One man's trash - Finding new uses for old freezers

I mentioned in my stories that this farm of ours does not meet my expectation of a farm. I am from the prairies where farms are rolling as far as the eye can see. That being said, our peaceful little valley can seem quite big sometimes when we consider all the things we need to maintain.

We recently had a batch of pigs which went to slaughter in late April. The past month has been booked up with visits, events, and other work projects and so we had not been out to tidy up.

I was out by our cow barn, which serves as a holding pen for livestock before pickup, as well as a storage area for hay and any grain that does not go in the silo (mostly food for the pigs). I stopped by the barn with the truck to load some more hay for our horses. While I was climbing up to open the top doors, I noticed our pig grain had been invaded by rodents.

We do not normally keep a lot of this around, but we tend to have a few extra bags after a batch of pigs. I suppose one of the bags was torn open by the exodus of the pigs, leaving it ripe for picking. Given that we do not come out there often when we have no livestock in the area, the rats setup shop.

So I started researching a way to store this grain. We already use the silo for cow grain, so we need something to store the pig stuff in. I stumbled across the most sensible idea, yet it was completely unknown to me until then. Old dead freezers. Amazing. It made sense and the beauty of this idea is the fact that we own so many freezers and they will die. Unfortunately I needed one sooner.

I posted up an add for old dead freezers on Used Victoria. Within a few days I had a few hits. One of them was nearby and was also a large freezer. Perfect. So this past weekend, Marc and I did a run about town and picked up a large and small chest freezer for storage. The large one had the lid falling off and it smelled terrible. A good pressure-washing cleaned it out. I then made a reinforced plywood lid for it. And now we have storage for grain, and one less freezer at the dump.

The smaller freezer will be used for a similar need at our horse stable, so owners can keep a bag or two in reserve. I love doing things like this. Out-of-the-(ice)box thinking to save money and landfill space.

Now to find the next thing I can reuse for good on our farm...