Examples of Simple Outdoor Livestock Shelters

Shelters keep livestock alive. Good animal shelters help animals thrive. Although styles and sizes vary, the needs remain the same for all livestock. Shelters are protection from the harshness of our earth. Animals need protection from sun, rain, and wind. That takes care of concerns about hyperthermia, hypothermia, and gives them a place to hide when scared during storms. In every climate below Canada, heat stress is a concern to all farm livestock.

A shelter needs to offer shade and maintain decent airflow so it doesn’t get hot. A few small trees will do for that. Trees can be shelter.  But, shelter from rain requires a solid roof. When wet, animals use roughly 4 times as much energy to keep warm. Not only does that burn through your feed, often times animals can’t quite keep up with the energy needs to stay warm when cold and wet. Protection from wet includes rain, melting snow, and ambient ground moisture.

If you lay straw on the soil, it gets wet. Be sure to fluff and turn any bedding your animals sleep on so it can dry out during the day now and then. Replace it when needed. I learned years ago that when sleeping outdoors, I should hang up my bedroll during the day to dry because the ground moisture collects in it and made me colder at night if I don’t. It’s the same for animals. Keep rain and snow off, and do what you can to keep their bed dry. Shelters need to block wind.

Here is one of my more simple shelters. It’s an a-frame made with old deck boards and roofed with tin from an old trailer house. It works to keep out most of the elements well enough for mature animals.

 Windchill is the second largest factor in heat loss. A single-walled lean-to will block wind, but something with three walls makes a much better dead-air space. Here in Michigan, I’ve converted all my lean-to shelters into more of a cubby or A-frame with a back wall. That allowed us to have more successful winter litters of pigs and will help with our new sheep breeding project. When wind, rain, and sun are blocked, you can keep animals warm in the coldest weather with a simple pile of straw. I do not have barns or animal sheds. We only use simple outside shelters made with cheap materials.  

Here is my most winter-proofed shelter for pigs and sheep.

I built it from scrap 2×6 lumber and wood from an old chicken coop. The walls are less than a 45-degree angle which seems to shed rain well enough without overlapping the boards. The boards were clamped together before nailing to minimize gaps. The back is a solid 2×6 wall and the front is half-closed with scrap plywood. By adding a smaller front opening, I found that the inside temperature was 5 degrees warmer when the animals were in it. When full of dry straw, a newborn litter of piglets is perfectly warm in blizzard weather. In hot weather, I’ll remove the front and back walls for airflow. Mobile shelters are best. They can be positioned with the prevailing wind direction depending on the season. My prevailing wind is from the West. If I face shelters to the East, winter wind can’t blow in. In summer, I turn them so the wind can most often blow inside. That helps to limit the animal’s stress load. With roofs of less angle, they need to be watertight. Tin and steel sheeting is often the best, but I’ve used tarps as temporary waterproofing. They only last one season though. Consider things that last. Treated lumber, steel coverings, and fiberglass shell huts are great options when you can afford them. Do the best you can.

Here’s our main rabbit shelter.

It’s built out of scrap, except for the sheeting. Most of the wood is pressure-treated to resist rotting. It’s nothing fancy but works quite well. Rabbits need shade, protection from the wind, and from rain. Our house keeps the wind at bay. Sometimes I’ll cover the tops of the cages with a blanket in extreme cold weather, but only if I really think it’s needed. Semi-enclosed nesting boxes are all that’s needed for newborns in this setup.

Here’s my favorite simple chicken coop design. I have two. They cost me $50 each, I bought the used chain link dog pens and picked up two truck toppers for free. They both sit right on top of the kennel, and we use the back door to get eggs from the nests. It’s a bit unorthodox but it works fantastically. All I had to do was cut scrap lumber to make a shelf for them to have laying nests and I added some cut saplings as roosting poles. Our chickens seem to love it.

A coop like this one, purchased from a store and assembled, can work great. They don’t always last very well, but they can be a simple way to get started with a small flock of backyard birds. They currently sell for around $300-$500 depending on size.

     A simple lean-to (one wall on an angle) works well enough if it’s water-tight, but when there’s snow it’ll blow right in. I’ve used them but won’t consider them good for my winters anymore.

Jordan

I practice what I preach. Here in rural west Michigan, me, my wife, and 5 young kids work together to grow food, raise animals, and grow aninmal feed on just 1 acre. I teach homesteading classes locally, and help people where I can.

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