Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Leopold Center fosters growing use of hoop barns

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2011

By MELISSA LAMBERTON, Communications research assistant

The Leopold Center’s new interim director Mark Honeyman knows firsthand the opportunities that can arise from grants awarded by the Center. In 2004, he led a project team that received $20,000 to build a hoop barn for feeding beef cattle – one of the first in the state. Seven years later, hoop structures for beef production abound in Iowa, and pioneering work by the Iowa State University team led the way.

Honeyman was appointed interim director of the Leopold Center in March 2011. A professor of animal science, he has worked at ISU for more than 30 years. He is the longtime coordinator of ISU’s nine Research and Demonstration Farms, and recently accepted the position of associate director at ISU’s BioCentury Research Farm. As a graduate student, he served on the original steering committee that helped shape the Leopold Center in the 1980s.

“I think the Leopold Center frequently is a spark, an igniter, a trigger for innovative work in agriculture in Iowa,” he said.

Honeyman’s own research embodies that kind of impact. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Iowa farmers began considering hoop structures – open-ended structures created by stretching tarp over curved trusses – as alternative housing systems for livestock, primarily hogs. Honeyman and a team of ISU researchers became involved in the early stages of this research with the Leopold Center-funded “Hoop Group” in 1997.

With promising results from swine studies, a second Hoop Group – which included ISU Extension field specialists Shawn Shouse and Darrel Busby, ag research specialist Dallas Maxwell, and ag engineer Jay Harmon – turned their attention to beef cattle production in 2004. The team built a pilot hoop barn at the ISU Armstrong Research and Demonstration Farm near Lewis, and compared it to an open feedlot with a shelter in a three-year study. They concluded that both systems resulted in similar cattle performance, making hoop barns a viable alternative for feeding beef cattle with reduced environmental impacts.

The major benefit of hoop barns, in addition to their affordability and versatility, is that their half-moon profile deflects rain, meaning less runoff and less pollution. That could help farmers meet state and federal regulations for reducing the nutrients in runoff from feedlots that reaches streams and groundwater. Additionally, deep bedding in the structure, like cornstalks or other crop residue, helps absorb urine and captures manure for easier handling.

Honeyman credits the Leopold Center for being the first to commit to the beef hoop barn project. That allowed the Hoop Group to leverage other funds from the Iowa Cattlemen’s Foundation, the Iowa Beef Center, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Wallace Foundation, and private cattle feeders. In addition to numerous articles in the press, the pilot barn had more than 5,000 visitors from eight states and five countries. Furthermore, the Leopold Center encouraged the multi-disciplinary team approach that helped the project succeed.

When Honeyman and Harmon completed a survey of Iowa’s hoop structures in 2010, they discovered their research made a significant impact. Farmers currently use 680 hoop barns for beef cattle production. Of these, 83 percent are used for feeding cattle in bedded confinement, following the model that the ISU team established in their pilot project. The survey estimates that hoop barns now account for about 15 percent of the beef cattle fed in Iowa annually.

Honeyman points out that this increase in hoop barns is happening for environmental, not economic, reasons. Hoop barns cost slightly more than conventional feedlots for similar cattle performance. Honeyman explains that the research gave farmers “a new choice on the menu” for meeting the demands of regulations and concerns about feedlot runoff, as well as helped facilitate a shift to more environmentally-conscious meat production in Iowa.

The Hoop Group continues to study livestock production alternatives. The team’s current study examines the optimum density of cattle in a bedded hoop barn. Honeyman plans to keep the Leopold Center focused on providing grant funds and acting as “the spark for new ideas in Iowa agriculture.”

“This is all possible because of the Leopold Center,” Honeyman said. “You do things that help make changes possible. You never know what people will be touched by a Leopold Center research and demonstration project.”

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2011