Top 8 Must-Have Barn Tools for Your Homestead

Today we're gonna talk barn tools and the tools that we have at hand every day that we find essential for the barn. And one tool in particular that I think nobody should live without. This is gonna be the last segment on the barn for a while because spring is springing, the sun's out, I'm starting to see green out there and I'm really excited to get back out into the pasture, back out into the garden, just looking forward to that season. But before we get there, before we exit the barn, I've got a lot of great questions, a lot of great discussion about this barn. It's been fun to see your guys' thoughts and questions. And what's come up is some kind of must-have barn tools. What do you gotta have in the barn? It certainly varies, every homestead's a little bit different, every farm is a little bit different, but there really are just some key tools that are kind of must-haves when you're working with animals and you're working in the barn. So it's not everything you're ever gonna need, but it's the things that we couldn't live without day-to-day. Let's talk about rakes first. Rakes are essential for a lot of reasons and you need a couple different kinds of rakes. Of course, you need a nice, hard, people call this a landscape rake, but a nice, hard, heavy-duty, good quality landscape rake. Long handles, look at this, this is almost as tall as me. This is a great handle. I prefer wood, but they're harder to find these days. But you want a nice, long handle, you don't want something you gotta work like this on, it's bad for your back, it makes you sore. But you want a good quality, wide, hard rake for raking up some of the thicker, heavier material that you're gonna have to deal with. Next, you want a good leaf rake. This is an old one, there's lots of different styles. I like these old triangular-styled leaf rakes, but there's lots of different kinds. You got a lot of light material a lot of times. It's really important to keep your barn clean and tidy, so a lot of tools have to do with that, or moving material around. And so you need a good leaf rake or two. And I like this old style, again, wood. This is a little longer-handled one, almost as tall as me, really like this. Makes it a good reach, I don't have to bend over to get the job done. So a good quality leaf rake or two. Hey, don't pinch on the cost of tools, don't buy the cheap stuff. You're gonna use these things, you're gonna break them if they're cheap. So whatever you get, whether you go find something old from the antique store, the thrift store that's salvageable, whether you buy something new, make sure it's good quality. Let's talk pitchforks. Every barn, every homestead needs probably multiple pitchforks and different ones. Pitchforks come in different sizes with different tines. You can see this is a four-tine pitchfork. There's a couple three-tines up there. You can get them with five all the way to these really wide ones that are very narrow in between. I don't know how many tines they have. And there's different ones for different purposes and that's what you need to know is what kind of material you're hauling and when. This one, small material, is gonna fall through it very easily, but it's gonna go into hay and denser material much more easily. Sometimes even a three-tine needs to do that. Sometimes you've got light, loose weight material and you need the tines closer together to grab more of that material, but it's easier to push into. So you really want to think about what you're using. We do pretty well for most things with these or some shovels, which I'll get to in a moment. But you need a few pitchforks. Again, you want ones that serve you properly. I like nice wooden handles. Again, nice long handles are always, always good. Much more, you're gonna have much more problems with short handles. You can reach here, especially when you're scooping, shoveling, you can scoop stuff and you're not having to bend down so much and putting as much pressure on your back. Really, really important when you're doing this work. It's just gonna help your body stay in better condition. So pitchforks, gotta have a few different kinds that serve you well. Shovels are another one. Must have, obviously. There's a few different shovels. This is just down, a rounded shovel, pointed nose shovel. You can call it different things. This is a larger one. This is good for moving material that's not super heavy and very, very handy. And so you want at least one of these. You want a square shovel right here. Don't have it. It's wandered off somewhere. And I'll give you another tip on tracking your tools in a moment on a homestead like ours. It's also nice to have a smaller nose shovel. Sometimes you gotta do some digging. You gotta work through some muck, some stuff that's gotten compacted and heavy. And this is easier to get in and dig with and move material if you're having to move heavy material. You wear yourself out with a larger shovel and if you gotta move heavy material. So having a smaller one is on hand. It's great. This handle's a little shorter than I like, but I love the head on this. So we use this one a whole lot. Another great go-to is this guy right here. If you're doing deep bedding like we are with wood shavings, they're very light and you need to move a lot of them. So a big old, this is probably like a snow shovel or something, but this just allows you to move a lot of things like shavings. If you're doing the deep bedding, like I've talked about in the other videos, you're at a wheelbarrow and shovel scale. This is really great. It's gonna go a lot faster than these when you're having to just get those wood shavings or different things in there. For us, because we do a lot of wood shavings, this is very, very handy, this large shovel. It's aluminum, it's lightweight, wood handle, a little short for my liking, but it works really, really well. Wheelbarrow, you gotta have a wheelbarrow, probably a couple, depending on your scale. You're moving a lot of different things with the wheelbarrow. I like to have one dedicated to the barn. Otherwise, you come out here to do some work and then you spend a half an hour trying to find it on the property somewhere. So, really recommend you have one dedicated to the barn. You have it heavy duty. A lot of times, you're gonna be managing manure in it and the manure, the urine, the materials that go in here, definitely are hard on the material. So, I like a good old metal. This is an old Jackson wheelbarrow. I've had this thing for nearly 25 years. Very, very good wheelbarrow. These are a little hard to find and they're expensive. This has actually been through day-to-day construction work, concrete mixed in and materials hauled in it every day for years. It's actually getting lighter duty here in the barn, but that's how well-made it is. So, buying one really good one is great. The plastic ones can be pretty nice if they're heavy duty. They're gonna last, but make sure the thing is well-built and has good amount of volume in it. They've got some newer, different ideas today. They've got ones you can pull along that are more like a wagon, the dump. Those can be great too. To me, there's just nothing like a good old wheelbarrow. I like the wooden handles. Very, very essential to have a couple of those. Five-gallon buckets. Five-gallon buckets for a million different things from trying not to haul water too much, but sometimes you need to. So, hauling water, hauling grain, different feeds, fermenting grains. I've got a video on that, how we ferment grains. These are great. So, you always wanna have a bunch of these around. You can make waters out of them. It just, we can never have enough. So, gotta have some of those on hand. Good metal scoops. There's all kinds of scoops. There's certainly plastic ones. I find the plastic ones just break too easy. Gonna pay a little more for this, but this is never gonna wear out. Gonna last forever. So, you want a good scoop always. You also need some good storage containers for a variety of things. I love these 50-gallon barrels. We keep our salt and our kelp in here and keeps it dry, keeps it safe and protected. These are just food-grade barrels. Very, very important for storage. You can also store grain in them. We're storing long-term grain at a larger scale, so they're not in here, but this, again, keeps them dry, keeps the critters out of them. Good old galvanized cans work as well, depending on your scale. So, during the season when we're feeding different things and pulling from our bulk stores of grain and storing short-term, we use these galvanized barrels. Works really, really well. I wanna tell ya, one tool right here in front of us, these racks right here. For years, our tools leaned over in the corner, falling over here and there, disappearing, don't know where to find them. There are not very many good solutions out there for storing your tools in an organized way. You know where they go. I found these racks. They're metal. They're heavy-duty. This is the tool, a wall tool, that no homestead should be without. These things are so cool. They'll last forever. They're not gonna break. You know, they can get banged up when you're taking your tools in and out of them. Absolutely love these, whatever kind of hand tools it is you're gonna have. We've got them here in the barn. We've got them over in the garden. We've got them down by the house, and it has made all the difference in staying organized with our tools and keeping our tools in the right place. One final tip, if you have multiple places and tools, you've probably struggled with having the right tools in the right place in the right time, and we've gotten to where we've got tools dedicated for the barn. We've got hand tools dedicated for the garden. Again, down by the house for stuff going on around the house. They still tend to wander, so what we're about to do this year is we're gonna color-code the handles on all of our tools. We actually started this last year, and so we're gonna have a color. I don't know what it's gonna be for the barn. We'll call it blue. The garden's gonna be green, and the house will be whatever color Carolyn wants. Last year, we found some tape and wrapped it on the end so that we knew if we found a tool somewhere, and it had, say, blue tape on it, oh, that goes in the barn. Somebody forgot to put it away. They know right where to go, right where it belongs. The tape didn't work. It fell off just because we were using them, so this year, we're gonna actually sand down the end of the handles and paint them and color-code them, and for a busy household like ours, I don't know about you, but we've got so many people, so many tools, different locations. Color-coding the ends of the handles is gonna help us keep our tools, or at least get them back to where they belong so we can stay organized.