Author: Anna & Mark

Marvin Bartel wrote in this week to share
his ingenious solution to the
problem of frozen chicken waterers.  His description and
photos were so great, I’ve reproduced the entire email here with just a
few modifications:

Here in Northern Indiana it gets cold. I have a three hens 
in a small insulated shed.  They use one of your drinkers. 
So far this year it has been down to 
7 degrees F outside and down to 15 F in the shed.

Being a potter and expecting cold weather, I made a stoneware pot shown
here under the
drinker bucket.  It contains a 25 watt lightbulb
controlled by a thermostat.  The water bucket has 
wire and spring to secure it so it cannot fall off.

The yellow plug thermostat is designed to turn on heat tape to keep
pipes from freezing.  It is permanently set to switch on at 38 and
off at 50. 
Search for: Easy Heat #EH-38 Auto Thermostat.  Amazon has them at
$12.88 + shipping.

This is
the base with the stoneware cover removed. 
Inside the closed container it reached 50 degrees too soon and turned
the bulb off before it produced enough heat 
to keep the drinker from freezing.  By adding an inch of
insulation between the bulb and the thermostat, the bulb
stays on long enough to keep the drinker from freezing
(thus far). The insulation is alumina-silica fiber insulation
used in pottery kilns and space shuttles. Other fireproof
insulation would probably work. The bulb uses a standard
porcelain fixture.

The closed warmer without the water container on top of it.  Any
potter can make these.  A tinsmith
could also make it from sheet metal.

The
drinker is mounted with a rubber o-ring seal.
Inside the water pail it has a brass nut (sold to fit the little
pipe under a lamp sockets).

We’re always thrilled to
see unique homemade chicken
waterers like this
one.  Marvin’s base is very elegant because he’s a potter, but I
suspect less crafty folks could make something equally utilitarian with
even less effort.  Or contact Marvin and commission him to make you a unique art base!

The sooner your chicks
get out on pasture, the healthier they’ll be…as long as they don’t
die of exposure or get eaten by something.  Most large-scale
pastured poultry  producers don’t have the time to baby chicks on
pasture, so they keep their flocks inside for their first one or even
two months of life (up to two thirds of the entire life span of a
Cornish cross broiler!)  But I figure if the weather’s warm and
dry and I place the flock right outside our back door, we can get away
with pasturing chicks as early as one or two weeks old.

This spring, we
made little enclosures to keep the flock within bounds, but with this last batch we
opted to let the youngsters entirely free range from their first day
outside.  We’ve located the outdoor
brooder in a shady
spot between a peach tree and a row of raspberries, and the chicks
naturally gravitate to these sheltered zones for their first week or
two in the great outdoors. 



They travel as a flock,
all fly-running after the leader when he or she decides to move to a
new patch of earth, or to scurry back inside.  Watching the
chicks’ antics as we eat dinner feels like we’ve turned on cartoons.

Each evening, I go out
and shut the chicks in just to be on the safe side.  They make
quite a mess even with their automatic feeder, so I don’t want to
attract rats (who might stay to dine on
my baby birds).  And for the first couple of days I do have to
spend a few minutes helping chicks find the brooder door when they get
lost five feet away — the alarm peeps are easy to hear from inside.

The only other thing I
do regularly is to keep an eye on the weather forecast and make a
judgement call about whether the day is fine enough for chicks to spend
outdoors.  It’s easy for a chick in the fluffball stage to get wet
and chilled, so if it’s going to be extremely stormy, I just leave them
shut up for the day.  That said, by the time they’re even two
weeks old, our chicks are bright enough to stay inside during downpours
since we’ve selected for good foraging breeds.

You may have other
problems to contend with if your pets aren’t as well-trained as ours,
if you don’t have a sheltered area to protect the flock during their
youth, or if you’re raising a dumber breed.  But I highly
recommend figuring out how to get your flock out on pasture early
regardless — they’ll be healthier, and so will you when you eat the
higher quality meat and eggs.