Automatic chicken keeping - Introducing the Eggmobile

 

I'm hugely excited about this new aquisition

Well that just looks like an ancient rusty horsebox I hear you say. And what's more, you add,  you don't have any horses. 

But look, I retort, it has a tow bar on the front and four reasonable wheels.

You notice it's lacking a back door and most of the floor...

However, undaunted by your negative observations, I'm still excited. These drawbacks are not a problem. This lovely old thing is going to be transformed into my new mobile chicken house - Introducing the Luxury Eggmobile!

I will explain how it will work.  But first let's look at the problems.

The Problems

Having kept chickens for many years now, I've tried all kinds of ways of making life easier. For them and for me. These are the major difficulties I've encountered -

1. Chickens scratching areas -the chickens' tendency to strip away the plant life from any area where they are confined for more than a few weeks. We don't want bare earth or worse, bare mud. 
2. Chicken perches and thereunder - chickens need perches to sleep on and what comes out of the rear end overnight tends to accumulate under the perch and has to be cleaned out regularly to avoid a build up of manure and associated smells. Although the chicken droppings can be composted for the garden it's not a pleasant job, smelly and dusty in the summer and smelly and muddy in the winter.
3. Red Mite - This horrible pest of domestic chickens hides in the cracks and crevices of wooden hen houses and particularly under the often used roofing felt, and comes out at night whilst the hens are roosting to bite them and feed on their blood. We want to avoid this. 
4. Predators- Chief amongst these for me are foxes and occasionally rats. We definitely don't want this as predators can wipe out our flock in no time at all. Possibly overnight. Ask me how I know.

The Solutions

I decided some time ago that movable houses were the way to go. I tried hen houses  with wheels on and moveable runs. Whilst it kind of works, the wheels were too small, the houses too heavy and with the rainfall we have were soon mired in the winter mud and difficult if not impossible to move. And there was still the floor to clean out.

We tried the Heras Panel chicken house copied from Kev Alviti on An English Homestead. This worked well in the summer for table birds and I'm definitely keeping it for that purpose, But for layers it's a bit heavy and impractical for me to move, though I would still recommend it as a low cost option for people with just a few birds.

So to the Eggmobile  -I cannot claim credit for the Eggmobile myself, it's a straight copy of Richard Perkins idea on the Ridgedale Farm You Tube channel. Richard's plans are intended mostly for people wishing to have a profitable business but the idea is scaleable for anyone, and has been replicated in many forms all over the world. 

I'm a huge fan of Richard Perkins and have watched his many and varied videos on You Tube about small farming. One of his best ideas is the Eggmobile which is essentially a hen house on wheels with a slatted floor. The advantage of this which you will immediately realise if you keep chickens, is that the droppings go straight through on to the grass fertilizing your land and avoiding the job of cleaning out the floor of the hen house. The house is surrounded by an electric fence, and being on large wheels the house can be towed to new area of grass on a regular basis. I think this will work for me. As all my hens will now be in the one house, I'm also investing in a new electric pop hole which will let the birds out into a protected area at dawn and lock them in at dusk. Additionally I will have rollaway nest boxes to make egg collection easier and cleaner. 

Richard's houses are made of metal sheeting for lightness, and my horse box is aluminium (under the flaking paint and rust), so quite light to move and unattractive to red mite, hopefully.

I will keep posting about the ongoing project,  as we go along, and hopefully I will prove your skeptical observations to be entirely groundless.

Bird Flu

Since the announcement of incidents of the latest strain of Avian Influenza in the UK, Apha, the Animal and Plant Health Agency, have been issuing details of recommended ways in which poultry should be protected from contact with wild birds. For large commercial producers this isn't too much of an issue, as the birds tend to live in enormous hangar type buildings anyway, but for small poultry keepers like me, it's more difficult. I can't just conjure up a building to house my chickens, so we have had to be a bit inventive. So we have made an enclosure with some old Heras fencing, the type of thing normally seen on building sites, and covered the top with some polyester netting, again the type normally seen on scaffolding on building sites (because it's cheap and readily available)
Chickens however, are very quick to find any gap in your defences,and although i though we had everything covered, it wasn't long before they found this easy exit through some broken bits of fence

 and they were all out again. So I've patched it up, and hopefully all will be ok again for tomorrow. We will of course have to move this arrangement around the field at regular intervals to make sure the birds continue to have access to fresh grass.
We all fervently hope that this latest strain of bird fly will be short lived and we can go back to our normal free ranging as soon as possible, especially now that the birds are coming into full lay. I've even had a couple of goose eggs in the last few days!

Young Farmers New Recruit

Thought I'd just post a picture of the youngest prospective recruit to the West Country Young Farmers - this is our grandson Brown with his two new friends. As you can see he's already got the green wellies, and the tractor - just needs a few acres now (bit like his Granny Kathy...) 

Surprises, and Shocks

The draft text below was to be my next post but circumstances have overtaken me before I had chance to put it online. The foxes have come again and this time taken my two new pullets. Since all the gates were closed this time, they must have come round by the house; I am amazed at their audacity. It seems that once foxes know where the birds are, they will persevere again and again until they get in. I am going to have to be extremely careful if I am to keep them out. The two newcomers were in a quarantine ark, admittedly old and a bit tatty, but one that had housed two or three birds in various parts of the garden most of this year without any sign of trouble. But they simply tore off the wood at the side of the ark to get at the two pullets. I have had a chat with a local gamekeeper who has said he will be coming into the village this week to do some "lamping" which is his method of fox control.

 Thanks to everyone who has taken the time and trouble to post messages of support, it's great to get them, and it helps to know that people sympathize.

Two feathery Surprises!
Our lovely little grandson has come with his mum to stay with us for the weekend, and with all the paraphanalia one needs to have when travelling with small children, Claire still managed to find room in her little car for a large cardboard box containing a surprise gift for me of - guess what? Two beautiful point of lay chickens that she had got for me when she read about the fox attack last week! How sweet is that! And they look like really good birds too, one is a Light Sussex, a lovely old dual purpose breed known for its gentle nature, and the other a very smart Copper Black Maran, which I'm hoping will lay a lovely dark brown egg. I couldn't be more pleased, and I feel blessed to have my kind and thoughtful family always here for me.

The Fox Came

The fox came tonight and attacked my hen house. I've been keeping chickens and ducks for about five or six years now I should think, and during that time I think I've had three fox attacks, where I've lost stock. Tonight I failed to lock the birds up early enough, and at around ten o clock, David heard a great commotion and ran out with the dog, by the time we got out there of course the culprit/s had gone leaving a mess of feathers and dead bodies behind. Luckily the three Indian Runner Ducks were safe in their house, foxes have always gone for the ducks first in the past, but this time it was the chickens. Three birds were still safe in the hen house, of the remaining five one was cowering in a corner of the run, may or may not survive the shock, two were dead, one dying, had to be finished off, one missing presumed dead. I was particularly sad to lose my Red Black Auracana, a traditional breed, who was an old hen but still laying.

I had a smaller number of laying hens this year as last year I had concentrated on raising birds for the table  so now I'm down to just three or four hens, and three ducks.

It's my own fault, I should have been more vigilant. But it's a hard lesson.

Loadsaweeds! And a Mystery Egg Thief?

I have been away at an exhibition "up north" so have a bit of posting to catch up with. Like most people with livestock I have to rely on friends and neighbours to help out when I go away, so I try really hard to make the arrangements as foolproof and user friendly as possible. However I've noticed that my idea of foolproof seems to not always hold up to daily scrutiny by other people, and so my long suffering neighbour and friend Alison comes round before I go to see what kind of Heath Robinson contraptions I have come up with this time, guaranteed of course not to go wrong, break down, fall apart, allow escapes, fox attacks etc etc. The neighbours all know when we're going away with the incessant racket emanating from our garden, of hammering, sawing, and generally banging about for the whole of the previous week. Anyway, this time I spent a few days making some proper automatic feeders and drinkers with components from the Solway Feeders whom I highly recommend - website http://www.solwayfeeders.com/ -they sell all the bits and pieces you need for various options, and I also found a small industial unit in Cirencester who sell off used plastic barrels cheaply. (Contact Rachel at MJP Casings Cirencester http://www.naturalsausageskins.co.uk/ - also an excellent contact for anyone wanting to try sausagemaking at home) The large containers make excellent water butts and the smaller ones are useful for making large automatic feeders, and they are safe to use for livestock as they are approved food use containers. I will try to post some more construction details and photos later.


All this does mean that every time I go away I spend the preceeding two weeks preparing to go, then a week away, and when I get back there's a months weeding to do. And boy can those weeds grow in three weeks! The veg garden looks like a jungle! But at least there were no serious problems this time for Alan and Alison, and my new automatic feeders and drinkers worked pretty well. Even the automatic greenhouse watering timer seemed to work. Amazing!The weather up north seemed quite cool and rainy, and I think it was similar down here, which has also contributed to the weed overgrowth situation. Anyway, I set to, with help from the chickens, - I did the weeding, and they ate the insects - here they are tucking into an ants nest they found in the woodchip path.




One interesting thing Allan mentioned whilst I was away that he saw what he was fairly certain was a ferret in the garden. I have noticed the remains of some stolen eggs in the garden recently and had put it down to crows or magpies entering the duck house and dragging out eggs before I had collected them. Now I'm thinking it maybe another culprit, so I have brought the defunct squirrel catching cage out of retirement and baited it with an egg - nothing so far, but we will see.
This is a picture of one of the eggs, not broken as you can see, but opened on one side and completely emptied. So quite a delicate job really, I would love to hear from anyone who has seen anything similar.