Bata Farms saves money with pig barn conversions

Joe Bata and sons, Chris and Mark, are handy with nailers, saws and just about all construction tools. They have built or moved in and renovated about every building and grain bin on their Adams, N.D., farm.

“If we’re not out in the field or working cattle, we’re building something,” Mark says.

Their most ambitious project has been the conversion of the farm’s hog barns into shops, a storage shed, parts storage warehouse, office, and a lunchroom and man cave.

Bata Farms was built on hogs. Joe, now 70, started raising pigs soon after he graduated from North Dakota State University in 1972. He developed a 150-sow specific pathogen free herd. He sold boars and gilts to producers who needed to repopulate their barns with disease-free pigs raised in isolation. Joe built all the pig barns himself.

Joe also farmed. He grew wheat, barley, corn and several other crops — and raised registered Simmental cattle. Chris joined the operation in 2000 and Mark in 2006.

The Batas got out of the hog business in 2000. The market for finished pigs was just 17 cents per pound that year, and the demand for independently raised SPF stock was drying up. Most vertically integrated pork producers were getting gilts and boars raised by their partners.

“We would have had to join one of the corporations and expand,” Joe says.

Although the SPF business had been profitable for many years, Joe decided it was time to do something else.

“We had the opportunity to do more with the registered cattle and expand our grain farm,” he says.

Barn conversions

The swine barns didn’t sit empty long. The Batas started converting the barns in 2002. The first project was to turn one of the two farrowing barns into a lunchroom and man cave. At 24 feet wide by 58 feet long, the room is big enough for community events. It is also a perfect spot during hunting season for family members and neighbors to get together and try the Bata Farms’ infamous jerky.

In 2004, they turned the second 24-foot-by-58-foot farrowing barn into a storage shed.

“It is a big garage for our toys,” says Joe, who keeps a 2013 Ford Shelby Mustang GT500 inside.

In 2008, they remodeled the pig nursery into a parts room. The 36-foot-by-78-foot space is as big as the parts rooms in some implement dealerships.

In 2009, they built a 42-foot-by-104-foot shop out of the old gestation barn. Converting it was an engineering challenge. The swine barn sidewalls were only 8-foot high — not nearly tall enough for a shop — and there was an 8-foot deep manure pit under the slatted concrete floor.

The Batas unbolted the sidewalls from the foundation, jacked up the barn, added 10-foot extensions to the walls and set the building back down on the original foundation footings. The shop now has 18-foot sidewalls. They installed a 16-foot-by-24-foot door on one end, which allows them to get their biggest tractors, semis and combines inside and out with ease.

The Batas took out the barn’s old slatted concrete floor, filled in the empty manure pit underneath the building with clay soil, packed it, covered it with 1-inch-thick foam board insulation and poured a 6-inch concrete slab with in-floor water heat over the top.

The floor is especially strong, Chris says, because they left the pit’s concrete walls in place.

“We don’t worry about driving two loaded semis in here,” he says.

They followed the same procedure in 2018 and converted the 42-foot-by-104-foot finishing barn into a second shop.

They also re-sided and reroofed all the buildings with steel.

All the buildings are connected to each other by enclosed alleys, which had been used to move pigs to the different barns.

The Batas like everything about the new buildings, especially the price. They spent about half of what a new shop would have cost.

“I think there are many old barns out there that could be converted,” Joe says.