Barn to shop conversion

[245dlc]

Well just a little news for you guys if you are interested my father in law has a series of barns that use to be for raising pigs. Well when the market for that went south and the smaller outfits couldn't make any money raising piggy's he got rid of his and the barns have stood vacant ever since. So now what he'd like to do is install a large bi-fold door and then go inside and hammer out the manure pits and existing floor so that he can gain a higher ceiling and bring some of his equipment inside when it's cold out and so he can work in heated comfort. So I'm pricing out renting a mini with a breaker, while he specs out a door, concrete and other supplies we'll need.

[Stock]

Is any of those farrowing pins or feeders salvageable Bert? a fair few quids worth by the look of it................

[245dlc]

Yeah all those bins are perfectly salvageable and so is the feeding and hog handling equipment some of which has already been sold off. But everybody want's it for nothing and doesn't want to come and get it so it takes a while before somebody buys that stuff.

[B4D2USA]

Having relatives that used to raise hogs, I need to ask: Have the buildings been aired out amply? LOL.

Those HUGE hog farms seem to have taken the wind out of the sails of smaller producers. I hope your FIL got out before he lost money. As Stock recommends, it'd be nice to salvage the equipment, but hogs create quite the corrosive environment. Is the gear in decent shape? If all you can get is bottom dollar, what about taking it all to the scrap man yourself? Better to pocket the value that to depreciate the equipment to a low-ball buyer.

A mini excavator with a hammer? What about a skid steer? I'd guess you'd move a lot more rubble that way. Anyways, it will make for some good pics.

[245dlc]

Yeah it's fairly aired out he made some screen doors that he puts on in the summer to help with ventilation. Everything that I've seen seems to be in pretty good shape. With the distance to the shredder from the farm I'm not sure if it would be worth hauling all that stuff there. My FIL was a silent partner in the business deal and managed to keep his shirt, however his brother (who'm I've never met) 'cooked the books' so to speak as spent money they never had and had all kinds of big ideas and basically made operation so big that it could never turn a dime. My FIL bought the hog barns and the land that came with them from Farm Credit...... One problem he has is that the Province of Manitoba put a moratorium on hog barn construction a few years ago as some of it was getting out of hand and things like lagoons weren't being built properly, plus the complaints from the general public about the smell wafting from these places is a bit much to say the least. So off and on the last few years he's had to argue with Manitoba Conservation about what he's going to do with his lagoons which are actually borrow pits and to my knowledge they have no proper clay liner, and one lagoon still has manure in it that's about ten or twelve years old. He's looked into hiring a company to agitate it back into a slurry and get it injected into his fields as that's the standard now but he figures that will cost him around $50,000 nevermind rehabilitating both lagoons which will probably cost as much.