portable barns for job sites

I make rough hovels with tarps and any wood that’s handy. It takes less than half a day. I spike a frame to standing trees and nail the tarp down with button caps. I bed with straw. For turnout, if there is any open land, I use portable electric fence. During the moose rut, I string some rope around the outer limits of the hovel.

I had another thought as to a solution that I have not tried but I think would work. They make portable stalls with wood sides that are 12 foot pannels. They link like a pin lock corral and I think a roof made from a heavy tarp could be an answer to a temporary barn. The pannels are hefty though they could be loaded into a stock trailer by a couple of people. They should last a long time and are fairily easy to move and set up.

just a thought

Joshua

Last time we tied down a tent in 103 MPH winds, the ridge pole snapped under the pressure, but ours at least didn’t just flop over or fly away like the rest of the division.

Assuming your structural members are sturdy, which they should be to resist the occasional horse bump, a pair of compression lines running diagonal across the rectangular shelter, coming down at 45 degrees to the ground, should hold fast. You might have to educate the horses about stakes of any are inside the pen area, perhaps making them much longer than necessary, and use a heavy, highly visible rope? If stakes and rope are too risky, you’ll just have to add a solid compression member at an angle on each upright, and run the stresses the other way around the structure.

Doing no more than you have to if it is a small job, seems to be the pattern we have had to adopt. If you are going to be there a while, say over 10 acres of mature Appalachian hardwood then some shelter may be appropriate.

We were on a job in the public woods (national forests) once and camped down at the end of a dead end road built to access a clear cut on an adjoining piece. The site was about 50 acres of marked timber. It was at a crossroads of state roads through the NF. It had been a negotiated sale based on the special provision of the site having a high visual sensitivity, because so much traffic used these roads. I guess we were just a beauty ring used to hide clear cuts from the public, but I digress…

We have always liked to give the horses as much liberty when not working as possible, so a portable electric fence and a crude black plastic pipe diverting water from a stream course to a trough was about it. There were always trees and some natural shade. We had our trailers on site and when cold we would put them on them, especially in freezing rain conditions.

One day we had some unexpected and uninvited visitors that came through for a Sunday drive and reported us to the local authorities for animal abuse. The local deputy came up the next working day and watched us a couple of hours and said this is crazy, you treat those animals very well. I asked what we should do? He said the law required that when more than over night camping that the horses needed a three sided structure. So we built a couple of standing stalls with a roof and two sides and counted it as three. The deputy said we were cool and that we would hear no more from those SPCA folks. I told him to send them up, they could watch us work anytime they wanted. We never heard anything from them again.

So I guess the point is lots of liberty and maybe some shelter of any kind will work.

I have known guys that had welded metal standing stalls they set off th back of the log truck with knuckleboom. But it is a matter of doing the work and everyone will find their own system that suits them. The culture of using the animals is so precious, the hardware and electric fence is just stuff to practice that culture.

~