Shipping Containers

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I have 2 - 40 footers.
I use them to store round bales for the cattle and square bales for the hay recyclers.
I always check the moisture content with a meter before I put them in the containers because if they're wet they will mold.
If I do get some to come back to high in moisture I have a couple of fans that I just run 24 hours a day until it's dry.
I also use the big bags of desicant that are made for containers
I have mine set far enough apart that I am setting metal roof trusses between them and weld them to the containers and mine will turn into an equipment Barn.
 
The biggest problem I observed over in E Texas is that the shipping containers have flat roofs and don't shed rain water very well. Take a ladder with you to see how much corrosion is on top, and a flashlight to see how much is underneath. Rust, never sleeps.
 
Guess it's all local climate dependant, but UP here some people have tried storing hay in them. And the condensation dripping off the roof and walls turns the hay into slime.
 
chevytaHOE5674 said:
Guess it's all local climate dependant, but UP here some people have tried storing hay in them. And the condensation dripping off the roof and walls turns the hay into slime.
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I've seen that happen too, even on smaller steel buildings. The little one under the arrow appears to be sheetmetal and metal siding but in reality the tin roof was added over 1/4" roof, as was the siding on the back.

DSC00320a.jpg

It was originally a big steel box, that was carried around on a 2 ton work truck for road crews. Had a bench down one side for them to ride in. All steel, including an internal 2" pipe frame..I added the tin roof over the original roof to make it drain off toward the back instead off to the sides. I only used it to store volatile chemicals and herbicide/insecticide, but the roof dripped condensate water all year except the hottest driest parts of Texas summer. It always had that musty smell to it no matter what. Anything in cardboard boxes or paper/cloth sacks rotted pretty quick.
 
My brother bought a 40 foot high cube in December 2021. $4675 paid to the driver when delivered. Gave them an ag exemption form and paid no state sales tax. Guaranteed to not leak and it did not. Pretty good shape other than faded paint. Doors sealed well. He used it to store cotton seed that he fed to cows. I expect the price is considerably more now with inflation.

Facebook and craigslist will have people offering to sell them. Looks to me like some are either scams or people just acting as a middleman. Take your order and money, place an order with a real company and make the markup. Never pay in advance.
 
greybeard said:
I've seen that happen too, even on smaller steel buildings. The little one under the arrow appears to be sheetmetal and metal siding but in reality the tin roof was added over 1/4" roof, as was the siding on the back.

View attachment 36867

It was originally a big steel box, that was carried around on a 2 ton work truck for road crews. Had a bench down one side for them to ride in. All steel, including an internal 2" pipe frame..I added the tin roof over the original roof to make it drain off toward the back instead off to the sides. I only used it to store volatile chemicals and herbicide/insecticide, but the roof dripped condensate water all year except the hottest driest parts of Texas summer. It always had that musty smell to it no matter what. Anything in cardboard boxes or paper/cloth sacks rotted pretty quick.
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spray foam on the bottomside of the roof or get sheets of foam insulation and glue it up
 
Named'em Tamed'em said:
There are stacks of them around here for sale. Seattle area.
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I can verify that there are always stacks of them in the Seattle and Tacoma area. Lol, my son drives from a hay yard in Oregon to the ports of Seattle and Tacoma daily to deliver shipping containers of hay that are sent to Korea, Japan and other parts of that world. I guess they pay a premium for the product there. Like $8k per container plus shipping costs per load, his company sends 15 trucks five days a week year round for the past twenty years.
 
Dave said:
On a daily basis I see trains several miles long going by with nothing but containers. Full ones headed east and empty containers headed back to the west. I think they haul the majority of them back to China for another load. The ships are going back that direction anyway.
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You can see the difference in the container ships and how high they sit in the water when the containers are empty. They anchor out in front our rental house quite often.
 
Schmitty said:
I can verify that there are always stacks of them in the Seattle and Tacoma area. Lol, my son drives from a hay yard in Oregon to the ports of Seattle and Tacoma daily to deliver shipping containers of hay that are sent to Korea, Japan and other parts of that world. I guess they pay a premium for the product there. Like $8k per container plus shipping costs per load, his company sends 15 trucks five days a week year round for the past twenty years.
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I know this sounds pretty trivial and in a roundabout way would only make a miner dent.

But you take a 10 acre hay field and cut hay off of it continuously for a number of years. Deplete it of its nutrients it takes to grow hay. Most farmers periodically replace those nutrients in some way.

But even those depleted get redeposited some where else in someway. Some turned into mature after being fed to a cow. Then those nutrients the cow converted some of those nutrients to meat, that is then converted to manure by whatever eats it.

But all & all those nutrients needed for that hay field to grow grass for the most part stay on the continent where they come from except for those exported to another continent in the form of a food is one way. Then you take other forms of agriculture products like the hay being shipped ?
 
What I was getting at is I wonder how much if any significant amount of a continents nutrients can be lost through biological forms of exports.
 
I know the place my son works for gets it's hay products from dozens of different farmers over a very large part of Oregon. They spend the summers sending drivers all over to haul the stuff to storage until it gets sent overseas. Now I can tell you that I would not feed the stuff to my own cattle, as it's not what I would call high quality. Life sustaining, yes, but your not going to put weight on with it.
 
504RP said:
What I was getting at is I wonder how much if any significant amount of a continents nutrients can be lost through biological forms of exports.
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Not to any great extent. Erosion, by both wind and water would play a far far greater part in the loss of natural resources than the export of finished ag products.
 
T
Dave said:
On a daily basis I see trains several miles long going by with nothing but containers. Full ones headed east and empty containers headed back to the west. I think they haul the majority of them back to China for another load. The ships are going back that direction anywayere
Click to expand...

There was a while there few years ago that folks in California/Arizona were filling them with Hay and Alfalfa and shipping them to China. Made more money and shipping was cheaper than shipping them east over the Mt's or even in state. The carriers were just happy to have a good to back haul. Even a single dollar per conex is better than shipping 100's of cans empty.
 
Mountaintown Creek Ranch said:
I have 2 - 40 footers.
I use them to store round bales for the cattle and square bales for the hay recyclers.
I always check the moisture content with a meter before I put them in the containers because if they're wet they will mold.
If I do get some to come back to high in moisture I have a couple of fans that I just run 24 hours a day until it's dry.
I also use the big bags of desicant that are made for containers
I have mine set far enough apart that I am setting metal roof trusses between them and weld them to the containers and mine will turn into an equipment Barn.
Click to expand...
That's what I have in mind doing. There are so many chicken farms going out of business it's pretty easy to find metal trusses that span 50'. I built one pole barn using telephone poles, chicken house trusses & the roof tin from them. It was a 50 long x 75' wide. Seems like it took 31 telephone poles to build it. Built it by myself with the exception of my wife and daughter standing the sheet metal up for me to pull on up on the roof. They were 30 foot sheets 38 inches wide. Dug all of the post holes using an auger and post hole diggers. Would never have got them dug that way had the soil not been almost like top soil where I was digging. Was 40 years old when I built it. What I would give to still be in good enough health to work like that again.
 
504RP said:
That's what I have in mind doing. There are so many chicken farms going out of business it's pretty easy to find metal trusses that span 50'. I built one pole barn using telephone poles, chicken house trusses & the roof tin from them. It was a 50 long x 75' wide. Seems like it took 31 telephone poles to build it. Built it by myself with the exception of my wife and daughter standing the sheet metal up for me to pull on up on the roof. They were 30 foot sheets 38 inches wide. Dug all of the post holes using an auger and post hole diggers. Would never have got them dug that way had the soil not been almost like top soil where I was digging. Was 40 years old when I built it. What I would give to still be in good enough health to work like that again.
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I was thinking the same thing. I have always done almost everything by myself. Now i cant do lots of things. It really bothers me.
 
Cowman42 said:
T


There was a while there few years ago that folks in California/Arizona were filling them with Hay and Alfalfa and shipping them to China. Made more money and shipping was cheaper than shipping them east over the Mt's or even in state. The carriers were just happy to have a good to back haul. Even a single dollar per conex is better than shipping 100's of cans empty.
Click to expand...
There are several hay companies in the PNW who buy hay and ship it to Japan. One in Ellensburg WA is pretty big. They have been doing it for 40 years or more. They recompress the bale. A standard small square ends up being about 2x2
 

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