Barn and byre

Measure from the well before pegging anything. The Minnesota Department of Health (2024) sets these minimum distances, doubled for a sensitive well: one with less than 15 m (50 ft) of watertight lining that is not lined down through a confining layer, such as clay, at least 3 m (10 ft) thick. Treat a hand-dug well as sensitive unless you know it passes both tests.

• Animal building: 15 m; sensitive well 30 m.
• Open heap of solid manure: 30 m; sensitive well 61 m.
• Liquid manure pit with no approved liner: 91 m; sensitive well 183 m.

Put all of them downhill of the well, as the plot step lays out, and see the wells guide for protecting the well head.

Raise the pad (Penn State Extension): strip the topsoil and roots, compact the subsoil, slope the ground 5 % away from the walls on every side, and build the floor so its top stands at least 30 cm above the ground outside.

Count the animals housed at once at their largest, then multiply. Floor under cover per mature animal (University of New Hampshire Extension, 2023):

• Cow, dairy or beef: 7.0–9.3 m², plus 9.3–11.6 m² of outdoor yard.
• Sheep or goat: 1.9–2.3 m², plus 4.6 m² of yard.
• Breeding pig: 4.5 m² with a yard of 18.6 m², or 9.3 m² with no yard.
• Hen: 0.28–0.37 m², plus 0.9 m² of run.

Growing pigs in groups need at least 0.15 m² each up to 10 kg, 0.40 m² at 30–50 kg, 0.65 m² at 85–110 kg and 1.00 m² above 110 kg; sows in groups 2.25 m² and served gilts 1.64 m². These are the legal minimums in England (Defra code of practice, 2020), which also requires a lying area on which every pig can lie on its side at the same time.

Build the floor in layers (Penn State Extension): compacted subsoil, then 10–13 cm of gravel, 5 cm of sand or pea gravel, then at least 10 cm of floor. Pure clay packs watertight and is slick when wet; mix 2 parts clay to 1 part fine stone dust and ram it. Fired brick on sand, from Brick and tile, makes a feed passage that can be swept.

Fall the pen floor 1.5–2 %, that is 1.5–2 cm per metre, toward an open channel along the wall. Never put a drain in the middle of a pen: bedding blocks it. Carry the channel out through the wall to the manure store, not into the yard or toward the well.

Bed deep with straw and replace the wet patches before they soak through.

Warm, wet air rises and leaves by the ridge; fresh air comes in at the eaves. Opening sizes for a naturally ventilated barn (Penn State Extension):

• Ridge: a continuous open slot 5 cm wide for every 3 m of building width (2 in per 10 ft): 15 cm for a byre 9 m wide. Make it 20 % wider if bird netting covers it.
• Eaves: a continuous opening at the top of each side wall, half the ridge: 7.5 cm each side for the same byre.
• Side walls: adjustable openings about 1.2 m high above the animals. Close them against winter wind but never completely: leave at least 15 cm open at the top.

The air inside should stay within about 5.5 °C (10 °F) of the air outside; if it is warmer, the byre is shut too tight. Stop draughts at the height of the animals, not of the keeper (UNH Extension).

Hay heats until it is dry. Stack or bale it at 20 % moisture or less (FReSH extension); above about 22 % it loses feed value and the risk of fire rises (Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue). Bale it later in the day, not in the morning (FReSH).

• Store hay and straw in separate buildings at least 10 m apart (Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue), downwind of the byre (Penn State).
• Keep no more than a week's hay and bedding in the byre; anything stored longer goes in a building separate from the stock (Ontario Ministry of Agriculture). Where hay and stock must share a building, put a masonry fire wall between them (Rutgers), built as in Masonry house and chimney.
• Outside stacks: a firebreak about 4.5 m (15 ft) wide around each, on a raised, drained base (NDSU).
• Split the harvest between two or more stores, so one fire cannot take the whole winter's fodder (NDSU).

Most hay fires start within six weeks of storing (NDSU), some only after three or four weeks (Purdue). Check every new load twice a day for those six weeks (FReSH).

Probe: drive a pointed iron pipe about 3 m long into the stack at several places and lower a thermometer down it on a string for 10 minutes at each (NDSU). With no thermometer, push in a 10 mm iron pipe and pull it out twice a day: if it is too hot to hold, the stack is at risk of fire (Ohio State).

Act on the core temperature (Purdue, from NRAES-18):

• 52 °C or less: nothing to do.
• 66 °C: check twice a day; pull the stack apart so air cools it.
• 71 °C: check every couple of hours; keep pulling it apart, with water ready (Ohio State).
• 79 °C: fire pockets are likely. Stop all air movement, shut the building, call fire cover, and take the animals out of any building holding this hay (NDSU).
• 88 °C and above: remove the hot hay only with fire cover and water on the spot; it can burst into flame as it meets the air.

People sleep in a separate building, never over or inside the byre. Q fever is caught by breathing dust contaminated by infected animals' dung, urine, milk and birth products (CDC). In the Dutch epidemic, living within 2 km of an infected dairy-goat farm carried a far higher risk than living beyond 5 km (Dijkstra et al., 2012). Put the house upwind of the byre and the manure heap.

• Lamb and kid in a pen apart, away from the house, and clean out and burn the birthing material (livestock guide); pregnant women stay away entirely (Livestock).
• Soap and water at the door: wash after touching an animal, its feed or its dung, scrubbing for at least 20 seconds (CDC). Soap is a first-tier craft.

The barrier for each disease that crosses to people, from brucellosis to avian influenza, is in the livestock guide.