What’s in Your Livestock Shed? visits low-effort, high-welfare beef shed

A beef housing system in Powys is designed to minimise labour, maximise animal health and welfare, and protect the farming system from increasingly frequent weather extremes.

The Morris family replaced outdated buildings at Lower Drostre, near Brecon, with a shed for 150 cattle. Bedding, mucking out and feeding can now be completed by one person in less than 90 minutes.

“A tired, stressed stockman bogged down with an inefficient system cannot operate as they should,” says Griff Morris, who farms with his son Gareth, wife Carolyn, and daughter-in-law Steph.

See also: 10 tips for safe cattle handling during TB testing

Griff and Gareth Morris © Debbie James

Why was new housing needed?

The steading had old, outdated and ill-positioned buildings when we bought it in 2015.

Some were taken down, recycled and repositioned, and sections added.

It also became apparent that we needed to adapt our system to be resilient to climate change, with this year a test case, as we have had no real rain since the end of May.

If you want the best from your farm without harming the environment, given possible continuous rain and possible continuous drought, stock must be housed for well over half the year.

How did you design the building?

We wanted a simple and inexpensive system, a shed that could be managed by one person in the minimum amount of time.

Routine work should be as time-and-motion efficient as possible to give enough time for stock handling, assessment, evaluation and necessary maintenance.

This also helps to minimise the number of those never- ending days that we all sometimes endure.

How is the shed laid out?

The building is designed around a central feed passage with calving pens to the rear.

Nine housing pens can be shut back from the 5.4m scrape passage in front. Feeding off that bedded area are up to 24 calving pens, each measuring 6x3m, which double up as creep areas when calving has finished.

These pens can also be shut back to create a scrape passage. When scraping, the cattle remain shut back to allow straw bedding to be blown into the pens.

The same system allows any group or individual animal arriving to be moved to the handling race and returned in a circuit without fuss.

© Debbie James

Tell us about the shed’s specifications

The shed is made up of two buildings – 49x23m and 49x26m – joined together with two cantilevers, one measuring 3m and the other 1.5m.

t is a steel structure with eight bays and Yorkshire boarding at the gable end.

The roof is box profile and the underside is treated to prevent condensation.

What is your favourite feature?

The efficiency of the building.

The factors that can affect an animal’s performance – stress, competition, disease and nutritional imbalance – and the factors that can influence a stockperson’s performance – stress, overwork, injury and long hours – are as varied as each other.

It is the stockperson’s job to manage all these factors, and our shed allows us to do that.

What couldn’t you live without?

The calving gate. It makes the process of calving a cow much smoother and safer. Every farm should have one. Our vet offers clients a 25% discount for assisted calvings if they have a calving gate.

Any other “must-haves” in the shed’s design?

The diagonal feed barriers. It was important to us that every beast had an eating space. We didn’t want cows queuing up to eat.

The diagonal design stops bullying. We didn’t want self-locking yokes because the clanging would have driven us mad.

Quick-emptying water troughs mean the cattle always have fresh water – they can be easily cleaned because they drain from the bottom. All the doors are designed to prevent wildlife getting in.

What features of the system enhance cattle health and performance?

Ensuring good ventilation was a priority when we designed the shed. It is open-sided, but we have since installed wind and weather protection along one side.

We get calves to suck within an hour of birth to cut down on the legacies of poor antibody levels, with the back-up of tubing calves out of heifers with cow’s colostrum.

We aim to use vaccines to prevent disease rather than antibiotics, as once the digestive systems and lungs of calves have been impaired, they remain unthrifty.

This loss of performance is particularly devastating in a pedigree calf because its evaluation at sale depends on development and weight for age.

As a result of vaccination, we very rarely lose a beast. We credit our vaccination policy and herd health status and selection with excellent fertility – our commercial herd achieved a 96% conception rate in 2024.

Have you made any additions since the shed was built?

We put up a shed with two covered silage pits and a dry muck store with drains to a large effluent tank.

It was built to a high specification, so the investment was £120,000, but it was supported by a 40% sustainable production grant.

This, combined with both manure and soil-testing facilities, keeps risks to the environment and costs down. We apply just what nutrients the grassland needs and no more, to ensure no excess leaching to watercourses – or, indeed, out of our bank account.

It is about learning to use what we have, to make sure that our system can absorb the changes we are seeing in the seasons, and that means making proper use of the building.

We are very mindful of complying with the new Sustainable Farming Scheme; if we didn’t have the right buildings, then, like others, we would be less able to adapt.

We must have the facilities to protect the stock, to make proper use of our investment by keeping them off the land when it is very wet or dry.  

© Debbie James