80x150 Livestock Barn

This page is ordered around the group rather than the animal, because how many separate groups this footprint holds — and whether each can be reached without crossing another — is the question it actually answers.

The footprint holds 12 housed bays — 3 across by 4 deep — and the remaining 0 feet is marginal: there is no buffer bay, so stored material sits against the pens and machine traffic passes the stock every time it is fetched.

What distinguishes 80x150 is depth behaviour: 4 rows along 150 feet after 14 feet of circulation, with 0 feet unaccounted for at the end of the run. Snow, wind and site exposure change what this shape costs to build long before the interior plan does.

A 80 by 150 footprint is a clearly directional plan: 12,000 sq ft enclosed by 460 ft of wall, at a 1.9:1 length-to-width proportion. Along its 150 ft dimension it takes 4 runs of housed bays at 34 ft, leaving 14 ft over — the 14 ft is where the argument about this size actually happens. Taken purely as arithmetic, 80 by 150 gives 2 housed bays across the 80 ft dimension once 14 ft is reserved for movement, and 4 deep along the 150 ft dimension. Run as a a barn housing stock at one end and feed or bedding at the other, 14 ft across is enough to be worth planning: a buffer bay between the stored material and the animals, keeping dust, vermin and machine traffic away from the housed end Bedding and feed arrive in weather that makes them hard to move, so where they are stored is a labour decision.

At 80x150 the operating question is a specific one: where is the line between the housed end and the stored end, and does anything protect the animals from what happens on the other side of it? That is a different question from the one a livestock barn of another shape has to answer, and it is why this footprint is planned as a barn housing stock at one end and feed or bedding at the other rather than as generic covered area.

The housing pattern this barn could equally be planned around is open group housing where animals move freely within a bedded area: there is no bedding reserve inside, so bedding arrives from outside on the day it is needed and in the weather it arrives in. Dividing the 12,000 sq ft by the 26 by 34 ft housed bay 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: where is the line between the housed end and the stored end, and does anything protect the animals from what happens on the other side of it?

Treating the last 0 feet as a room is the recurring planning error at 80x150: there is no buffer bay, so stored material sits against the pens and machine traffic passes the stock every time it is fetched. Fire separation, egress and occupancy are determined for the specific building and can reshape this plan entirely.

Width is fully committed at 80x150. With 2 feet spare, wall storage and passing room compete with the housed bays directly. The mezzanine that is added afterwards is the change order that reprices the frame.

Compared with a 80 by 110 of the same width, the extra depth here adds run rather than reach: it buys about 4 housed bays in line, and every position past the second is retrieved by moving what stands in front of it. Spent as a square 110 by 110 instead, the same 12,000 sq ft would stand 3 housed bays across rather than 2, and would trade this plan's length for parallel access. That is the width-against-depth decision this footprint has already made. A building of this size behaves like a small yard under a roof: zones need to be defined, signed and left alone, or they migrate. Two routines run in the same building at different rhythms: daily stock work and intermittent bulk handling. Their routes should not cross, which is a door and layout decision rather than a scheduling one. Space allowances, ventilation and welfare provisions are determined for the specific operation with veterinary and design input rather than by building type. That movement pattern, not the 12,000-square-foot total, is what decides whether the leftover 0 feet is useful here.

The columns win at this footprint: 25-foot nominal bays against a 26-foot module means every layout decision starts from where the frames fall. Storage expands until it meets a wall, so give it a wall on purpose.

Depth here creates a hierarchy: 4 rows means front positions get used and rear positions get filled. Deciding which is which up front is what keeps 80x150 workable. Judge the plan by what has to happen on the worst day of the year, not on an average one.

The stored end extends, because it is the end with machine access and the end whose demand grows with the herd rather than with the building.

Configured as a barn housing stock at one end and feed or bedding at the other, 80x150 is judged on whether the 12 housed bays 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 racking or work zones on both sides with a full vehicle lane down the middle, or does it need a second lane that this 80-foot span cannot give?
• Is the 150-foot length being bought for depth, or for the repeated bays — a long repeating bay sequence, so segment boundaries are set by bay lines rather than by walls?
• How does air move through the barn on a still day?
• Can the cleaning machine work the full alley without moving animals twice?

Openings are the pinch point here. With 2 feet of spare width the gable cannot host 3 separate doors, so access is either shared or moved to the 150-foot sidewall. Circulation width is the first thing surrendered under pressure and the first thing missed afterwards.

Separate openings for the two ends, sized separately — the storage end for machinery, the housed end for stock and daily work.

Animals loaded through a handling route at one end; feed and bedding delivered to a different point entirely.

No price appears on this page. The quantities that scale an estimate at 80x150 are 12,000 square feet of slab, 222.2 cubic yards of nominal concrete, 11,040 square feet of wall cladding and 12,649 square feet of roof cladding. Two feet of spare width reads as nothing on a plan and as a great deal when a machine is being turned.

One shell serving two purposes is the saving; the buffer, the second opening and the separation are the costs that make the saving work rather than merely look like one.

• ventilation provisions and sidewall openings
• interior pens, gates and durable linings
• the alley width the cleaning machine needs
• drainage and washdown provisions

Span drives headroom at 80x150: 80 feet of width on a 4:12 pitch puts 37.3 feet over the middle and 24 feet at the walls, so where a tall item stands matters as much as how tall it is. Rows that cannot be entered independently end up used as one long space.

Height on a 80 ft span is a separate decision from the 150 ft length, and it is the span that sets the frame's behavior. Raising the eave over 12,000 sq ft affects every bay along the 150 ft dimension, so the test is whether mixed housing and storage barn genuinely needs the extra clear height or only the floor area.

Ventilation across 12,000 square feet at this height: air quality above the animals is the defining requirement of the building, and it drives ridge, eave and sidewall decisions together.

• 60x80 moves the count from 12 to 2 housed bays (2 across by 1 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.
• 40x120 moves the count from 12 to 8 housed bays (2 across by 4 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.
• 50x100 moves the count from 12 to 6 housed bays (2 across by 3 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.

Because this footprint is planned as a barn housing stock at one end and feed or bedding at the other, the useful next reads are different from the ones a differently shaped livestock barn suggests: mixed housing and storage barn, buffer bay, separated access ends.