The History and Current Design of Agricultural Buildings New Technology, Old Style

Feb 25, 2013 Alice Construction 0

In general terms, the agricultural building – or barn – has not changed in design for more than a century. There are regional variations, in terms of the pitch of the roof, and the material from which the barn is built. But basically speaking, barring the advancement of the equipment installed inside them, agricultural buildings still do what they first did when man settled down and started living off, rather than on, the land.

The barn is used as a work and storage space to facilitate all normal indoor activities associated with working the land or raising domestic animals such as cows and sheep. It may be used for multiple purposes, or a series of separate barns may be used to allow the farmer to segregate specific storage requirements and tasks between sensibly-arranged networks of outbuildings.

A barn in its basic form consists of four walls, a large interior open space, and a pitched roof. ABC Roofing explains that the roof is normally open, so a person standing on the floor of the barn may look right up into the eaves or gables. In some layouts, a mezzanine runs around the sides of the barn and is used to store hay bales or other feed and equipment. The mezzanine is accessed by ladders: the central floor of the barn remains open all the way up to the roof.

Historically, mezzanines of this type were used to store items that would be loaded from the barn onto a waiting cart. For this purpose, barn doors were set into the high part of the outer wall. When the cart required loading, the loading doors opened outwards and were bolted to the face of the barn. The hay, or whatever other items needed loading into the cart, was then passed out into the waiting vehicle.

This design is still seen in Holland and in parts of rural America. It is less commonly seen in the modern barn, which is usually designed to facilitate large scale farming of meat or crops – and as such often has a single purpose, repeated many times over within the space.

A milking barn, for example, is designed to do one thing and one thing only – namely to help the farmer extract milk from her or his cows. It is fitted with a number of items to help do this. There may, for example, be a series of milking pens – small enclosures into which cattle are herded and affixed to milking machines. By designing the layout of the pens to achieve the maximum number of cows milked at any one time, the farmer is able to maximise his or her herd yield without requiring extra space.

Other barns may be set up to provide a more traditional multiplicity of environments. Commonly, there will be a tack or tools room; a breakout space for farm workers; a central area designed to facilitate a number of animal related tasks (with, for example, a vet chute); and a storage area for machinery and other agricultural equipment not stored in the tools room.