildings you started with or how you, you know, your modifications you made and how you kind of decided to build in your prioritization of that.
- [22:19]
F
So when we started there in before Amy and I actually, but when we started there in Elgin, Apache, Oklahoma, we literally were operating out of a lean to, just a three sided lean to that was. Had some kind of asbestos on it. I don't even know. It was awful in a garage and we worked out of that and it was, it was pretty much a shanty. There's not anything fancy about it. But I can say that as we progressed and got bigger and we moved to Hennessy, you know, like I said, we were able to kind of start from scratch. But the one thing that I, I wanted and have and noticed over the years is the, the direction that you can actually set these barns up and the way ours is, is opening up entirely to the east has been, has been ideal. We'll get morning sun, in the afternoon, the heat of the day, everything is covered and there's more shade on the east side of that, of that barn. So there are times we're going to be dry a lot in those things and they're necessarily going to be able to go out to pasture. And so you want, you know, some as much shade as possible, especially this time of year when you're breeding these things. The ventilation itself has been a big thing for me. I've been in so many barns over the years that when you walk in it literally just burns your eyes and your nose and not having good ventilation regardless of what time of year it is. But more so even in the wintertime, not being ventilated, we put A giant exhaust fans on every one of our buildings here. Obviously the, the main U barn as we're discussing, I guess breeding barn, U barn, however you want to word it is, is the one that is 60 by 200 plus another 20 foot lean to. And we've got a big fan and big, big exhaust fan that sits on the south side of that building and it pulls everything from, from the north all the way through. As we, you know, as far as any kind of renovations that we've done since then, when we started, we just threw up some panels and pins until I could kind of figure out what I wanted best on the layout. Pouring concrete and having some concrete area was a must. I thought I could get by without it. And year one I'd had enough. And so we poured some concrete and got that set up where it's just easier to clean. It's not necessarily ideal in, in all scenarios, but from a Clint cleaning standpoint, and I'm very, very ocd, as most of you can attest to, and, and I want to be able to clean it as best as I possibly can. So the renovations that we might have done initially after, after we got in it and used it for a year was adding some concrete as well as putting our chute inside the barn where you could access all pins from the front of it. You know, it can, you can direct those use coming through the chute one way or the other. But putting that shoot inside, I can, I can tell you that first year or two, whenever we working use out in the Winter and giving LA 200 shots and doing that stuff anywhere from November to November on, we've had LA200 literally freeze up in syringes trying to give it whenever you're out in the middle of, in the wintertime at our place. And so moving that chute inside and putting it on concrete was a must. Most of our renovations that we've done, I've tried to do them all in one whack. Like if I decided I was going to pour concrete, we did it everywhere. I wanted to put it when we added on the extra hundred by 60 by 100 onto that barn, we did put in kind of a surgery room. And so there's more concreted area there too. But my suggestion on most people want to do this is figure out your flow. Like what's, what's going to work and what's going to. As far as those, whenever you are either building from scratch or making renovations, just how it's going to flow. We hand watered everything for first Couple of years. And that was the one thing that if I was going to plan on getting Amy back to the barn ever, I had to get in some automatic waters. I like the idea of, you know, that fresh water for those things and I just soon clean an automatic water, then have to deal with dumping water and figure out places to dump water where you're not putting in your bedding. And Amy certainly appreciated the fact that we had automatic waters. We don't have to deal with as much cold, cold weather. There'll be a time or two whenever we have to, you know, put some form of heat system on our automatic waters. But generally we are able to keep those things flowing. We don't have to have heated automatic waters here at least. But between the concrete and automatic water and moving a chute inside where it's feasible to work out of and out of the elements was our biggest thing that we ended up doing after the initial barn was built.
- [27:14]
B
Cody, what about you?
- [27:17]
A
Yeah, I can just talk to what mom and dad did when I was young. I can remember the old hog house that we used to call it and shoot, we used to do everything in there. They would open up the one end of it and that's where we drop babies at and that's where we would jug and do the whole nine yards at. And that was their biggest goal was to have a heated spot when we're having babies. When we were starting all the, all everything else that went after that was a cold facility. And we, you know, renovated some Morton space or where the hay was stored. That's where the ewes would run and the babies would be at. And they. We're very. My dad is a very frugal individual and does not like to spend money. And so we have to figure out a way to benefit that for both sides of the operation. So a lot of our buildings are multi purpose driven. Sometimes of the year they're for sheep and sometimes the year they're for swine. And we do a lot of changeover of buildings and there's a lot of facilities, but they do a lot of different things as I mean our jug barns, that's also where we sell baby pigs. So we tear it down and we put pigs. And then where my kids have their barn is also half of the jug barn that we added on to one building. So we do a lot of different things where we can utilize them year round. And now granted they're, you know, like the big barn up top, that's, that's sheep all the time. And there's a building built in my house that's got two acres of concrete behind it used to be a cattle feed yard. We run sheep on that with open feeding on that all the time too. Now that we came or that I've came back, we build a show pig barn. I've got it. The shops all at my house now. So we're trying to get it to where it's easier for everyone. Especially for the hired help and the kiddos are getting involved in it. So a lot of those things trying to go that way and that route with it now. But I mean the big thing, ventilation. I can. I'm with everyone on that. That is full key. And I spent a lot of time doing that in some other buildings. But I think that's one thing I'd always look at the ability to heat things if that money is allowed there. And find. Find your. Find your Achilles heel and. And put your money there and. And allow it to grow and prosper. You can always add on. I think mom and dad built that first building 15 years ago. We added onto it for stinking times. So you can always keep adding on to them also.
- [30:03]
B
Yeah, I think your place is really interesting because you do have multiple species. And that was one of the main reasons I want to have someone from your group on. Just because your buildings transition so much. Which that's something that's important here sometimes. Our lambing barn we only lambda three groups a year. So the rest of the year that barn has to be something else. Maybe it's a show barn. Maybe it's where we AI et cetera. And so I thought it was really interesting how much your buildings have to change purposes throughout the year. Do you take anything into consideration in terms of like because they have to be multi species or dual purpose. Do you take anything special into consideration for those when you're building those or renovating them?
- [30:44]
A
Yeah. So we always use plywood down low so we got the ability to screw something into the wall. They're not tinned all the way to the floor. We'll send them halfway down. So if we need to put a pig pen in or put a V panel in for the sheep. The drain. So like all the ones now, the drain all drain one end. They don't just drain to you know the whole alleyway. They actually drain. The concrete's all designed to go to one spot. Everything now we do is brush concrete. We don't finish anything anymore. Water lines. Multi purposeful. We just put a hydrant in now. And my brother in law is a master plumber. So we can, we can run water wherever we need to. And sometimes it's not the best looking things but it, it allows us to use them in. In lots of different ways.
- [31:38]
B
Great. Let's go into just general barn setup and this can either be how your pens are set up or just in general. If you were going to give someone advice for how you would set it up, what is your guys's preferred pen size? And I would say this would be more for like either used with babies or maybe this time of year when you're running used with bucks or AI groups or donors. I guess. What, what do you suggest pen size wise for our listeners?
- [32:05]
F
This is Chad. So I ideally I think Brian kind of highlight or kind of hinted on it I guess earlier about number of views you're putting per pin. You know, I think the biggest thing for us is not to overcrowd per pin. Now as your numbers grow and you and you don't build on or add more barn space, you can get a little overcrowded. Most of our pin sizes for and we've got eight different, eight different pins all through this barn. We're setting about like a 20 by 40 pin. Most of most all of that from a bunk space. We can feed 25 pretty comfortably in those bunks. I would like to keep those numbers down to where you're like 1520 would be ideal. But if we are in a situation where I got to put 25 ewes and babies in there, then we can go 25 pretty comfortably. There's been a time or two in larger groups and I've got one or two use that's going to go over the. The max amount that I'd like to be in that pin. We might have 28, 30 in there, but I would prefer to keep it at least 25 or less. You know, as far as all of our bunks we went through them. But that's one of the renovations we did do A couple years ago we had a lot of ketchums that I bought secondhand actually from D Brothers whenever they renovated a barn and I bought all their ketchum stuff. And since then we renovated some ourselves and we do all Rivera fence line feeders and in our barns. Now that's been a lot less space that you're taking up from a. From a pinning standpoint. I like the idea for us that has not. It's. It eliminated some visibility issues with those ketchums feeders that we had. At one point whenever you're running cameras or Even just stepping out of the office to see what's laminar whatnot they can, they can hide from you pretty easy with these. You can look out there and see everything straight across from one end of the barn to the other and nothing's really hiding out from you with that. Most of those as far as like we still try to set those creep pins up in that, in each one of those and those creep ins become dual purpose for us throughout the year. But they're about a 10 by 15 they are up at the front. So you can access those from, from, from the alleyway at the front, gather those things up. I like having those creeps up at the front because if I'm walking through there and sheep I can see stuff if baby lamb's in there, if they're in there eating as a and they're opened up, I mean there's paneling but you can see all the way around it on our, on our creep pens, you know, it's biggest thing is like for us as far as on the preferred pin size back to the fact that as long as you don't overcrowd those things, I think those sheep stay healthier. And so alleyway fairly minimal. But as far as outside of that particular 20 by 40 area, we've got another 20 foot of lean to and then another 60 or 80ft of runs all the way out to the. Where we have an alleyway set up for that go out to our pastures and so lots of space for those used to come and go. All of our feeding itself is done inside. If we're, if we're feeding grain, it's going to be done inside those fence line feeders. In our scenario, we feed all the hay out. It's just past the lean to. It's easier to get in there and put hay out. From that standpoint, we're not having to enclose those sheep all the time at our place. I mean they can come and go pretty good for the most part. When it's really cold, obviously we shut them up and we'll hand feed hay. But most of the time everything's other than grain being inside. All hay and stuff is outside. It seemed for us to be able to keep it a little cleaner all throughout the breeding season or not breeding season, lambing season, we're not having to bed as much or we're not having to clean that bedding out as much. If we don't have hay sitting in the middle of the pens.
- [36:24]
E
This is Jake. I can kind of jump in on that, so we're, we're set up very similarly to Chad's barn, just maybe a little on a smaller scale. I think one advantage that we have of being a rather small operation is like these guys have said, like, overcrowding I think becomes an issue when you start talking about health and whatnot. You're trying to figure out where to put, where to put ewes with babies. And so we've tried really hard to set up to where we're not going to be overcrowded. So we'll put the whole north side of our barn. There's about a 20 by 60 drop pen that we end up setting jugs in. But we'll, we'll move that close group in there and then we've got probably 20 by 30 pins inside that go out into into runs. Similar like to Chad was saying, we feed all of our hay outside. Um, we've got Rivera fence line feeders. Say that was one of the best investments we've made is setting up those U runs with those fence line feeders. Like Chad was saying, just from an ease standpoint of being able to, to feed those use when you are feeding grain and you're not having to fight them. They're, you know, you know, when things are coming to the bunk, you can see everything easy enough. So we're set up very similarly. Um, I would hit on what he said earlier. We kept our barn pretty, pretty manageable in terms of nothing right now, since it's not even two years old, is very permanent and I've changed things all the time. Like that drop pen area right now there's a set of keeper ulams are feeding on in there. So that kind of changes. If we needed to change our U runs, it would take me and, you know, a couple kids that, that work for us every now and then a.
- [38:22]
A
Day to do it.
- [38:23]
E
We didn't go just immediately build a bunch of pipe pens and make everything permanent because just when you think you've got it figured out, your flow changes or, or you notice something that just isn't working for you and, and you want to change it up. And so I'm sure eventually we'll get it figured out to where we can build some pipe pins and those U runs and whatnot. But right now things are, are pretty, pretty changeable and, and not, you know, just to do a complete product plug. But like those Rivera products are so easy to make. Everything just fit together between the front panels and the, the fence line feeders just make everything setting up very easy so that's we're pretty similar from that standpoint. We put all our creep pins at the front of those U runs. They're 10 by 10. We try to in those size pens. Like I said, we're pretty fortunate having small numbers because we can spread things out. Last year we didn't get over about 10 ewes with babies, depending on how, you know, how many twins or singles we had 10 use with babies in each one of those U pens. And those things, I mean, they just thrived. They had plenty of room, plenty of bunk space. Even when we got super cold for a couple weeks there in January, we'd push everything in and shut them in and nothing was overcrowded. Everything stayed pretty healthy, knock on wood. We didn't have, you know, a bunch of issues as far as lamb health or U health went. And so I think just not overcrowding if you have the ability to is key. Now this year we're lamin probably twice as many used and things are going to get a little bit, a little bit more crowded. And that's why we've already started talking about how the heck we're going to add on to our barn. So growing pains. But at the same time, I think overcrowding is just the, the main thing that we've really tried to avoid and try to keep those, those ewes and babies with enough space to be able to stay healthy.
- [40:22]
D
This is. Brian, I'll jump in there too. When you talk about overcrowding, I said before that, you know, we run like 15 to 20 use per penny. So what we try to do to put a number to that is our ewes and lambs and the pens we put our ewes and lambs in, we would do one ewe and lamb per 50 square foot of pen. So our pens are 27. They're either 24 wide or 27 wide, depending on the building, because we go off of our poles because they're 8 foot on center, 9 foot on center, and then our pens are 34 foot deep. So depending on the pen at 50 square feet, that's what we get for using lambs in there. And then our creep pens are a little bit bigger than Chad and Jake referenced. So our creep pens, which would add to the square footage, Obviously those are 10 foot wide by 24, 27, depending on the width of the, of the big pension. And we would have 10 of those pens that we would have ewes and lambs in there. And we run three separate groups through there. We do a December, a January and then a February, March group that we would run through there. So from a square footage standpoint that's what we do on those.
- [41:47]
A
This is Cody. Just talk what everybody else is saying. Ours is all set up the same. Ours would be 22 foot wide by 40 some deep. And the creeps are all set up in the front. A little different here. We have to feed hay inside just with winter time and the snow load and everything. So we do bed we bet every other day when the middle of wintertime. So it's all hands on deck with 14 bays I think that's laying up there. So we, we do have hay. We built all of our feed bunks so we do the walk through line feeders. Dinner for a 4H project when I was young and now we just made them wider so it's easier to walk down them. But ours are all built just a wood two by four frame and walk down them and they're the whole length of the pens so we get plenty of room for them sheep to spread out. And then we made made hay bunks at big square bales. We just bring them to skid loaders and set them in and and bed in between them. So we just got to have everything under a roof, you know for wintertime setup.
- [42:52]
B
Let's talk lighting and electric. Any suggestions on what you recommend or the do's and don'ts?
- [42:58]
F
This is Chad again. As far as lighting is concerned, the absolute most lighting you can have is ideal. The older I get, the less I can see in these dark barns. And I've been in several barns over the years when I was younger and didn't seem to bother me. But the better the lighting the better the whole scenario is going to be. We know part of our barn and one renovation that has got to happen. And when Amy hears this podcast she's probably going to frown. But we've got to change some lighting in one than the original part of this barn, the old traditional like the fluorescent bulbs. And as they've started to, you know, just this past year we've been in this, this part of the barn for 12 years now I guess and they're just now starting to kind of burn out. Obviously we don't leave them on all the time. So they're starting to burn out some and we're going to try to change out some of those lighting. Some type of LED light is going to be the most feasible. Especially things have changed over the years. But do as much as you can electric wise one of the one one thing that I was pretty hell Bent on whenever we started was dropping cords and having electric wherever I can possibly get it. We've revamped our breaker box a couple different times to add, add more and be able to get more, more electricity in the barn. You'll never, you never can have enough places to plug something in. And like I said, we don't run autumn. Our automatic waters are not he. But we have access to plugs around the or close to those automatic waters to where if I need to drop in like a bird bath heater for, you know, keep them from freezing, I can set the, I can plug those in and run them in the side of those automatic Richie Waters we have. And, and it, and it works really, really good for us. Any type of. When you start talking about electric and lighting, I think more is certainly better in this scenario.
- [45:01]
E
Yeah, this is Jake. So what we did is we did high bay LED lights in the barn and there's a lot of them. But one of my goals was I didn't want people, if they were coming to look at babies and it was, you know, dark, I didn't want them to struggle looking at those things. I wanted to be able to turn on the lights and it'd be easy to see what's going on, easy to look at the sheep, not have to worry about that. So we, we've got high bay LED lights that run east to west. Each bay essentially of the barn is on a switch. So like when we're laming, I can shut off all but one bay of lights and I think those use settle down a little bit more when it's not, you know, like it's daylight in that barn. So I've got all those on switches. There's, there's four different bays of lights so we can shut, shut off or turn off whatever we need to. And then we put big LED floodlights out on the lean to so that I can flip that on at night and if there's something, you know, if you hear something running or the guard dogs are going crazy, you can flip on those, those floodlights and it, I mean you could play an NFL Monday Night Football game out there. Those things are very, very bright. And those are honestly, they're, they're a higher end brand. But we ordered them off Amazon. Our electrician installed them, but we ordered them off Amazon. They've been great. So it's not like we, we went crazy with a bunch of commercial lighting, but it works very, very well. And then we also put like some dust to dawn lights on the outside of the Barn just to make sure if you need to back up a trailer or something, kind of know where the overhead doors are, things like that. But I would also reiterate what Chad said. If you think you might need a plug somewhere, put a plug somewhere. They are not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. If you're building something or, or you're renovating a barn, plugs are on the cheap side. So put them wherever you might think. We've got a plug or multiple plugs above every single U run so we can drop heat lamps into the creep pens. We've got multiple 30amp plugs so we can run blowers and turbo fans, things like that. And then we've also. One thing we did is in our, our lambing jug area we've got a drop cord that splits where two jugs will come together so we can hang those, we can hang heat lamps and they just plug right into that drop cord. We're not having to run a bunch of, a bunch of extension cords anywhere to those heat lamps because we'll put a heat lamp in every single jug. And just a little tip that we really like is all of those are on switches as well and so I can turn those off without having to go through and unplug heat lamps. So my, my heat lamps are on switches and that, that certainly makes life easier.
- [48:16]
D
This is Brian. We did go through a couple years ago and we did put in all LEDs. We had fluorescence in before that and just old traditional screw in light bulbs before that. So we've kind of upgraded over the years as different things have become available. Our electric, when we started, our electric service wasn't near big enough. We've added on so many times that our electric is an absolute mess around here now. But we make it work because now we have five different panels. So I guess starting out, when they talk about electric service, you just want to make sure you have the biggest electric service you can have to start with. It really makes things better later on if you do have any aspirations of growing. If you're going to stay at a certain size and you know it's just a hobby, then you don't have to worry about it. But bigger the better on electric service for sure. And we do have to have electric to all of our waters here as Chad knows he's been here. And Cody too, just being where he's at. And Stevie, you'd know, I mean there's times in the winter here where you just absolutely can't get, couldn't get by without having heated waters, if you have automatic waters. So yeah, so our electric, I can't speak to too much to it because ours is a mess. If somebody really went through because we've added on so many times this Cody.
- [49:47]
A
I'd agree with everybody saying every barn now that we do just because we have to have all the waters plugged in. Actually kid I grew up with is our electrician. Every Barn has a 200amp service and then the biggest freaking panel you can put in it because like everybody's talked, you gotta add on and keep going with it. That's what I would do from the get go because then you're never gonna have to drop another line in or increase your wire size, do 200amp service and you're gonna, you're gonna be able to do whatever your heart desires. Lighting wise. Pretty much everybody on the call has been to our big barn. It could use some new lights. So my stuff in my house is bright because I like light. But we could use some new updating on some lights. So I'm in that boat, have as many lights as humanly possible.
- [50:35]
B
I always tell the electrician that works here when I was explaining it needs to be bright. He's like, well, how bright? I'm like, we need to be able to land planes in here. I don't want anyone to come in here and not be able to see sheep at any time of the night. I kind of was giggling when you guys were talking about the electric, about Brian, your electric being a mess. Ours is kind of the same way. I feel every time our electrician's here, I'm always telling Jason like, hey, while he's here, have him put an outlet here or have him put an outlet there. And it seems like it never ends. And we're the same. We've added on and have multiple panels now and the panels are as full as they can get and you just keep adding on. So yeah, start bigger for sure. Do you guys have anything you want to add in terms of gating at all?
- [51:15]
F
This is Chad on As far as just regular gates functionality where they can, you know, run both ways. We've got places where, you know, the gates don't necessarily, whenever you open them may not extend all the way to the next wall or the next fence. And that is something that probably frustrates me more than anything is always having to. If I need to run a group of used to here, I want to be able to swing that gate open and it blocks the place. They don't need to be at and it turns them into where they need to as opposed to going and grabbing a panel or a couple of panels and setting it up to block those holes. So the functionality part of gates I think is, is very important. Another thing I would, I would suggest, you know, most all of our, most all of our gates are homemade and obviously not homemade by Chad. He does not weld at all. But we have a guy that comes and does that stuff for us. And so most of it's homemade but you can see through them. As opposed to solid panel gates, we've got a few Ketchums original gates, four foot gates and a couple of five foot gates that, that we've acquired whenever we bought that equipment out. But I like the idea of being able to see through those gates and just using regular four by four square panels to be able to do that. As Jake was talking about, everything's kind of movable at his facility. And that's how obviously we started out as well. But as, as time has went on, we've piped everything and figured out exactly how we want it. With the exception of my biggest pet peeve is we did not make some of the gates wide enough or where they block out where you don't want the use to be going or babies to be going when you're running them from one spot to the next.
- [53:01]
E
This is Jake. The place that I thought about when I read that question, Steva, was Vince McGolden's place when they were raising sheep. Like every gate like Chad said, swung and could latch to shut off an alley or a pin wherever it needed to go. And like ideally if someone could, could make it work with their design in their barn. Like I always thought that was so, so slick that each gate basically had two different latches because you could swing it open the block and alley or open a pen or whatever it needed to be. And I always, always really like that. And that's something that like Chad was saying if you could make, make that work, it makes life a whole lot easier than having to break out V panels and set them up and you know, wire stuff up in a pinch, things like that.
- [53:50]
D
I have pretty much all custom built gates. I, I do weld and you know, we've, we've got gates everywhere for moving sheep. They, to Chad's point and Jake's point, they don't necessarily, when we open a gate, go right to where we want. But you know, we have a gate for every purpose. I don't think there's any one that's better than Another on the commercial ones, I mean we have catch them gates too. But all of our pens are all custom custom made pens here to be the same.
- [54:24]
A
They're all custom built over there. The, the runs all at my place and now around my place would be the lock together galvanized tubing. I started using those instead of putting wire panels up so they can. Sheep can eat through them and eat the backside and not get their head stuck. So started using them more. Yeah, they're kind of expensive, but they work well and they don't don't have to be painted. I know the one thing we did in our barn, it all runs to the be to the west where everything comes out and they all swing. Yeah, they don't swing the right way sometimes. The AI facilities on the north and the chutes on the south. But we lined that that year. Forget when it was, it was a, it was a pain in the butt to run sheep down that alleyway when it was all open. And you know there have been professors talk about it. We line it up so that she can't see and man, you can easily run them things down the alleyway now and just run right in the chute and, and no big deal. So can't see through it. And this it is where the babies are. But if you're tall enough you can see over it. But that really helped with moving stock and not getting your butt whooped all the time.
- [55:29]
B
Let's talk a little bit about do you have a chute and what is the layout like? Cody, you just touched on that. But what about the other guys? What is your shoot system like?
- [55:38]
D
This is Brian. We have two old Townsend shoot systems that we can put, you know, extend the alley as long as we want in there because we have two sites, one here where we live and then one across the road. So we have a shoot system on each side and we've had one of them for almost 30 years. They do work well. I looked at one of the automated ones here two years ago. Spent a lot of time looking into. Into one of those that has a self catch and the self sort and all those kind of things. And the more I looked into that, the more I didn't think it was going to work for us. Although I, I love the idea of the self catch and the auto sort and whatnot. But when we're sort and use and working use which we use that thing all the time. It's. It's kind of on the fly sorting. You know, we might have a plan that they're going to go one way, and we decide to go another way. And that auto sorting, like, it just won't work for us. So we just have the old Townsend that are. That are even. I don't even think that company's in business anymore. But the tub is sized right, and they go down the alley really good. So that's what we use.
- [57:03]
F
This is Chad. Ours has been kind of revamped a couple of different times. Our first initial shoot was homemade, thrown up with some solid panels, catching panels. But prior to Kim passing away and catching is kind of slowing way down. Luckily we were able to get a shoot system, the front part of it, I guess, shoot system from there. And I love it. It works good in our scenario. It's not bulky. Even myself, I've seen a lot of those automated ones and. And have been intrigued by them. But I'm kind of like Brian and our. Where our situation is and our. And where we want that shoot to be, it would not function for us, make things a lot easier, for sure. But I'm kind of like Brian on. On the sort. It could be sorting on the fly. Like I decided, all right, they don't need to go to this pin. They need to go to a different pin. We use that shoot a lot. Whether running any. Any type of sorting things out, babies or used for that matter, it's used all the time. And we set it up kind of where it's basically right in the dead center of the. The barn. So in that 200 foot, we're sitting there with the. With that chute in the center of. At 100ft, you can access the back side of that from any angle. As far as getting used, driven, you know, from the alleyway that we have set up. At the end of each run, they're going to have to come into a specific pin, as we call pin five. It'll have to come into that pin to get to the chute, but it's pretty easy. And then we can sort off the front wherever we need to go and close off this pin or that pin or whatever to get those used in. When we start using the different pens. It's kind of a fiasco for us around here in that scenario. Just because I'll be yelling at one of the boys on one end of the barn. This goes in pin one, or these go in pin two. And we may be sorting them out as far as from breeding standpoint, where I'm going to put those and then yell at another one of them at the other end of the Barn they need to go this way or that way. So it's the shoot deal is ideal. Like I said, I like our setup and where we moved it since we moved it inside. The outside shoot was brutal. But having that ketchums on the inside has been. Has been really nice.
- [59:16]
E
This is Jake. Yeah. We'd be the odd man out just because oh year one there's. There's only so many expenses you can handle. But a shoot is at the top of our shopping list this year. I can tell you that much from a standpoint of just ease. But we don't have one right now. What we do and it works. It's not the easiest, but it works. It's kind of like a messed up game of Tetris trying to sort stuff around. But we'll leave those creep pens set up in those U runs and they're easy enough and, and those U's are easy going enough. We can push them into those creep pens to crowd them if we need to give shots and. And you know, kick them out one by one if we need to do that and sort. So it's not the easiest but it does work. So you know, we don't have a chute but it definitely makes life easier. Especially you know, if you're just solo trying to do stuff like that. Shoots, you know, like I said, at the top of our shopping list. But for now just running them into those pens and crowding them works well when we don't have babies on the ground. When we do, we'll push all the babies in the creep so that nothing's getting run over and then we'll just crowd those ewes with a couple V panels or something like that and. And make sure we can sort on them that way. But we, we make do with it right now. But the, the working facilities I'd say are going to be worth every penny.
- [60:42]
A
Yeah. Ours is a catch and shoot also set up inside. We actually use it as Bay 1's gate system. So they all the alleyways, all concrete and everything runs runs to the south. And we do all of our Cedars shots. The use. We've. We've trained them. We actually run them through the chutes. Not even doing anything. Just making sure they know how to flow because we got a lot of different things going on. So there's a lot of times it's somebody by themselves doing it and they just know to run down there and yeah catch them. Shoot. Works great. It shoot. I remember when mom and dad bought it and I wasn't very old. It's been outside, it's been inside, it's been all over the place. But it actually is tied into Bay. Bay 1 is actually used as the pen and then our one of our heated areas is over there where it's got all the medicine and everything in it and just run through, knock everything out and run them back to their pen.
- [61:44]
B
I know the chute was one of the things I struggled the most with. I bought one at Sedalia and I kind of had an idea where it was going to go and I didn't realize how much of my barn it was going to take up. And so I ended up losing a whole pen because I thought I needed this tub. And I was at Jeff Rapasky's one time and saw how he had his set up. So he just had no tub. But the actual chute separated two pens and used that as his gates. And so that's how we started doing it. We always get a lot of people that ask about it when they come through and it's been one of our best things, but it's also was the hardest thing for me to figure out. And I finally put the tub on an online sale last fall. I finally came to terms with I've got it exactly how I want it. I can let go of this. Well, that was part one of our three part series on barn renovations. Be sure to visit championdrive.com in the coming weeks for episodes two and three of this three part series. Thanks again.
- [62:49]
E
SA.