A Study on Structural Characteristics of the Cattle Barns in Ispir County of Erzurum Province

This study was carried out to determine the structural characteristics of the barns and related problems in the cattle enterprises in Ispir county of Erzurum province. For this purpose, a face-to-face survey was conducted with 325 randomly selected enterprise owners. It was determined that 94.7% of the barns in the enterprises in the county consisted of tied free-stall barns. Furthermore, 33% of the barns were between 16 and 20 years old and 31.2% of them were older than 21 years. Stone (95.4%) and brick (66.2%) were commonly used as building materials in the construction of the barn walls, and mainly galvanized sheet metal (77.4%) was used for the roof. The barn floor was also determined to be mostly concrete (61.9%) or stone (48.2%). Some of the standard barn elements were available in almost all of the enterprises in the county, such as feeder (100.0%), urinary canal (85.3%), window (96.7%), however other elements such as the feeding alley (6.6%), automatic waterer (1.3%) and ventilation holes (22.8%) were available in a small number of enterprises. The relationship between the number of windows in the barns, the level of farm size and the level of education of the breeders was found to be statistically significant ( P<0.01). The percentage of enterprises with two windows in their barns was the highest (48.2%) in the county, and this was followed by enterprises with three, four, one and five windows in the barn, respectively.