Poultry

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.