Fire consumed a barn owned by Iowa State and killed two boars early Saturday morning.

“The Story County Sheriff’s Department received a call around 12:30 in the morning,” said Department of Public Safety Capt. Rob Bowers. “When they got to the barn it was a total loss. It is my understanding that when the sheriff’s department got there it was fully engulfed in flames.”

The barn was located five miles southwest of Ames at the North Woodruff farm on 500th Avenue. The Story County Sheriff’s Department dispatched fire fighters to battle the fire, Bowers said, but when they learned the barn belonged to the university, the sheriff informed DPS.

The cause of the fire could not yet be determined because so little of the structure survived the blaze, Bowers said.

“At this point we don’t know what caused the fire. We will have to take a look at everything that may have caused it,” Bowers said. “There was electrical power to the barn — we can’t eliminate that possibility. There was obviously not an electrical storm that night, so we don’t really know what could have caused it.

“Given it was a total loss, it could be very hard to find a point of origin, but there are ways they can do it,” Bowers said.

The barn was used by the agriculture department for livestock, said Agricultural Specialist Bob Hibbing. The barn also stores pigs for breeding for the university’s teaching farm.

“At the time, it housed some boars for the animal teaching program,” Hibbing said. “We lost a total of two boars, but there were just four boars in the barn. The total loss for the boars was around $1,500.”

The university has used the barn for quite a while, Hibbing said.

“It was around 50 or 60 years old,” he said. “It was built just to be a livestock barn for cattle and horses for a private landowner. The university later acquired the property for its agriculture school.”

The property has served many purposes, but it has primarily been used for livestock storage.

“It is just used to keep boars,” said Mark Gannon, land manager for the agriculture department. “In the past, they have used it to store many different kinds of livestock such as cows and horses. It was also used for hay and straw storage.”

The College of Agriculture will not be affected by the fire, said David Topel, dean of the College of Agriculture.

“At this time there are no plans to rebuild the building,” Topel said. “It was a facility for storage of hay and straw. It will not effect the school of agriculture in any significant way and will not impact our programs as a whole.”