The diverse needs of different ranches result
in a wide range of barns and barn styles




by Gavin Ehrin

When building a ranch, chances are you start off with strong preferences as to your home's design. But unless you come from a ranching background, you may be overwhelmed by all the choices related to your barns and outbuildings. In the following pages, we simplify the process with tips on finding a contractor, assessing your needs, and sorting through basic options in barn design, stable layout, and fencing materials. Whether you desire a Mediterranean-style stucco studded with massive pine timbers, an Old World milk barn with a lovely gambrel roof, or an ultra-modern facility with minimalist Bauhaus lines, your barn's design should complement your home and be somewhat congruous with your community. Your choice of contractor plays a key role in the character of your buildings. A good bet is to hire local craftsmen who specialize in barn building and are familiar with the post-and-beam construction style commonly used for pole barns. An alternative is to enlist a barn building company such as Port-a-Stall or Morton. These companies use modular contraction methods to make uniform buildings based on standard and popular barn styles. When planning your barn, first consider your needs. If you intend to raise commercial beef cattle, a barn will serve mainly as a workshop, tool shed, and place to store and repair large equipment. It may be desirable to provide calving stalls for troublesome young heifers or for containing sick or orphaned animals. But plenty of ranchers get by just fine without such amenities. At a bare minimum, you will need a hay storage shed that is large enough to house a winter's supply of feed for your stock. Typically, this translates into a huge pole structure with a sturdy, all-weather roof and a cement pad to help protect the hay from spoiling. Raising prized registered cattle, on the other hand, takes quite a bit more effort than simply throwing your cows out to pasture—and your building needs will grow apace. Most registered cattle are bred using artificial insemination, which necessitates a "collecting" barn for the bulls, a small lab for cooling and storing semen, and barn facilities for inseminating cows. Depending on how high you set your sights, such an operation can be decidedly extravagant. Take, for example, one businessman-turned-cattle baron who looked to corner the Angus market by winning all the cattle shows across the West. His Oklahoma breeding ranch featured individual, air-conditioned stalls for his prized and perfectly show-groomed cows and a full-service, state-of-the-art breeding barn complete with a lab for handling artificial insemination chores. If this level of management is your ambition, you'd best hire a breeding specialist fresh out of agriculture school to help plan your facilities. If you're a genuine cowboy (or are wise enough to hire one to manage your outfit), you might get by with working the cattle in the open. But dreams of roping, branding, and doctoring cattle on the open range quickly give way to the practicalities of this grueling and dirty work. Even hardened cowpokes would agree that cow work is most efficiently performed in a substantial and well-planned corral. Actually, two corrals: one for holding your livestock and another for separating out the cattle that have already been branded, doctored, castrated, or (in the case of calves) separated from their mamas. A handy and almost indispensable corral accessory is a squeeze chute—a tubular steel device designed to entrap and contain cattle so that they can be branded, vaccinated, and doctored. Buy a good one, as you'll use it a lot. Last on the list of corral necessities is a loading chute. This is an angled loading ramp with sturdy side rails used for driving cattle into a semi-truck trailer. Made of heavy wood planks or steel tubing, the loading ramp should be sturdy—an 800-pound steer can do a lot of damage to a flimsy chute. Pre-fab loading chutes are available. If you're a "gentleman" rancher whose interests run more toward equines than bovines, you should consider the needs of your horses when deciding on the size and type of stable. Horses are social animals who prefer companionship to solitude. A lone horse will quickly become bored and cranky. So even if you're starting off with just a couple of horses, plan your stable with additions in mind. Ranchers wanting to keep a few horses for light recreational riding can get by with a simple open shed to protect the horses from the elements. Horses actually prefer such a setup to being stabled for most of the day, and having room to roam promotes fitness. Remember that a horse is a full-time eating machine. Two or three left out to pasture can transform a few acres into a dust bowl in a single season. Thus, it is desirable to contain them for a portion of each day, allowing them out to pasture only for exercise. This can be done by creating paddocks or runs with sheltered, shed-type open housing. To facilitate turnout, the pens should be located near your riding arena or a gated pasture. Show horses require a stable. Keeping them indoors helps prevent them from "hairing up" in winter and allows you to completely control their feed and monitor their health, water use, and exercise. The simplest stable floor plan for keeping just a few horses is the shed row. In this design, all stalls face in one direction, typically a covered walkway used for grooming, doctoring, or saddling. Pens may also be built on the backside to facilitate turnout. For the average horseman, the center-aisle barn is the Rolls-Royce of horse keeping. Two rows of stalls are placed on both sides of a covered aisle way. The aisle serves as a place for grooming and other chores—an especially desirable feature in inclement weather, be it driving snow or sizzling heat. By converting one of the stall areas into an enclosed room, you can keep saddles, tack, and grooming tools in top condition. Many people wonder if they should include such luxuries as heat, insulation, and indoor plumbing in their barn. In most cases, horses will produce enough body heat to warm a modern, well-insulated barn. Only in cases of extreme cold is heat necessary, and then only if you need to keep your horses in short coats for the winter horse shows. Plumbing, however, is a definite requirement. At a bare minimum, you'll need an insulated water supply equipped with a brute water hose. Horses drink from five to ten gallons of water each day, making water chores burdensome. On every stable owner's wish list are automatic waterers—the equine equivalent of a water fountain. Buy the best you can afford, as they are notorious for failing at the worst possible time. One other plumbing need to consider is an alarm-driven sprinkler system to protect your investment in the event of a fire. For horses, a training arena will likely take the place of a corral for all but the largest operations. Arena sizes vary greatly depending on activity. Breaking pens for training young colts tend to be circular affairs ranging in size from 60 to 80 feet in diameter. A roping arena can be as long as 200 feet with alleyways to return cattle to the roping chute. A basic riding arena will be about 150 by 80 feet. It's an axiom of fencing that the smaller the enclosure, the safer the fence must be. You wouldn't use barbed wire for a small paddock, for instance. In fact, horses and barbed wire mix like children and matches. More and more, horsemen are stripping their ranches of the stuff and going to safer materials. For corrals and pens, welded pipe is the safest, surest material. Next comes wood planks, as long as there are no exposed nail heads or large splinters. An inexpensive alternative is smooth wire, although horses tend not to respect it. Adding an electrically charged wire can help keep horses from testing and pushing on a wire fence. While many ranch owners envision the white-plank fences and blue grass of a Kentucky horse farm, the maintenance and upkeep is staggering. Texas ranchers have lately taken to plank fences painted black, which seem to hold up better under the punishing Southwestern sun. Another popular fence employs welded sucker rods left over from the oil fields. Some horsemen use PVC boards that mimic the look of white wood planks while avoiding the maintenance hassles. Ultimately, local availability and use may help dictate your choice when it comes to fencing. In the Rocky Mountains, it is still common for ranchers to use aspen trees to create lovely and functional saw buck-style pasture fences. If money is no object, you can always do what Ralph Lauren did on his Colorado ranch: surrounding his entire spread with miles and miles of fencing made of beautiful red cedar saw-buck. Now that's a dream ranch. North Carolina Masterpiece On land where Siouan and Pee Dee Indians once lived, at the confluence of the Pee Dee and Rocky Rivers, Charlotte businessman James W. Cogdell recently built the ultimate dream barn. An avid horseman and breeder of rare Irish Draught Horses, Cogdell purchased this 1,300-acre swath of North Carolina, named The Fork, to preserve the land and its wildlife and to develop a state-of-the-art equestrian facility. "My passion for outdoor life and habitat and my love of horses came together at The Fork," says Cogdell. "Most importantly, my aim is to educate people to protect open land." The centerpiece of The Fork is a 185-by-65-foot barn designed by Mark Wray of Mill Creek Post and Beam in Saluda, North Carolina. "The barn is timber framed in an Old World craftsman style that uses oak pegs for joinery instead of nails," says Wray. "This style was popular in the early days of the United States when iron was in short supply, so there's a lot of romance and character associated with it." The barn not only has 15 stalls, a tack room, and a vet lab but also such deluxe amenities for riders as a dressing room with lockers, steam showers, and a gourmet kitchen. As a fan of eventing—a sport that combines cross-country, dressage, and show jumping—Cogdell wanted the elaborate barn to facilitate an Olympic-caliber competition. Another consideration was that it complement The Fork's cross-country course, designed by renowned horseman Captain Mark Phillips. Cogdell's patience and planning have already been rewarded: The Fork will host a U.S. Eventing Association horse trial in April 2003. —Margaret Brown Pickworth

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