Hay Shelter

We've learned to be creative when it comes to farming. As I've mentioned before, we built our house in 2000/2001, before we ever considered being alpaca farmers. Had that been the plan, we would have done things differently (most likely we would have bought an old farm). But, we've learned to make what we have work. This past year we stored most of our hay in a small barn up by the boys. We now need that barn for our male weanlings. We store a little bit of hay in our garage, for the girls. The boy's barn is about .16 miles from the girls, I'm not hauling hay that far every feeding time. So we had several bales of hay in our garage, right by the girl's area. Thankfully we built an oversized garage (we took plans for an oversized garage and even added more space to it). And, I drive a small economical car, so that there was room in the garage. But still, we had to restack hay every couple weeks to keep up with the girls' eating.

We put the hay behind the bins of grain:



There was only room for 1 pallet there (we like to stack our hay on top of wooden pallets):



To free up our garage and to clear out the male weanling barn, we decided to put up a hay shelter:



Pretty impressive that we have that up already! I can't take any credit for it. I've been at work, and I caught a miserable cold. We've had incredible warm weather and J's been home. After the show all weekend, J had until Friday night off of work (the benefit of working 12 hour shifts three times a week, he ended up with over a week off without taking time off.... but now he works 6 out of the next 7 nights). Anyway, the shelter is up and inside we can fit 3 pallets from left to right, 5 lengthwise. It is huge compared to the 1 pallet area we had back here before.



J still wants to put dolomite on the floor of the shelter. We will need more pallets and lots of hay.