Gone are the days when turning on the barn lights was only good for making sure you could walk from point A to point B without stepping on a shovel or kicking over a bucket of water. Today, smart and effective lighting is used not only to illuminate your buildings, but also a sophisticated lighting system will make a positive contribution to livestock productivity, especially during winter (indoor) months. Controlling the biorhythms of your animals helps to maintain productivity and establish successful breeding patterns when winter daylight hours are few.  

As in the home, barns can take advantage of a mix of natural and artificial lighting. Natural light, of course, is the most cost-efficient form of lighting you can use. It is an important factor in maintaining good animal health and is a determining factor in regulating animal biorhythms for milk and egg production and breeding cycles. You can take advantage of natural light by using layered curtains or translucent materials such as plastic sheeting rather than solid paneling on the walls. Building translucent materials into existing structures—a row under the eaves, the top half of aisle doors, or transparent roofing (like skylights)—decreases the amount of artificial lighting needed except on cloudy days. Polycarbonate, a plastic material often used with metal roofing, is a good choice for creating natural light.

But, lighting is also functional—you need to see to do your job. Unlike in your home, placing fixtures in central, overhead locations may not be the best use of artificial lighting. For holding stalls, overhead lighting will create shadows on the floor. This creates difficulties for farriers and vets who need to be able to see to shoe horses or examine lower extremities. Consider placing lighting at the corners or wall edges, shining inward, to light lower-leg areas.

Another smart use of lighting, and one that will reduce costs, is to distinguish between “task” and “walk around” lights. You probably don’t need as much wattage to complete simple, menial tasks like feeding and watering. Consider using simple fluorescent fixtures to light walkways and entryways. For more critical tasks like milking or grooming or cleaning stalls, high efficiency compact fluorescent lighting will be more effective and give you the illumination you need to make sure these work-focused jobs are completed mistake-free.

Motion sensors and light timers are also excellent energy-saving devices for interior rooms—tool rooms, feed rooms, bathrooms, and office areas—where lights might be accidentally left on. Whatever you decide, lamps should be placed to maximize the illumination value of the largest area. It all depends on the equipment and dimensions of your building.

Livestock are sensitive animals. Their day/night rhythms are of enormous importance and particular light levels are necessary to impact the difference between the day/night rhythms in their bodies. In short, the more light, the more milk and egg productivity. In winter, with the lack of natural light and when animals are indoors, livestock will benefit most from lighting control. The goal is to maintain healthy and continuous year-round milk and egg production.

For cows and other milk producers, an optimal lighting period is 16 hours followed by an eight hour dark period, mimicking the light duration of a long summer day even in the bleakest of mid-winters. Effective artificial lighting will help the herd to maintain summertime productivity levels and, even in summer, lighting control may provide additional benefits on cloudy days.

Providing light for chickens has become a complex and multi-faceted process. These days, if you want to maintain consistent egg-laying patterns, you need to do more than screw in a bulb and flick on the switch. Inside the coop, light color and light intensity are integral for managing both the mood and reproduction cycles of your birds.  

For chickens, lighting has three major functions:

• Facilitate sight
• Stimulate internal cycles due to day-length changes
• Initiate hormone release

Bulb choice is important. When selecting bulbs for your coop, some things to consider are:

• Initial cost relative to operating cost
• Bulb efficiency
• Rated life (hours)
• Color temperature

It’s important to do the necessary research to optimize the production of your birds. For instance, it has been reported that blue light has a calming effect on birds and red has been used to reduce cannibalism and feather picking. It has also been shown that blue-green light stimulates growth in chickens while orange-red stimulates reproduction. That’s a lot of information to digest. But some important rules to keep in mind for lighting coops are to never increase the duration of intensity of light during the growing period.  Similarly, never decrease the duration or intensity of light during the production period. Complex! It is definitely worth your while to consult with the local extension service about the best way to construct an effective lighting system for your coop.

But here’s one simple and useful tip—dirty lamps will decrease light output by as much as 15-20%. Clean your lamps off at least once per week!

Remember the warnings of old regarding heat lamps? Don’t touch—you’ll burn yourself! Keep back—you might cause a fire! There was a lot of sense in those warning, of course. Heat lamps are a significant fire risk in the stable, stall, and coop. Every winter, many farms lose building and animals due to fires caused by heat lamps. After all, the standard 250 watt infrared heat lamp bulb can heat to over 480° F. And in dry winter weather, bedding and paneling represent significant fire-risk.  Fortunately, heat lamps have come a long way since the days of exposed bulbs and flimsy cords.  

Basically, do not use cheap and poorly made heat lamps. Invest in safe and well-built lamps. When selecting heat lamps look for models with bulb-cages or enclosed bulbs so if the lamp falls or is pulled down, the likelihood of the bulb touching hay or bedding is greatly reduced.  Similarly, hard glass bulbs are much less likely to shatter and cause injury. Also, use lamps with heavier gauge cords (12 gauge).  Cheap extension cords are more prone to damage and can’t support the heavy electrical draw needed to heat the bulbs.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, the old saying goes.  When using heat lamps, use well built ones.  But also avoid linking together multiple cords. Have a fire extinguisher nearby, just in case. Better yet, and if you’re set up to do so, use heat lamps only in buildings separate from your main buildings. That way if you do experience a fire, you’ll have a much better chance of containing it and limiting the damage.

Be mindful of a few handy facts, too.  As previously noted, the average 250 watt bulb gets hot—up to and over 480° F.  Animal bedding, though, like sawdust and hay/straw, will spontaneously combust at 212° F. Plywood flooring or wall panels will spontaneously combust at 400° F—definitely something to keep in mind when thinking about light placement.  A good rule of thumb is to mount heat lamps at a minimum of 24” from everything.

So, hopefully this article has “illuminated” the importance and utility of effective and smart lighting around the homestead.  Some issues are straightforward—barn lighting etc. Other lighting concerns are more complex, particularly when thinking about how lighting affects the mood and productivity of your chickens or livestock breeding patterns.  

No doubt we haven’t said all there is to say here. What have we failed to mention? Enlighten us in the comments section!