Heated Chicken Waterer

If you have chickens in a cold climate, odds are high that you'll eventually want a device to keep their water from freezing. (The alternative is to take them fresh, unfrozen water multiple times per day, which quickly loses its novelty.)  That's the situation we found ourselves in last winter when the temperature suddenly dropped to overnight lows of -10 °F.

A quick search of the internets revealed a ton of potential solutions, especially for bowl-type waterers and relatively mild climes.  There are fewer solutions to keep nipple-type waterers from freezing, but a few options we've seen include adding poultry nipples to a heated bucket and heating a larger reservoir that then gets circulated through a tube-type waterer and across the poultry nipples.  We also saw mentions of using a heat tape, an aquarium heater, and a stock tank de-icer to keep a bucket waterer thawed.  Those latter two options sounded pretty good to us.  Time for some research to decide which one is better for us!

There are many opinions on using aquarium heaters in chicken waterers.  Some caution against it because water can sometimes leak into the chamber with the heating element (leading to electrified water that can shock chickens or chicken keepers) and the glass on some models can shatter if the water level gets too low.  Other folks say they work great for several years and encourage the chickens to drink more water during cold weather (which, they claim, leads to better egg production and healthier--or at least, more hydrated--chickens).  The risk of electrified water can be minimized by using a GFCI outlet (which really ought to be used with any electrified chicken waterer), and the risk of shattering glass can be minimized by using non-glass or shatter-resistant glass heaters with automatic shutoff features (although, be careful about using titanium heaters in a plastic bucket because they can get hot enough to melt some plastics).  A 50 W heater is often times spec'd out for 5-20 gallon aquariums, so it should be plenty powerful enough for a normal-sized chicken waterer.  Also, while we're certainly not experts on aquarium heaters, we noticed that the opinions cautioning against using aquarium heaters in chicken waterers tended to be based on years (and years and years) of experience using them with fish, which doesn't necessarily account for many of the features that have become standard in recent years (i.e., plastic, metal, or shatter-resistant glass construction and automatic shutoffs).  Many aquarium heaters now carry lifetime warranties.

Meanwhile, stock tank de-icers keep the chicken water just above freezing, the smallest ones are 250 W, and they carry a 2-year warranty.  For those of you who keep track of such things, that means the power consumption is equal if the tank de-icer is on for one-fifth the time of the aquarium heater.  Also for folks living in the coldest climes, there is some anecdotal evidence that keeping the bulk of the waterer slightly above freezing isn't enough to keep the nipples from freezing.

Both a 50 W aquarium heater and a 250 W stock tank de-icer cost about the same, but in our minds, the aquarium heater seemed like a slightly better option.  Phew!  Decision made.

Ok, with all of that discussion out of the way...on to some pictures to demonstrate the reduction to practice!

This is the model we went with.  Last year, we had it in a 2-gallon bucket, and it was too long to sit flat along the bottom.  It worked fine (keeping our water at about 70 °F with outside temps frequently at 10 °F and lower), but we wanted to get it into a 5 gallon bucket so it would stay covered with water until the bucket was almost empty, and so that the heater would be close to the nipples, making it easier to keep them thawed.  NOTE: As luck would have it, our heater was probably breaking as we typed this.  We were home in Wisconsin over Christmas, and returned to Colorado to find an empty water bucket with a small hole melted in the bottom and a burnt rubber smell inside, and a cracked (but not shattered!) aquarium heater.  We didn't have it on a GFCI plug (do as we say, not as we do...), but obviously we can't recommend this heater anymore.

We drilled holes and installed the poultry nipples in the bottom of the bucket, leaving a space for the heater in the middle.  Also, for what it's worth, lots of folks seem to recommend drilling 11/32" holes, but we usually go with 5/16".  It's a little snugger fit, which makes it harder to thread the nipples into the bucket, but might help with preventing leaks. Also, 5/16" is a lot more common drill bit size.  For real cowboy construction, it's possible to slightly enlarge the hole by making the drill bit sightly off-perpendicular and rotating around, but be careful not to make it too big!

Next, in goes the heater!  You're not imagining it--we cleaned it up between the first picture and this one.

We picked this spot to cut an opening for the cord in the lid.

A few snips with a wire cutter, and voilá! Cord-accessible.

The cord goes out the bucket and trails off through the hole that provides access for the garden hose in the summer.  On the outside of the coop is an extension cord, eagerly awaiting a plug.

A couple S-hooks make it easy to connect the bucket to the chain it's hanging from.

And here's the finished product.  The chickens are clearly intrigued with the new deluxe model.

What's your heated chicken water solution?

New On Our Reading List: Critter Tales

Leigh Tate's new book, Critter Tales, is out! 

In it, she chronicles her first-hand experiences with many types of livestock on her five-acre quasi-rural homestead in the southern Appalachian mountains. If you read Leigh's blog, you know that she is working to maximize self-sufficiency for herself, her husband, and their animals. Most of her livestock-related posts are on goats, chickens, and more recently, bees, but the book also covers llamas, pigs, guinea fowl, guard dogs, and farm cats.  

We're regular readers of Leigh's blog because she does very good research and combines that research with valuable insight from her own experiences. We're definitely looking forward to reading her new book.  

In the interest of full disclosure, we're helping her promote the book partly because we're hoping to win a copy.  The other part is because we dig her stuff and think you would, too.  If you're interested in winning a copy yourself, check out her announcement post for more info.

Fall Broiler Stats

In mid-November, we put our fall batch of broilers in the freezer.  Now that the books are closed on them, we wanted to take a look and see if we came out any better than our previous batches of meat chickens on a price per pound level.  We stuck with the same feed source we had for the previous batches, but we had a slightly different feeder setup that probably saved some wasted feed.  We also raised all Cornish Cross this time around instead of Red Rangers or Pioneers (or a mix of those and Cornish Cross), and the birds came from Meyer Hatchery instead of McMurray.  Ok, here's the numbers!

We ordered 25 birds, and one came free, so we started with 26.  We lost two as chicks, and had to cull three more at the six-week mark due to leg injuries, so 21 birds made it to the butcher date at eight weeks.  That's a mortality rate of 19%, or 8% if we don't include the six-week culls, although 26 birds is a pretty small sample size.  The butchering price increased from $3/bird to $4/bird for us this year.  The dressed-to-live weight yield is 72%, and the feed conversion ratio is ~2.5:1.  For comparison, the industry figures are 4-5% mortality rate, 71-74% dressed-to-live weight yield, and just under 2:1 feed conversion ratio.

The feed again accounted for the major portion of the overall cost, but the initial cost of the chicks and the butchering were also significant costs.  If we lived in a place where we were allowed to butcher them ourselves, we could have decreased the price to $3.34/lb dressed weight.  Some day!

To compare with other organic whole chicken prices, we're right in the range of what's available online (sources here and here), and a little above what's available in our local Sprouts grocery store.  Of course, if we got it from them, we wouldn't get any fertilizer for the garden!  We're also $0.54/lb less than our batch last year, even with the increased processing price, so we're definitely moving in the right direction.

Now that's a happy freezer!

Next steps for us? Start growing our own feed and get better set up to do our own butchering!

How do your home-grown chicken prices fall out?

EFB? ACK!

Earlier this summer, we noticed our new package of bees wasn't building up as quickly as it should, and the brood pattern wasn't full and solid like it would be in a healthy colony.  We started looking closer at the combs, and noticed a few things.  Most of the uncapped cells all had eggs or larvae in them, so the queen was laying fine.  But many of the uncapped larvae didn't look quite right--some were sort of discolored and laying at the back of the cells; others started to extend out toward the front of the cells, but were slightly twisted, as if they had a stomach ache. In short, a lot of our brood frames looked like these and these.  Sounds like trouble.  Not trusting our limited beekeeping experience to officially diagnose the problem, we decided to send a comb sample to the USDA bee lab, where they test it for free and tell you what disease your bees have (if any).  A few weeks later, the results came back: our bees had European Foulbrood (EFB).  Oh no!

Here's the old brood comb, with the sample we cut out to send to the Bee Lab.  Although they only ask for a 2" x 2" square, we cut out a section to fit a small USPS box instead.  Don't want them to wish they had more to test!

So what are our options for treatment?  While EFB is no walk in the park to get rid of, it's not quite as bad as its evil sibling American Foulbrood (AFB) in that it doesn't form spores.  For AFB, the only treatment is to kill the bees and burn them along with the frames and comb (hive boxes and other equipment the bees have come into contact with can sometimes be sterilized by high heat or bleach).  For EFB, there are a few more options (and here):

1. Do nothing, since in a strong hive, symptoms will often clear up when the nectar flow is strong.
2. Treat with the antibiotic Oxytetracycline (trade name Terramycin).
3. Re-queen, since a disruption in the brood cycle will often clear up symptoms.
4. Use the "shook swarm" method to restart the colony on uninfected combs in a new hive (this also disrupts the brood cycle).
5. Kill the bees and burn or sterilize everything, same as for treating AFB.

Of these options, we had already been trying #1 for a while, and it clearly wasn't clearing up.  We're trying to minimize chemical treatments of our bees, so #2 wasn't a great option, either.  #3 would be ok, but it seems like we could get the same effect by #4, which was preferable to us since our queen seemed to be laying well and we already had everything we needed.  #5 is obviously a last resort, and we weren't there yet!

So, shook swarm it is!

The general operation is simple, and shown here: we're just taking all the bees from the old hive and shaking them into the new hive.  A few tricks that aren't shown in the video: the new hive should have a queen excluder on the bottom (actually functioning as a queen includer) so that she doesn't have the opportunity to decide she doesn't like the new digs. Also, the chances are good that she'll end up in the new hive if we're efficient in our shaking operation, but we can increase the odds by spraying the frames down with sugar water to reduce flying bees before shaking them, or if we wanted to be really sure, we could find the queen and catch her, and then install her in the new hive once the rest of the bees are in there.

Also, in our case, since we're trying to clear up EFB, the new hive should just have foundation and not already-drawn comb so that the bees have a chance to sort of purge their system before they have to feed new brood. Some sources recommend holding off on feeding them for a few days for the same reason.

After a couple weeks in the new hive, they've started drawing out comb and generally looking healthier.  Can you find the queen in this picture?  Her name is Waldo.

If we blow a little smoke on them to clear the bees away, we can see that the brood pattern looks a lot more full than it did in the old hive.  Time will tell if they can build up enough to make it through the winter, but they've got a better chance now than they did before!

Stay tuned to find out what happened to all the old frames, comb, and the honey they had stored.

Have you dealt with EFB before?  Have you done the shook swarm method with your bees?  How did it go?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Quick Chicken Fence Repair

We found out the other weekend that wire mesh movable electric fences (one of these guys) and lawnmowers don't get along very well.  While trying to get into a tight spot behind the bee hive, the lawnmower managed to reach out and pull one slightly-less-than-taught section of the fence into the blade.

Here's a question for you: given that it takes the human brain around 0.2 seconds to process a stimulus and react, that the lawnmower blade spins at 200 rpm, and that the fence cost $165, can you calculate how many dollars per blade revolution the lawnmower did?  Ready, go.

Easy, you say?  0.2 seconds equates to 2/3 of a revolution, and the fence was obviously destroyed, bringing the total to $247.50 per revolution?

Wait, there's more information: first, we didn't have the fence electrified and weren't planning to since it kept the chickens in just fine without electricity (until we put a big hole in it with the lawnmower), and second, we saved the wire wrapping that our rolls of hardware cloth and woven wire fencing came in, along with plenty of other wire scraps.  Turns out that, as long as we still don't want to electrify it, the cost was more like an hour of Jake's time, or basically, $0.00.

We started by laying the damaged section of fence as flat as possible, figuring out what strands were missing, then replacing the vertical missing vertical strands with pieces of 16 gauge wire.  Where there were a few remnants left, we tried to wrap them around the new wire.  We also fed the new wire through the horizontal strands when they were still intact.

Similar drill for the horizontal wires, except using the thinner wire that the hardware cloth roll was wrapped up in.  Our thinking is that the thinner wire will make it more flexible in the horizontal direction when we eventually roll up the fencing.  In extra-damaged places (like in the first photo), we wrapped the horizontal wire directly around the new vertical pieces.

The finished product doesn't look perfect, but it does keep the chickens out of the garden.  Will it ever be electric again?  Hard to know.  If we decide to try it, we'll update the post.  In the meantime, mission accomplished!

How do you do electric fence netting repair?

Homestead Happiness, March Week 3

The weather was pretty nice this week--lots more signs of spring (including the calendar), and some progress on our goals for the year.  Yay!

The first spring flowers in the yard!  We saw some crocuses at the neighbors' last weekend, but these dandies are the first ones in our yard.  Can't wait for pancakes and steamed greens!

Last week we mentioned that we found a source of free straw to use for composting, mulching, chicken bedding, etc.  This week we also found a source of free horse manure (hidden under the straw in this picture), as much as we could ever want.  It's organic, mixed with shavings and hay, and comes (accidentally) pre-inoculated with fungal mycelium. Gorgeous!  And they're just giving it away!  Can you believe it?

When the chickens saw the pile, they were possessed by the spirits of entropy and turned it into this within a couple hours.  They're not too interested in the manure part yet, but they really like scratching through the straw.  Since one of our goals for the year is to cut down on chicken feed costs, we're trying to get a miniature version of this going, and it looks like the chooks will be amenable.  (The full version of the video linked above--at Geoff Lawton's website, e-mail subscription required for full access--explains more about the operation, including predator control.  Harvey Ussery also wrote about the concept here and here.)

We also finally got our garden plans in order--layout in the yard and most of the seeds bought.  (Kudos to Territorial Seed for beating the pants off all the other seed catalogs in terms of variety and information about the plants.)  Now we just need to find time to dig up the middle half! (Or not dig part of it, since we want to try the no-till method Anna described in The Weekend Homesteader with some of the beds.)

And last, but not least, the rhubarb is alive!

What made you happy on your homestead this week?

Homestead Happiness and Progress for February Week 3

'Twas an eventful time this week on the homestead, bolstered by some nice weather and a couple snowy days. Check out what happened this week at THL!

A seven-egg day!  That means all of our hens are definitely laying.  (We were pretty sure that's been the case since mid-January, but this was the first time we got a horizontal bingo on our egg-tracking chalkboard table.  Vertical bingo has been achieved by our Red Star and New Hampshire Red, who have laid eggs on 21 and 15 consecutive days, respectively (also 25 out of 26 days for Red Star and 23 out of 26 days for New Hampshire).

Monday was a snow day, which we used to make a picnic table.  Happy belated valentine's day Katie!

But by Friday, things had thawed out enough that we could see the feral poppies pushing through the leaves with new growth.  Everything is now covered in snow again, but that's ok!  We know what's underneath.

First try at isolating potato starch.  It works!  It turned out ok, but we want to tweak a few things before we turn it into a full blog post.

A liver-and-onion strata (with kale)!  Delicious, packed full of vitamins, and appearing in our upcoming strata cookbook.

Seed catalogs!  Wherefore lyeth such a slippery slope of inspiration upon our kitchen table?

What fun stuff happened on your homestead this week?

Keeping Track of Egg Production

If you keep your chickens to lay eggs rather than as pets, you probably want to keep track of how many eggs they're laying.  You probably also want to keep track of how much food, grit, etc. they're eating and how quickly they need their bedding replaced so you can calculate how much each dozen eggs is costing you.  And if you're shameless nerds like we are, you might want to put everything into a spreadsheet that automatically tracks production and costs.

Today we wanted to share our system for tracking chicken data in case any of you might find it useful or have suggestions for how to improve it.  So, without further adieu, here is EggSpreadsheet.xlsx, version 1.0, (kindly hosted by OpenDrive).

This is the general layout.  To use it, just make an 'x' in each cell corresponding to which dates each chicken lays an egg.  Up on top, input your costs for feed, grit, etc. The part in the upper left counts how many eggs each bird laid and the total (for the most recent seven-day period and since the beginning), and calculates the cost per dozen based on your inputs.  It doesn't include the bedding costs for now because the bedding works double duty as garden fertilizer once we compost it.  The part to the lower right tallies up each bird's egg count for each week and puts it into a graph so you can track the cycle.

The trends are kind of interesting.  The open symbols correspond to times when we weren't around to collect eggs forthe whole week, and we didn't want to rope our chicken-care volunteers into our goofy data collection experiment. From the left, the eggs/week started increasing as more chickens reached laying age until mid-November, when production started to fall off, probably with the decrease in day length.  Then the chickens went on a tear in mid-December before shutting it down for most of January.  But this last week shows a real up-tick again, so we better get ready!  We're not sure why the big boost in mid-December, but they seem to lay more when they're outside more and the weather is warmer. 

Also, our Ameraucana was a real good layer up until two days before the day length dropped below 10 hours (November 18), then she didn't lay a single egg until last week, two days after the day length crossed the 10-hour threshold again (January 24).  Now she's laid five in the last week.  That's consistency!

Since we don't always fire up the spreadsheet computer every day, we made a non-electronic version on the chalkboard in our kitchen that we have to walk past to put the eggs in the fridge.  That makes it way easier to remember things day-to-day.  Now, as long as we update the computer spreadsheet once a week, we'll have data as accurate as our immediate guesses as to which egg belongs to which chicken.

In other chicken-related news, our well-traveled, but previously injured, Rhode Island Red has rejoined the flock.  She let us know she was fully recovered by escaping from her tote, making messes around the house, and eating our newly-sprouted avocado tree.  Also, we've been trying to figure out what type of chicken Big Chip is.  She was a mystery bird (a.k.a. 'free rare breed') from McMurray Hatchery that looks like a Partridge Rock in terms of coloring and size (she kept pace with the Pioneer meat birds last spring), but her comb isn't quite the same, and she was a chipmunk-striped chick, which Rocks typically aren't (nor are they a 'rare breed').  Any ideas?  Maybe a mutt from their top secret 'new meat breed' program?

How do you keep track of your egg production and costs?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Have Chicken, Will Travel

We got back the other day from a wonderful trip home to Wisconsin to visit family and friends.  We usually make the sixteen-hour drive to and from Denver in one shot, alternating shifts and driving through the night.  Preparations for being away typically entail making snacks to keep us awake, packing clothes, gifts, and other food, and finding someone to check in on our chickens.

Fortunately for our chicken-checking volunteers, the chickens are generally well behaved.  But what happens when, a week before the trip, one of the chickens gets injured and needs extra care?  Talk about a wrench in the plans!

We were going to cull her, but the injuries didn't seem to involve any vital systems, the only serious symptom being that she couldn't walk very well.  We kept her in a 10-gallon tote in the laundry room for the week leading up to the trip, and she seemed like she was intent on eventually making a full recovery.  Plus, we had just spent six-plus months rearing her into egg-laying shape and culling would have meant a lost investment on that end.

So, we decided to take her with us.

Thoughts of driving through a feather-filled ruckus from a panic-stricken bird, of inconveniencing anyone we visited, and the possibility of an overly-interesting traffic stop aside, we decided it would be a shame to cull her, and hard to ask our chicken-care volunteers in Denver to take on this extra burden.  Plus, what if she took a turn for the worse or had other unexpected problems?  At least if she was with us, we'd be the only dumbfounded ones.

Chicken setup in tote in laundry room.  Feed and water containers supported on wire hooks over edge of tote.  Water (yogurt) container has poultry nipple on bottom.  She hasn't even tried to escape, except on the second day in the tote when she somehow got out to lay an egg on the kitchen floor, but couldn't get back in.

We made room for the tote in the already-jam-packed car, packed a little extra food, and hit the dusty trail.  1000 miles and four states later, she was still happily doing chicken stuff and seeming ever-so-slightly more healed.  Since we drove most of the way through the night, she just slept, only making some annoyed chicken sounds because of the bright lights when we stopped for gas. She generally just hung out in the back seat, better-behaved than any human under the age of ten (and most humans older than that).

The tote fit nicely behind the driver's seat, and the cooler fit sideways such that the passenger seat still reclined.  That was critical for through-the-night driving!

In the time we were home, she stayed in a dog kennel in a heated garage (sans dog, of course), got to free range--or rather, free-hop on her one good leg--on some choice Wisconsin pasture (a rarity for this time of year!), eat some aquaponic lettuce, see four different relatives' houses, and entertain a cadre of young cousins.  And through it all, she was the definition of stoic.

The lesson?  If your chicken is more chill than Cub Foods-brand soda, don't be afraid to travel with it!  It was easier than traveling with a dog, and chickens don't shed.

Here's hoping she continues to recover and starts laying eggs again sometime in 2015!

Have you ever had to travel with chickens?  Do you have any funny stories or helpful tips?  Let us know in the comments section below!

2015 Homestead Goals

The other day, we took a look back at 2014 and what we got done around The Lab.  It was definitely cool to see some of the funnest parts of the year recorded and electronically narrated here on the interwebs, (one of the benefits of blogging!), and we were surprised to see how much we got done! (Still can't believe the powdered pectin experiment worked!) 

But now it's time to complete the 360° rotation and start looking forward again.  What do we want to accomplish in 2015?  We've got a big pile of projects we'd like to work on, but there are a few we especially wanted to post here so you, dear readers, can hold us accountable!

Kitchen counter and cabinet
Our kitchen is in dire need of both horizontal and storage space.  We built a butcher block counter top with shelves underneath it to remedy that, but we have a bad habit of stopping work on something as soon as it's functional.  So once it warms up, we need to finally finish the counter and put doors on the cabinet part so it doesn't look so cluttered.

Early stage of the counter top, pre-shelves, and largely pre-clutter.  That's not a coincidence.

Garden
We expanded in the spring to 250 square feet from the 30 square feet we had the previous fall, but it still seemed cramped and insufficient to provide much in the way of veggies.  Maybe because we planted so much of it with tomatoes and they all matured late, while the onions, green beans, and broccoli didn't do much at all.  The potatoes and herbs were also disappointing.  Apparently, as a baseline, our dirt sucks!  We had also planned to expand more, but got busy with off-the-homestead stuff.  At least the Swiss chard was rockin', and by this fall we had enough compost to cover all the garden beds about 2" deep when we put the garden to sleep for the winter.  We'd like to add another 350 square feet or so this year, and that's probably about all we can fit into our backyard and still have our landlords be able to rent it out to other people when we eventually move out!  As tack-on projects to the garden itself, we've got ambitions of setting up a barrel-based drip irrigation system to keep it all watered and a solar dehydrator to help preserve all the goodies.

This is what happens when your off-the-homestead demands go off-the-charts and you accidentally think your old tomato seeds won't sprout, but they do.  Hopefully this year's garden goes more according to plan!

Livestock
Chicken feed remains the biggest cost driver in our production of meat and eggs.  We think we can do better than the pre-bagged foods, if we can find time to grow the ingredients for them.  To that end, we hope to try two new types of livestock this year: soldier fly larvae and red worms.  We've grown worms before, but we don't have a setup out here in Colorado because there's no room in the house for one and we haven't built one outside that can take the temperature extremes.  Yet.  That's going to change this summer, just you watch.

Our Worm Trunk/end table from out east.  Not insulated enough for outdoor use in Colorado.

Foraging
We've been doing ok with the dandelions, mallow, plums, and apples from the yard, but we'd like to expand our repertoire a bit.  For example, we don't have any secret morel spots out here yet, and we haven't studied other wild edibles from this part of the country very well.  This category also includes getting out to go hunting and fishing.  We haven't been fully satisfying our inner caveman since we left the Midwest, and searching for food in the wilds will be a good way to get back on track.

Ok, that's it!  There's our highest-priority homesteading to-do list for this year.  If we make it all the way through December and you haven't seen posts on some of it, please scold us harshly.

What are the top priorities around your homestead this year?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Chicken Coop Feng Shui

At our homestead, we have three places for chickens to hang out, depending on the circumstances.  We have the row cover chicken tractor, which fits neatly over our garden beds, but doesn't have enough predator proofing to keep the chooks safe overnight.  Then we have the A-frame chicken tractor, which is pretty predator proof, but doesn't have much room for nest boxes (which we need now that they've started laying).  Lastly, we have part of a shed that shares a wall with the garage.  It doesn't give the chickens free access to the grass (yet), but it gives them the most space to move around, the best predator protection, and, we'll admit it, it's easiest on us.  (We still herd them out to the yard every time we have a few hours.)

A couple weeks ago, our Easter Egger caught us off-guard by starting to lay at 19 weeks old, followed shortly by the Rhode Island Red.  How did they know what to do?  We didn't even have our nesting boxes ready!  We clearly had to get the boxes built ASAP, and we took the opportunity to rearrange the shed coop and get the positive energy flowing more smoothly.

This is what the coop looks like from the outside, after rearranging.  We don't have a picture from before we reorganized it because it's probably bad karma to publish such things.

On the innermost corner, we built a platform, supported between two studs and on some pruned buckthorn trunks.

Then we built a nest box or three to go on the platform out of old fence wood...

...set it on the platform, and filled it with some of the straw-like tall grass from the yard.  This setup must be ok, the first egg was laid in it 20 minutes after the chickens first saw it.

Then we added a roost above the nest boxes.  As it's shown in the picture, the poles are too close together.  We're going to fix that soon.  But it's better than the 2 x 4s we had hanging from the ceiling before this renovation!  We also built a 'droppings box' out of an old 1 x 12 and some fence pickets, which helps keep the top of the nest boxes clean (shown in picture below).

The chickens can all fly up to the platform, but we have a pallet ladder to make it easier for them.  Some of them also seem to like the challenge of climbing the ladder and shuffling across the other stick to get to the platform.  We haven't heard them cluck the Mission: Impossible theme yet, but they're getting there.  Also notice the chicken feeder full of grit hanging underneath the platform, and the oyster shell dispenser behind that.  How 'bout that use of vertical space?

Good job, ladies.  Mission accomplished.

How do you make the best use of your coop space?  Let us know in the comments section below!

A-Frame Chicken Tractor

There are lots of ways to raise chickens in one's backyard: free ranging, rotational pasturing, tractoring, etc.  Meat breeds tend to eat a lot of feed and gain weight quickly, and those traits have come at the expense of foraging behavior (cornish cross, we're looking at you).  One way to get those meat birds out in the fresh air a bit while forcing the little butterballs to eat some greenery (and poop around the yard instead of two feet from the feeder) is to put them on a bit of a diet and move them around in a chicken tractor.

So it was with our spring batch of chickens this year, and, as is our modus operandi, we wanted to put together a functional chicken tractor for the lowest cost possible.  We got all the wood for free from Craigslist, which saved us the majority of the price of constructing a tractor from all new materials (woo hoo!) We managed to construct a pretty robust mobile chicken fortress, although it is somewhat more of a workout to move around the yard than we were hoping for.  But here are our design details, judge and improve upon them as you see fit. (And leave suggestions in the comments section!)

Here's the general framing.  The base is made from 2 x 6s cut halfway through where the perpendicular pieces come across, leaving a 12" overhang to support a 'weasel skirt,' described below.  (Kind of like Lincoln Logs.) The base boards are 10' and 7' for the long and short sides, respectively, giving an internal dimension of 8' x'5', or 40 ft².  The A-frame part is 2 x 4s, cut at about a 60° angle.  We tried to design it such that we'd be able to lift it ergonomically (i.e., by shrugging our shoulders), for which we calculated that at a height of 27.5", the handles, which would be situated at the outside of the triangle frame, would be 28" apart (similar to a wheel barrow).  For this application, 28" was probably 4" too wide, but we ended up needing more than a shoulder-shrug worth of height anyway (see below).

A close-up of the top edge.  The hardware cloth is one big piece from side-to-peak-to-side and a triangle piece across the end, with a few of the trimmings from the triangle used to fill in the gaps at the bottom of the triangle.

The handles went on the back, cut into the A-frame boards.  See five pictures down for a peek at how they're secured on the inside side.  The roof part and the back wall are cedar fence pickets.  The hardware cloth around the base (the weasel skirt) keeps digging predators out.  Neighborhood dogs and foxes, good luck!  May your claws be ground down to useless nubs before you eat our chickens.

On the front end is a go-kart (or dunebarrow) tire, with the wood supported by a piece of angle iron.  Cutting the bottom corner off the board makes it a lot easier to move around, although we could have helped ourselves out even more by putting the axle lower than we did.

The weasel skirt is held in place by some more old fence pickets.  Otherwise the inside edges tend to catch on the grass and get ripped off the boards.  The downside to supporting them this way is that the tires on the front end are now elevated, which means the back end needs to be raised even higher for the tractor to roll (like, at least two feet).  Lifting it too high lets the birds wander out as the tractor is being moved, but for cornish cross, that's ok.  They're not hard to catch.

On one side is a kind of Dutch door...

...that opens to allow access to birds or food and water buckets.  Opening the door panels also reveals exquisitely-calculated brace pieces!

Birds-eye-view (heh) through the top door.  A couple extra 2 x 4s provide a place to hang food and water buckets.  It works well for meat birds that don't really roost, but for lighter breeds, they'll roost on the center board and poop on the bucket lids.

Here's the view from the front...

...and other side for completeness.

Lastly, a word on wasting feed. The cornish cross are motivated by one thing: hunger.  In this picture, the general outline of the 'feeder end' of the tractor can be seen, with a big pile of wasted feed in the lower right corner.  The birds should be moved every day, even if there's good food available on the ground (the rest of the outline is their mess!). But they'll waste a lot if given free choice food all day long.  Yes, it will break down and end up feeding the pasture, but that's some expensive fertilizer!

In contrast, giving them a little less than they want will make for a lot less wastage.  You'll have to figure out where the magic amount of daily ration is for your flock.  For us, about 4 lbs per day for 10 birds was about right.  There's definitely still some visible in this picture, but if they're hungry, they'll spend their time eating the stuff off the ground instead of sitting around pooping on themselves.  (They'll probably still do that, too, but to a lesser extent.)  We even saw one eat a dandelion leaf once!

What does your chicken tractor look like?  How do you keep it light enough to move around the yard easily?  Let us know in the comments section below!