Agricultural and equipment storage buildings in Erie County, PA

Machine sheds, hay storage, and livestock housing — 40x60 and up, with the sidewall height and door openings modern equipment needs.

If this is what you're planning, you're in good company — it's one of the more common builds in this county.

Where people are when they get in touch

• An older barn that costs more to patch each year than it's worth
• A herd or flock that has outgrown its housing
• Hay stored under tarps and losing value every wet month
• Equipment wintering outside because the old bank barn can't take modern machinery

The usual approach

Farm buildings are usually quoted by footprint and use: machine storage wants tall sidewalls and wide door openings, hay wants ventilation, and livestock housing adds interior work. Buildings used solely for agriculture are exempt from most PA Uniform Construction Code permitting, which a builder who works farms will know how to document.

A farm building is bought by what has to fit inside it and what the roof has to carry. In Erie County both of those push the specification harder than a national price guide suggests: modern equipment needs sidewall height and door width that a 1970s bank barn never had, and the roof has to be engineered for a snow load that cannot be read off the national map.

Sidewall height is the number that decides the building

Almost every farm building that gets outgrown was outgrown vertically. A 12-foot sidewall clears most tractors and a pickup with a topper. A combine with the head off, a tall-sided dump trailer, or a telehandler with the boom stowed wants 16 feet, and a grain rig or a lifted sprayer can want 18. Sidewall height is cheap to add at framing and close to impossible to add later, because raising the eave means new columns, new trusses and new steel.

The practical rule builders here use is to measure the tallest thing you own, add the door header allowance, then add the height of whatever you expect to buy next. A building sized to today's equipment is a building you will be quoting an addition for inside ten years.

Post spacing, embedment and the frost line

Post-frame buildings carry the roof on columns rather than on a continuous wall, so the spacing of those columns is the structural decision. Eight feet on centre is the standard across the trade. Lighter agricultural loads sometimes allow 10 or 12 feet, which saves posts and holes; a heavy snow specification pushes the other way, to six feet, or keeps eight-foot spacing and puts more truss into the building instead.

Erie County's design frost depth is 48 inches, so columns and any footings have to reach below that. The column bears on a poured footing pad at the bottom of the hole, sized to the load and the soil, and the backfill is either compacted granular material or concrete depending on the builder and the uplift the engineering calls for.

Columns are usually pressure-treated solid-sawn timber or laminated columns built up from treated plies. Laminated columns are straighter, and because only the below-grade portion needs the heavy treatment they are often the cheaper way to get a tall, true sidewall. Where an owner wants no treated wood in the ground at all, the alternatives are a precast concrete pier with a bracket at the top, or a plastic sleeve over the buried portion — both add cost and both are worth asking about on ground that stays wet.

Trusses, span and why the snow number matters here

Farm buildings are wanted clear inside, and post-frame delivers that: engineered wood trusses commonly clear-span 40, 60 and 80 feet with no interior posts, and spans past 100 feet are built. Trusses sit on the columns rather than on every stud bay, typically at 8 to 12 feet on centre, with purlins running between them to carry the roof steel.

What the trusses have to be designed for is the local snow load, and this is where Erie County stops being ordinary. The county is a designated case-study area in ASCE 7-22, which means the ground snow load cannot be looked up on the national map — it has to be established for the site. The City of Erie publishes 40 psf as its own adopted figure, and the case-study designation is precisely what stops that figure being assumed to apply everywhere else in the county. A truss package engineered for southern Pennsylvania is cheaper here for exactly one reason.

Drift is the second half of the problem and the one that collapses buildings. Snow does not sit evenly: it piles where a lower roof meets a taller wall, in the valley between a barn and a lean-to, and behind anything that interrupts the wind. If the building has or will have a lean-to, the drift surcharge belongs in the original engineering, not in a revision after the addition goes up.

Door openings and what actually fits through them

Equipment door width is measured in regret. A 16-foot slider is standard and too narrow for a lot of modern machinery; 20, 24 and 30-foot openings are routine on newer machine sheds. The wider the opening, the heavier the header carrying the roof across it, so door width is a framing decision made at design time and priced accordingly.

Sliding doors are the traditional and cheaper answer, they need no headroom above the opening, and they tolerate being hit. Overhead doors seal far better and are what you want if the building will ever be heated, but they eat sidewall height above the opening and the tracks are in the way of a hoist. Hydraulic and bifold doors are the premium option for very wide openings.

Ventilation, hay and condensation

Under a steel roof, warm moist air hits a cold panel and rains back down on whatever is stored below. In a hay building that is a fire and spoilage problem, in a livestock building it is a health problem, and in a machine shed it is rust. The fix is not insulation on its own — it is a continuous ridge vent paired with adequate soffit or eave intake, so air moves, plus a condensation control layer under the roof steel.

That layer is usually either a factory-applied felt or fleece backing bonded to the underside of the panel, a reflective bubble product, or closed-cell spray foam where the budget allows. Hay in particular wants generous eave-to-ridge airflow and open gable ends or vented sidewalls; a tight, unvented hay building is the worst combination available.

The agricultural exemption — what it does and does not do

Pennsylvania's Uniform Construction Code exempts genuine agricultural buildings from most construction permitting. The exemption turns on use: buildings used solely to house farm implements, livestock or hay qualify. It excludes habitable space, and it excludes commercial use — the moment a building is rented out, used for a business, or fitted with living quarters, it is not an agricultural building in the code's eyes.

Three things the exemption does not do, and all three catch people out:

• It does not remove the electrical permit. If the exempt building has electrical service, a permit and inspection for the electrical work are still required.
• It does not remove zoning. Setbacks, height limits, lot coverage and permitted uses are the township's, and Pennsylvania is a home-rule state — the rules are genuinely different from one township to the next.
• It does not remove floodplain, stormwater or driveway approvals. A large roof sheds a lot of water, and impervious-coverage thresholds catch farm buildings routinely.

Floors and site work

Plenty of machine sheds are built over compacted gravel, and for cold storage that is a defensible choice. Where a slab is wanted, four inches with fibre or mesh reinforcement is the residential-scale default; equipment floors that will carry point loads from jacks, tracked machines or grain go to five or six inches with rebar, and the thickened edge under the columns is detailed with the building.

The site itself is a line item, not an afterthought. On the lake plain the soils hold water and a pad has to be stripped, raised and drained rather than levelled. On the higher till ground south of the escarpment drainage is generally better, but slopes need cutting and filling. Either way the finished floor should sit above the surrounding grade, with the water given somewhere to go that is not the doorway.