Poultry

Present

We wanted to share a quick update on how we manage our chickens these days. You can find more details on our Blog Page, but since the photo here shows our old coop on skids, I thought it’d be helpful to explain our current setup. We don’t use that old coop as our main chicken house anymore. Now, it serves as a grow-out house for young chicks, so it’s still part of our system, just with a new role. Today, our main chicken coop is the mobile one in the photo to the left. We repurposed an old camper trailer frame, building a small house on top that we can move from pasture to pasture. Over time, though, we realized that moving it frequently was a bit too much work. These days, we settle the coop in one spot for a month or two, then move it occasionally to avoid overworking the ground beneath it. As we got older, frequent moving became a bit of a hassle. The coop is about 11x11 feet, and it comfortably houses 35-50 chickens. We’d need to add more roosts if we wanted to go back up to 50, but it’s possible. The setup is easy to clean, thanks to Hardie board floors and a large door for access, and the interior is tall enough for me to stand in. One current challenge, though, is winterizing the coop, and I’m working on a plan for that. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments or send us an email. Thanks!

The early days

We raise Rhode Island Red chickens and found them to be a good breed for our area. They lay well and do well in the winter. We’ve butchered them and the meat is very good. We sell our eggs from the farm, but are limited because we only buy 25 chicks at a time.

The chickens stay in this mobile chicken coop that is built on 2x6 skids. (I have a blog post here showing how I built it.) The coop has held up well since I made it in 2008, and better than I expected. But there are a couple of weaknesses. First the 2x6 skid should have been beefed up with either 4x6s or two 2x6s joined together. This would have add a little more strength to the structure, which would enabled it to be pulled a greater distance with the tractor. Also a couple of years ago it was frozen to the ground and I had get my tractor to pull it out, and the pull slightly cracked the skid.

Second, the coop doesn’t have a floor. By not having a floor the chickens eat the grass inside as well and the manure falls straight the ground. But if it had a floor the chickens could be transported greater distances on the farm so they could “work” on other pastures, especially behind the sheep. Without the floor movement is slow and it has to be pulled with the chickens out of the coop. I’ve found that some lots of chickens will move forward as the coop moves, but others we've raised will move to rear and can be caught under the coop and crushed. So we usually pull the coop with an ATV in the evening when the chickens are out of the polywire net free ranging.

The floor also has another advantage when moving the coop. Chickens need to establish their spot before they’ll stay in a given location. For instance, if I pull the coop say two hundred yards away from where they were last located, most of the flock will not go to the coop even if they can see it. They’ll go back to the spot where they established. With a floor, you can move the coop and keep the chickens in for a period and they establish that spot, and once you open the door you won’t have them running all over the farm looking for the last spot.  With the current design I can only move a few feet at a time.

We do use polywire poultry netting, and it was held up well and does a good job. The only time we lost chickens, beside a hawk attack, has been when we failed or forgot to turn on the electricity. If the chickens are moved periodically and have fresh grass they’ll generally stay in the perimeter of the netting. But if not, they'll fly out. We clip wings to prevent this, but we’ve found that they can muster just enough air time to get out with a clipped wing. The length of the net is 156 ft., and this provides a good area, but we plan on buying an additional net to increase the area the chickens can range.