Chicken Tractor 1: The Coop

If you are fairly computer literate and want to design something, the I recommend downloading Google SketchUp. There is a learning curve for the program, but they have videos to help you with that. This will help by allowing you to see what you are putting together before you commit materials. I used it to generate a parts list as well. The drawing is not complete, but it's complete enough for what I need it for. Converting a pile of lumber into a chicken tractor with this picture as a guide would not have been too difficult if that was all I had to deal with.

The doors open wide and at 4 feet deep, it will be easy to clean.

I was hit in the lungs by some virus so hard that by day 2 I was wondering if I needed to go to the hospital. After a week I was not ill anymore, but my lungs itched and I continued to be short of breath and cough for a full month. In addition to this, our unusually dry and warm winter turned into a record breaking wet spring. While the chicks were ready to leave the brooder at 3 weeks, they had to spend an extra week in the brooder while I continued to build.

A sliding door between the coop and chicken run allows chicken control.

I put a 2x3 piece of plywood in the front right corner to put their food and water on. Some of my available information said that chicks don't do well on the 1/4 inch wire mesh floor, so I tacked a 4x4 piece of plywood over the left side of the floor with two screws.
I was unsure whether the chickens could reach the roost, so I added a lower second one.

The openings in the doors are for nest boxes. The triangles on either side are for storage.

I ripped 2x4s in half for 2x2 purlins to hook the roofing to. I used old sheets of galvanized roofing on the roof.

On the last day they were in the brooder, I forgot to open the windows on the car until near 11 AM and nearly cooked them. Finally late that day we moved them from the now over crowded brooder to the coop. Somehow I have managed to not loose a single chicken.

I printed off a chicken silhouette I found on the internet and cut the shape out for a decorative window.

This relieved the crowding problem for a time, but I was left with a feeding problem. They were consuming and loosing through the floor an entire bag of feed every couple of weeks. Manure build up in side the coop was also an issue I could do nothing about, because I had nowhere for the chickens to go. I had to get the chicken run done.

The Tshimakain Herald

I am starting a new endeavor I call The Tshimakain Herald. It is similar to many of the newspapers of a hundred years ago that would often be one man shows own and operated by someone with no journalism education or experience.

Farm versus Land

The key difference between having a farm, instead of merely land, is that a farm grows something useful. Since we are not so much farmers as engineers with land, we have not really done much to make the place a farm. I am taking steps to remedy this. The # 1 issue limiter is climate. While the land looks lush, we only get about 20 inches of precipitation a year. Worse, the wet moths are November, December, and the remaining winter months. Summer time only sees about 2+1/2 inches. The temperature in turn varies across the year from 100F or hotter to -20F or colder. Some years we don't get a full 90 days between killing frosts. This limits the wild vegetation to sparse weeds. After some consideration I have come to the conclusion that the animal most likely to survive on this ground are chickens.

The smart thing for me to have done is to go to Polyface Inc. and bought and read their book Pastured Poultry Profits before I made any plans. Instead, the first thing I did was order some chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery. Actually no, I did some research on chicken breeds and their attributes. I figured the biggest challenge would be the cold, so I ordered Jersey Black Giants, which also happen to be the worlds largest chicken breed. I really should have built the brooder first, but lacking time and materials, I ended up converting the back of this old Subaru station wagon into a brooder. I cut a slot in the top of the brooder for the thermometer so it could be read from outside.
I Following the advice in the early chapters of the book, I put an inch of sawdust on the floor to absorb the ammonia from the bird droppings. This worked very well. I bought a cheap $20 thermostat and hooked up four light bulbs to it. I had to trim off a plastic stopper inside the thermostat to get it to go up to 95F, but other wise this also worked well. The temperature varied by 10F, but this caused no problems. I rounded up a mismatched pair of metal hopper feeders we had and attached them to the wall with a single screw. They also have a piece of 1/2 inch plastic water pipe attached across the middle of the feeding tray to prevent the chickens from scratching too much of their food out. A pair of water trays that screw onto mason jars fit in nicely. It was all ready for the chickens not a moment too soon.

A phone call at 7:30 AM from the post office announced the arrival of my chicks. All 26 of my ordered chicks plus one free rare chick arrived alive in their cardboard box. This is when I began to figure out that a car is the worst place ever to brood chickens. Solar heating will push the internal temperature of the car well over 100F in a big hurry. Opening the windows fixes that but the cats found the chicks in short order. they didn't get any, but I had to install a wire screen above the back seat of the car to keep the cats out. At the same time a layer of fine dust covered every surface of the car's interior. I'm not entirely sure whether the smell will come out either. I will not be using a car as a brooder again if I can help it.

According to the very helpful graph in the book, I began turning the thermostat down 2.5 degrees a day beginning on their fourth day here. After they were 2 weeks old, I turned the thermostat down 5 degrees each day. All the while I was building the chicken house. Hoo boy. That is a story all it's own. Stay tuned.