50x100 Hay Barn

This page is ordered around the floor itself, because at 50x100 the 5,000 sq ft available decides what a hay barn can hold before any other consideration applies.

The footprint holds 9 handling lanes — 3 across by 3 deep — and leaves 20 feet of depth for a passing widening at the midpoint so a loaded machine and an empty one can meet without one backing out.

Commitment first: 63% of the 5,000 square feet goes to handling lanes at 352 square feet each, and 1,200 square feet survives as edge strip. A footprint is worth its own decision when that split lands where the work does. Security and after-hours access are easier to design in the door layout than to bolt on later.

A 50 by 100 footprint is a clearly directional plan: 5,000 sq ft enclosed by 300 ft of wall, at a 2:1 length-to-width proportion. Along its 100 ft dimension it takes 4 runs of handling lanes at 22 ft, leaving 12 ft over — the 12 ft is where the argument about this size actually happens. A through-lane converts the building from a store into a handling route. The lane costs stack area permanently and repays it in movement, so the plan is only right for operations where forage is trucked in and out rather than made and kept. Material stored for a customer rather than for the operation needs physical separation, not just a marked line.

This footprint is planned as a drive-through store worked from both ends without reversing. Traffic is one-way, which removes the reversing that dominates every other arrangement. That single change is usually what justifies the lane in operations handling trailers rather than loader buckets. What is stored changes across the year, and a building sized for one material behaves differently when the next one arrives.

The storage arrangement this floor tends toward in a heavy season is a compact bale store loaded and emptied by hand or with a small loader: there is no inside working space, so bales are handled on the ground outside the doors whatever the weather is doing. Dividing the 5,000 sq ft by the 16 by 22 ft handling lane gives roughly 8 positions before circulation is deducted a second time for cross movement. Whether the plan keeps 8 or drops to 4 comes back to the question this footprint is really answering: does the operation move enough material for a through-lane to be worth the stack space it consumes?

Depth arithmetic leaves a working end zone here. 1,000 square feet sits past the last row, which is why 50x100 tends to be planned with a passing widening at the midpoint so a loaded machine and an empty one can meet without one backing out designed in rather than added later. The span is the commitment; everything inside it is rearrangeable later, and the 50-foot dimension is not.

Only 2 feet of width is spare, so there is no wall strip: anything set along a sidewall comes out of a handling lane's clearance. Doors and their approaches decide more about daily use here than the enclosed area does.

Traffic is one-way, which removes the reversing that dominates every other arrangement. That single change is usually what justifies the lane in operations handling trailers rather than loader buckets. What is stored changes across the year, and a building sized for one material behaves differently when the next one arrives. That movement pattern, not the 5,000-square-foot total, is what decides whether the leftover 20 feet is useful here.

At 25-foot nominal bays the structure works with the layout instead of against it: one handling lane per bay line, walls free of awkward half-positions. The building is fixed for decades while the operation inside it changes every few years, and the plan has to survive that.

Two-plus rows change the access question entirely. Every rear position at 50x100 needs either its own opening or an aisle, and 2 feet of spare width is what that aisle has to come from. The floor treatment is a use decision that outlasts most of the equipment standing on it.

Extension is cheapest along the 100 ft dimension, where each added bay repeats work already framed; widening past 50 ft is a different frame rather than a longer one. Growing to 50 by 122 adds a 5th run of handling lanes — useful if the constraint is handling lanes rather than the 12 ft already spare at the far end.

Configured as a drive-through store worked from both ends without reversing, 50x100 is judged on whether the 9 handling lanes it holds match the operation, and on whether the 2 feet of spare width leaves the route this mode depends on.

• Does the work need three lanes and a working lane, or two lanes with an interior work hall between them, or does it need a second lane that this 50-foot span cannot give?
• Is the 100-foot length being bought for depth, or for the repeated bays — eight to ten repeated bays, which makes the layout a scheduling problem as much as a spatial one?
• What stack height do you plan, and can the loader place a bale above it inside the building?
• Which sides stay open for airflow, and which face the weather?

At 50 feet the gable will not comfortably take one opening per handling lane: 3 positions with 2 feet spare leaves too little wall for piers. A single wider opening, or a sidewall opening, is the workable route. An empty building looks generous and a working one rarely does; plan against the working state.

Two aligned openings define the building, and their clear width sets the largest vehicle that can use the lane. A lane wide enough to drive but too narrow to turn is the recurring planning error here.

Loader-handled from the open side, with the working face moving as the stack grows and shrinks.

Across a 50-foot span the 3:12 pitch adds 6.3 feet between eave and ridge. The centreline measures 22.3 feet; anything parked or stacked near a wall lives with the 16-foot eave. Two operations of the same size can want opposite plans, so the arithmetic below is a starting point rather than a recommendation.

Height on a 50 ft span is a separate decision from the 100 ft length, and it is the span that sets the frame's behavior. Raising the eave over 5,000 sq ft affects every bay along the 100 ft dimension, so the test is whether drive-through forage handling genuinely needs the extra clear height or only the floor area.

Ventilation across 5,000 square feet at this height: airflow through a stack is the reason many hay barns stay open-sided; enclosing them changes how the stored crop behaves.

No price appears on this page. The quantities that scale an estimate at 50x100 are 5,000 square feet of slab, 92.6 cubic yards of nominal concrete, 4,800 square feet of wall cladding and 5,154 square feet of roof cladding. Ground conditions and drainage decide the floor before the frame does.

Two large openings, a durable lane surface and the frame around both ends carry the extra cost. The stack area lost to the lane is the larger hidden cost and should be counted in the comparison.

• eave height set by handling clearance above the stack
• how many sides remain open
• the apron the loader and trailers use
• roof drainage over an open working face

• 40x50 holds the same 9 handling lanes but changes the leftover depth by -20 feet, which is where the difference is actually felt.
• 30x70 moves the count from 9 to 8 handling lanes (2 across by 4 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.
• 36x60 holds the same 9 handling lanes but changes the leftover depth by -10 feet, which is where the difference is actually felt.

Because this footprint is planned as a drive-through store worked from both ends without reversing, the useful next reads are different from the ones a differently shaped hay barn suggests: drive-through forage handling, lane width planning, two-ended access.