Category: Canada

We moved to our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in the fall of 1975. We bought a few cows and they were housed in the old style barn that came with the farm. That spring I went to Manitoba and Saskatchewan and bought a trailer truck load of cows. I had no intention of wintering that many cows in an old style barn. We got a couple of estimates to build a barn. We decided to build a couple of barns ourselves.
While I had learned a lot about working with my hands since I graduated from college, building a barn was not one of those skills. Living on a farm teaches you quickly do what needs to be done even if means learning how to do something new. I ordered all the materials that we needed from Ontario. They were shipped by rail to New Brunswick and then delivered by truck to our farm. The trusses for the barns were 36 ft. long and the others for the other barn were 36 ft. Even getting those trusses unloaded was not easy but it is amazing what you can do with a couple of farm tractors with front-end loaders.
It was harder getting a crew together but a couple of older neighbors agreed to help the two alternative life-style individuals that I hired. They had both come to Canada to get away from American life. I did not care about anything other than they were smart and hard workers. I started by digging a trench four-feet deep as straight as possible for 128 feet. We followed recommendations and made concrete pads to go under each of the four by six pressure treated poles. It was the last time we put pads under poles.
It turned out the instructions we were following were written for building barns in rock-free Ontario soils. New Brunswick soils were mostly rock. There was little danger of them sinking. After the first trench, I decided that we would dig holes with large hydraulic-powered auger mounted on a front-end loader. The advantage of having it on a front-end loader is that I could put down pressure on the auger with the loader so that it would dig more efficiently in the rocky soil. Once the poles were set, we used a tractor-mounted concrete mixer to pour concrete around the poles.
Once the posts were in the ground, it was just a lot of chain saw carpentry cutting the posts off to the same heights. Then we put plates on either sides of the poles. Then the trusses were put in place one at a time. The first truss was the hardest since there wasn’t a lot to brace it with when it was first lifted up. By the time I built the second barn, I had figured out how to improve the construction so that the first truss really was no longer a problem. If you look closely at this picture of the construction of our second barn you can see we put longer posts at the end of the building.
Beyond all the strapping that goes on a pole barn, the hardest thing is putting on the big sheets of galvanized roofing. Often you are way in the air and the only thing keeping you from slipping is the head of a nail. The second barn also got extensions on both sides. We ran out of pressure treated wood so we used cedar posts that came from trees cut off the farm.
The first barn was finished by Thanksgiving (American) 1975. I put the last steel on the barn door before I had any turkey. There a lot of other things that went into making the barns functional like getting electricity to them and of course water. We had to drill a well. I used the backhoe to build a small underground building around the well so I could keep it going in the brutal New Brunswick winters. I dug trenches to put frost free hydrants at both barns.
The finished barns had dimensions of 128 ft. by 36 ft. for the first barn and 69 ft. by 64 ft. for the second one. When I visited the farm back in 2012, both barns were still in good shape in spite of no real maintenance since 1984 when we moved from the farm. They were the only barns that I ever built.
It took at least of couple of years to get the interiors of the barns done so that they met the needs of our growing cattle herd. It was a lot of work but the new barns, a round baler and big farm tractors allowed me to run a cattle operation with 65 or so calving females before we decided to change careers. At our peak before our dispersal in 1982, we had 200 head of Angus, both red and black. The open style barns gave us a very healthy herd of cattle. In the nearly ten years we farmed, we never had a vet visit the farm. We probably had well over three hundred calves in that time.