08/31/2026
TLDR: Shed done! This shed saves us 75% of the feed lifting - and we’ve been picking away at it for MONTHS. Pretty cool to see it come together. Is this what year 13 of a farm looks like?!?
When we get feed from the mill, they load it onto our trailer with forks. Once it’s home, we USED to unload every 50lb bag by hand, carry it to our grainery (a mouse-proof-ish room we built in the barn) for storage. And then we’d drive our 2-3 days worth of feed at a time to each animal group, so we’d pick it up again to put it in our pickup, and stage it in 55 gallon drums in the pasture near where the chickens, pigs, or turkeys were rotating/grazing. We finally fed it out. We were lifting every bag FOUR times. That’s too many times, yall! Multiple four by the amount of feed we go through (in a typical year, 2.5 tons every three weeks, from May-November, and less in the slower times). It’s led to loads of tendonitis and sore muscles.
Over the last several years, we bought a tractor with forks that can handle a ton of feed at a time and small sheds that can hold a pallet of feed each (that we can move in the pasture, with those forks).
So now we can lift each bag ONE time: forks do the rest of the work, saving our bodies!
