Northern Farmer

Last Saturday was a day with a lot of excitement and lessons learned. Saturday morning I started down the hill to go do chores at about 5:50 hoping to get and early start to the chores that day because I was supposed to rain later on in the day and I wanted to be at least done with chores before it started raining. On my way down to get the milk buckets so I could go milk my cow I happened to glance over at the turkey brooders. We had just gotten 600 turkeys a week ago and had gotten them from two different hatcheries to do a side by side comparison on the quality of the turkeys from the two different hatcheries. We had 300 turkeys in the one 12×12 brooder and 300 in the other. The one brooder was bedded with wood shavings which is what we normally use. The other brooder was bedded with peat moss from Lowe’s because we ran out of wood shavings. So I glance over at the two turkey brooders and notice a few wisps of smoke coming from the one turkey brooder. I immediately ran over and shut of the propane tank that is sitting on a platform that is attached to one of the turkey brooders. I then peek in the door to see what is going on. I knew that I didn’t want to open the door and give any fire that might be in there any oxygen. What I saw was that the floor was pretty much gone but that there was no flames as of yet. The floor had simply smoldered away. I went running inside and woke Joel up and then came running back out to find that the first turkey brooder was up in flames and the wind was blowing the flames onto the other brooder that was about 8 feet away. The brooders where built out of poplar 2×4’s and poplar lap siding so in about 60 seconds the first one went from smoldering to completely engulfed in flames. I went to get the irrigation pump, it can pump about 75 gallons a minute so I figured that was my best bet for trying to save at least the second brooder. It turned out that the hoses for the irrigation pump were over at one of the rental farms because we had used them the other day and thought that we might need them over there again. So in about another 3 min the other turkey brooder was completely engulfed in flames and now there was nothing we could do but watch it burn. The only other thing that had us worried was the propane tank that was against the wall of the second brooder. After the second brooder had been burning for about 5 min we heard a noise like a jet engine warming up and we all turned and ran in the other direction as fast as we could. There was a loud bang as the top of the tank blew off and flames shot into the sky. The flames lasted for a few seconds and then all you heard was the propane hissing out of the tank. The tank hissed out of a open ½ inch pipe for about 32 hours. The tank was only a 100 gallon tank. The site of the fire was cleared up by lunch time and we went about our day thankful that no one got hurt and glad that ours is a diversified farm with small amounts of infrastructure that is spread around the farm so we didn’t lose any other barns or equipment.
The only thing that we can figure out is that the peat moss in the first brooder just dried out to much and the dust settled on top of the burner and started on fire.
So the lessons that we learned from this was Do Not Use Peat Moss for bedding. It just dries out to much.
The other lesson was that there are big advantages to having your farm diversified both in revenue streams and structure.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 7:19 am and is filed under Nathan V. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.