Revised chicken tractor wheel lift

June 24, 2011 Posts No Comments
Chicken tractor wheel lift

About a week after
sending me his plans for a chicken
tractor wheel lift,
Duncan emailed this addendum:


Had
a little problem this morning when I moved the girls.

One of the 4 x 4 wood blocks where the wheel lift assy was attached to
the chicken tractor gave way. It was screwed and glued. (lot of torque
force on this part)

So back to the drawing board as they say. LOL!

Here is an updated “as built” drawing of what I did to fix the problem
and maybe a little better drawing of the assy as well.

I put two – 6″ x 1/2″ bolts and nuts on each side as shown in the
drawing. Confident now it will play nice.



The revised plans look
even better.  I hope some of you put them to use!


Our chicken waterer is perfect for chicken
tractors since it never spills on uneven terrain.

Chicken bucket waterer mount

June 20, 2011 Posts 2 Comments

Homemade bucket waterer mountA lot of our customers turn
their DIY kits into a bucket waterer, and I can’t blame
them.  Once we moved our birds out of tractors and weight was no
longer an issue, I fell in love with the supreme simplicity of a clean
water dispenser that hydrates our flock for nearly a month without
refilling. 



The one problem with
bucket waterers is finding a way to hold up such a heavy object. 
We’ve showcased some good mounting methods in the past, but I have two
new ones to share.  First, Jeremy emailed me the photos to the
left and below, explaining that the lip of the bucket sits on his
homemade wooden brackets, which are in turn screwed into a wooden
rail.  He wrote:


Not
sure how durable it will be for the long haul, but we wanted something
that we could easily raise up as the chickens get bigger. Chicken bucket watererI’ll just unscrew the brackets
and mount them higher up the 2 x 4 rails next time.



Meanwhile, since I’ve
had Mark move our own bucket waterer every time we rotate chickens to a
new pasture, he’s been streamlining his mounting method.  His
newest mount, shown below, is simply “2 shelf brackets, a piece of
scrap lumber, and some rope with a bungee cord tied on the end”.

Bucket waterer holder


If these ideas get your creative juices flowing, I hope you’ll take the
time to email me your
own photos and mounting ideas!

Round hatch rate

June 17, 2011 Posts No Comments
Hen and chicksTurken chick

Our last hatch of the
year netted 11 chicks out of 20 eggs.  I ordered the hatching
eggs
from the same place I bought my cuckoo marans eggs, and they were all
supposed to be black australorps this time.  Imagine my surprise
to see this little naked-necked chick — must have gotten a turken
mixed in by mistake!  Regardless of variety, this batch of chicks
seemed to be the perkiest yet, with every chick that pipped hatching
and staying alive.



Hatch rateEven
though my hatch
rate was a hair worse this time compared to the cuckoo
marans hatch rate from last time, I was happy to get so many living
chicks.  One day into the incubation process, we had a two hour
power outage, and the temperature in the incubator dropped to 84
degrees.  Sure enough, when I autopsied
the unhatched eggs,
six of them were “yolkers”, meaning that the eggs either were infertile
or the chicks died within the first few days.  Since the fertility
rate of the cuckoo marans eggs I bought from the same hatchery was
100%, I figure the power outage was the obvious problem during hatch
3.  That’s good news because it means I would have had a 79% hatch
rate without the power outage — definite progress!



As you can tell from the
photo at the top of the page, we
tricked our broody hen into taking on the mothering responsibilities
once the chicks were out of the shell.  The first month of our
chicks’ lives has been very problematic this year, with us losing
nearly a quarter of the chicks to power outages or predators, so I’m
hopeful the hen will do a better job.  Maybe by this time next
year, all of my experiments with the incubator will be moot and we’ll
have a broody hen doing all of the hard work for me.



Our chicks learned to drink from their poop-free chicken waterer on day 1 with no prompting
from me.