Durham housing

[Anonymous]

This is a question to all of you helpful folks out there-
we are getting a fresh pair of durham bull calves and a dairy cow -ayreshire
maybe- in the spring and we are going to build a small outbuilding for them-
three stalls, a little bit of storage space for tools and chains and a hay loft.
We are planning on building a barn, but this won’t start until the summer or fall.
So, my question is, how big should I make the stalls, and is there any advice
from those of you who have built something like this for oxen?

thank you all
Miles

[CharlyBonifaz]

no experience;
however 😉 in horses you take their height, double that and this is what you want the stalls to be long and wide…….
elke

[Crabapple Farm]

Miles-
Is the small outbuilding going to be their permanent home? Or just until the barn is built? If you just need to house them for their first year there, the calves need a lot less space then they will when they are grown.
My ox stall (I have Durhams) is in a 10×12 bay of the barn – ten feet wide. they have 8′ of length, plus about 18″ of manger (an open box on the floor, mainly to separate hay from bedding and one ox’s hay from the other’s). There’s a 30″ wide feed alley in front – 36″ would be much more comfortable, but it works.
I think ox teams are best housed in double stalls, without a divider between them. It gives you more room to work up around them, and keeps them as a team. I’ve got chains that I clip them into attatched in the outer lower corners, short enough so they can’t steal much hay from eachother (there’s a partition in the manger).
I think eight feet wide would be the minimum you could get away with for a mature team of Durhams, and you’d want that much length. My stalls for our jersey cows are 8′ overall, two feet in front of the stanchions for their heads, six feet behind. Also a double stall, 8′ wide, actually divided into three 32″ spots – one for each cow on the outsides, one in the middle for the person milking. An ayshire would need a longer stall than the jerseys, but I don’t know if she would need more width.
This is all assuming tie stalls of some sort, for loose box stalls they would need to be quite a bit bigger.
-Tevis

[Author]

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