With winter far from over, farmers are being urged to watch for snow building on their barn roofs.
The warning comes after a Brussels area farmer's barn roof came crashing down thanks to the weight of the snow.
"I was going to go up literally going to go up yesterday to clean the snow, but Saturday's snow just kind of changed our plans a bit I guess.," says Steve Rombouts.
Instead of a preventative snow removal, Rombouts has a big mess on his hands.
Roughly one quarter of the roof of one his pig barns collapsed Saturday.
Amazingly no pigs inside the barn at the time of the collapse died.
"The winds changed from other years past, usually I'd be worried about the south side of the barn with snow load and this year the snow seemed to accumulate on the north side," adds Rombouts.
And bigger isn't necessarily better.
Larger and wider barns are more susceptible to collapsing.
"The types of barns we've been building have changed over the years. Namely they've got bigger, wider and larger. And especially when they start getting wider that presents some challenges in terms of snow sliding off the roof," says Howard House, an OMAFRA engineer.
Rombouts has an engineer working on reconstruction and reinforcement plans so he can get the hole fixed so he can get back to farming.
