Author: Anna & Mark

Feeding chickens in a trough

May 9, 2012 Posts No Comments
Making a chicken trough

I’ve always chosen to
toss my chickens’
daily allotment on
the ground for a number of reasons.  Primarily, I want to give
them a measured amount, but I really got in the habit when our chickens
lived in tractors.  I thought having to
hunt through the grass to find bits of feed could give our hens
something constructive to do all day.



However, my brother let
me know that his new
chickens started
eating less when he put the feed in a container.  He still gave
them a daily allotment, but realized that he was actually feeding them
a bit too much since they left food behind.  Since we’d recently
upgraded to gourmet
chicken feed, we
thought the higher quality feed might mean our chickens needed
less.  So I asked Mark to build
me a simple trough
to go in the coop, then watched to see what happened.



Chicken troughAt first, I wasn’t even sure
if the hens had figured out where their grub was now being
served.  They barely seemed to touch the food and I got worried
they were starving.  So I started giving them their food scraps
next to the trough, and snuck in early one morning to see that yes, the
hens were eating from their new container.  (Also, egg production
stayed high, which was a real tipoff that the chickens were still well
nourished.)



Our girls were clearly
eating much less out of the
trough.  (Or, rather, the sparrows were probably getting less
leftover feed.)  I already feed our chickens less than the
recommended daily allowance due to our pastures, but
I think I’ve been overfeeding anyway.  I’ll be slowly cutting back
on my feeding amount until there’s no grain left in the trough at the
end of the day and will report back once I know how much our hens
actually need to eat on pasture.


Even if you restrict their
rations, chickens should always have access to copious amounts of clean
water.  The Avian Aqua Miser is the obvious solution to
the dirty water problem.

Effects of a power outage on the incubator

May 7, 2012 Posts 14 Comments

Newly hatched chickHow much will a power outage
affect your incubator?  Is it worth keeping the eggs going after
the juice comes back on, or should you pull the plug and start over?



We had a two to three
hour loss of power during the second week our incubator was running,
and we did see a slightly lower hatch rate, but not enough that I feel
we should have just started over.  During our first hatch of the
season (same incubator, same parents), we had 90% viable eggs, 95%
hatch rate of those viable eggs, and a 94% survival rate to four
weeks.  In contrast, the set of eggs that lived through the outage
had 95% viability, 80% Chick camhatch rate, and 94% survival
(to one week).  (See my 99 cent ebook, Permaculture
Chicken: Incubation Handbook for more information on
calculating these rates and improving your hatch.)



How long eggs can
survive in the incubator without power depends on a variety of
factors.  Length of time the power is out is an obvious one, and
so is air temperature in the room — shorter outages and warmer rooms
cause less of an impact.  If you’re around during the outage (we
weren’t), you can close all the vents, add a hot water bottle if you
have one, and wrap the incubator up in a Two day old chicksblanket to conserve heat,
which will mitigate the outage to some extent.



Another factor to
consider is age of the eggs.  The further along your chicks are in
their development, the less likely they will be negatively affected by
a power outage.  As embryos develop, they begin to produce a bit
of heat by themselves, which warms the inside of the incubator slightly.



Have you left the
incubator running after a power outage?  I’d be curious to hear
how Week old chicklong your power was out and
what percent of the eggs survived to hatch.




Our chicken waterer got the surviving chicks off
to a healthy start with clean water.

Self-filling chicken tractor waterer

May 4, 2012 Posts 3 Comments

Gutter on a chicken tractorGlenn Ingram didn’t only make
his coop waterer self-filling, he added the same
innovation (plus some) to his chicken tractor.  I’ll let him tell
you about his tractor watering system in his own words:


Here is the overall chicken tractor. It
has wheels that go up and down as needed. I like my tractor because I
almost never have to go inside. I can pour feed in from the outside,
collect eggs from a door to the outside, and water from the outside.
Better yet, have the tractor collect rain water for the chickens to
drink.



Bucket waterer overflowHere
is a close-up of the buckets. They are not heated
as I don’t keep the chickens in the tractor during freezing weather. It
has the same exact features as the 5-gallon bucket system for my larger
non-mobile coop. The problem on the chicken tractor is the lack of
vertical room for the bucket to be below the gutter yet high enough so
the chickens can get under it to drink.

 

So I used a 2-gallon bucket. I used a
piece of flexible sump pump hose for the overflow so I can have a
little more control of where the overflow goes to get the water away
from the tractor and yet it does not get in the way when moving it. I
put a water level indicator on the outside, which works well but you
have to take the slope into account. We have almost no flat spots on
our hilly terrain so the buckets are never level. Depending on the
slope, the indicator can make it look like there is more or less water
in the buckets than reality. Just understand what the water level will
look like with the slope.



Connecting bucketsTo
gain more water capacity, I slaved a second 2-gallon bucket to the 1st
one. This is done by simply connecting the 2 buckets with a 3/4″ pipe
at the bottom of the buckets. It can be a straight pipe, mine has a 45
degree turn to get around the post. This connection allows the 2
buckets to act like one larger bucket. As one bucket fills, the other
bucket fills, as one empties, the other empties. Be sure to drill a
small hole in the lid of the bucket without the downspout so air can
escape or enter to replace the water that is moving (otherwise you
create a vacuum and the water cannot move). This works great so that I
have about 3.5 gallons of water capacity yet the buckets fit in the
tight vertical space (a little less that 3 feet total). I never put
more that 6 chickens in the tractor so they never empty these buckets
before it rains again. If I ever do need to add water as after
cleaning, I just pour it in the gutter. I do the same thing with the
large bucket system on the main coop.



The nipple is, again on the bottom of
the bucket. I only have one nipple right now but I am going to add
another. I used some bent lightweight galvanized steel conduit to mount
the buckets, but I just used them because they were left over from
another project. I don’t know that I would recommend them as they are
not perfectly stable when moving the tractor, but they are pretty good.



The entire roof of the chicken
tractor opens which also lifts the gutter and therefore downspout out
of the bucket. I can then easily pick up both buckets at once to remove
them for cleaning or to take them inside in freezing weather.



One other note, I highly recommend
the use of Uniseals to connect pipes to buckets. You can order them
online very affordably in pretty much any size that PVC pipe comes in.
Then you just drill the appropriate-sized hole with a hole saw (they
tell you which one to use) and pop the Uniseal into place. You then
push a piece of PVC pipe of the appropriate size into the hole with the
uniseal in place. The pipe pushes the Uniseal against the sides of the
hole and seals wonderfully. There are no glues or adhesives and you
don’t even need access to the inside of the bucket. They work equally
well on curved and flat surfaces. The best part is you can pull the
pipe back out, remove the uniseal and reuse it somewhere else. I don’t
know how long they last, but they have been great for the past 8 months
with lots of sun exposure and freezing temperatures. We’ll see how they
last through the summer. I use these for making rain barrels as well.



You may also notice that I have tin
roofs on my coops. Asphalt/tar shingle roofs may not work well because
of tar from the roof getting in the water. That may or may not affect
the chickens’ health. Also, the small pieces of grit from shingles clog
up the screens requiring more maintenance. Debris also seems to wash
off the tin roof much faster so you don’t get as much bacteria growing
on the roof. I don’t know that bacteria is really a problem when
talking about a bird eating off the ground all day, but at least that
is less bacteria to be growing in their water bucket.



Thanks again for sharing
your inspiring system, Glenn!


Glenn’s waterer is based on
our do it yourself
chicken waterer kit.