Horse Barn, Alpaca Barn...Chicken Barn!

Our 100+ year old barn has housed quite an array of livestock.  In an earlier blog I mention that it was set up for Oxen when we first purchased the farm. After raising up the loft and restructuring inside, I transitioned the barn to keep our horses. After several years of housing and birthing horses in the barn, Alpacas took up residence there along with a few goats.

Now the old barn is slated for an update to house our current focus, the chickens. Because our business took off so quickly and the acquisition of another chicken business, we had to quickly provide safe and clean housing for all these awesome new birds. The big horse stalls had room to make two coops in each one. Using wood from an old deck from a neighbor, I built a separate coop that houses four different breeds. We called this the “Chicken Suites”. My son and I went out into our woods and resourced some small locust trees. We used these small trees to frame out the pens for the suites.  Still needing more housing, Amy and I designed some “Chicken Cabins”. A 4’x4’ coop with 4’x8’ attached pens. These will house about 4 birds of different breeds each. In one day, I built eight of these cabins, it was a long day!

Now we are planning another big reno of the old barn. We will, of course, keep it’s old barn look on the outside, but I will be removing the stall walls and building coops on two sides with a center isle. All with attached pens. We are trying to centralize our birds to make it easier to feed and water, especially in the cold months. We may have to build a second barn that will attach to the current one. It will not be as tall but the same size footprint.

This is in addition to my plan to build a post and beam workshop fashioned after a barn at Old Sturbridge Village and our newest idea of building a greenhouse from repurposed windows. Next year we are also planning on transitioning an old alpaca paddock into a big garden.

We will be starting the Hatching and Brooder room build within the barn that I built in the next few weeks. If you’ve lost track, this was a workshop to a farm store to a yarn mill back to a farm store then back to a workshop and now will be a Hatcher/Brooder room. The attached feed room will then become my workshop. As you see, my workshop tends to bounce around, hence why I am planning a whole new barn for my new shop.

My work is never done here and for those who cannot sit still and like having an ongoing project all the time (like my son), a farm is for you.

-WF

Diversify your Farm (4)...

As with many of our ventures on the farm, we kind of stumble into things. We stumbled into the Alpaca business which led to the yarn business, etc. When our son lost his colt he expressed interest in Nigerian goats after seeing them at the Southwick Zoo. Amy did some research and purchased our first Nigerian goat. A baby female that we had to bottle feed. Her name was Delilah. Delilah led to a few more Nigerians including a few bucks. We still have about a dozen goats and still sell the baby's when we have them, but our newest farm animal is not really that new to our farm.

When we first moved to the farm I had always wanted to have chickens pecking around the yard. Nothing said farm like a few chickens. I borrowed a Styrofoam incubator from a friend and he gave be a bunch of fertile eggs. I knew very little about raising chickens from eggs, but I did it. I built a brooder box and a medium sized cage. Once the chicks were born, I kept them in the brooder box until they had their feathers and then moved them to the bigger cage. Once I felt they were big enough, I let them free range on the farm. So, we have had chickens on the farm for quite a while.

This past year, Amy decided that she wanted to focus on the chickens and start raising some to sell. We borrowed a bigger incubator and started filling it. It kind of became an obsession. We no longer would eat the eggs, we would immediately put them in the incubator. Amy was always excited to have baby chicks hatching almost every day. We would advertise on Craigslist and we would sell out of our chicks. This encouraged us to raise more and more. Amy started looking for more interesting breeds and became more serious about hatching specific breeds. The chick business took off for Amy. She was able to supplement her income nicely. We would have people calling and stopping at the farm almost daily looking for chicks.

We even tried our hand at Meat Birds. We raised 40 meat chicks and processed them ourselves once they were big enough. It took a little getting used to, but we ended up selling quite a few and the rest filled our freezer. Knowing that the chicken we were eating were cared for and live normal lives is piece of mind. Plus the meat was delicious!

Amy started sourcing her birds from other farms in order for her to keep up with the demand. We connected with a farm in Brooklyn CT. Recognizing that there was a market for quality chickens of specific breeds, we formed a "Micro Hatchery". After some hemming and hawing, we all sat down and conjured up The Hatching House. We decided that our hatchery would be better than the large hatcheries in the sense that we would focus more on quality and not quantity. We would only produce so many of our chicks per month and then close the month out. We also did not like the practice by most hatcheries to grind up the male chicks. We discussed different ways to utilize our male chicks in order to not waste a life.

We also offer our rooster chicks at 15 for $25. These are chicks you can raise for meat for about $1.60 each. Once our business grows and we start getting higher numbers of roosters, we plan on donating the processed chicken to local food banks and food kitchens. We will have several outlets for our male chicks in order not to waste a life.

Our stock birds are well taken care of. They are provided generous outside pens and fed Non-GMO feed that is locally sourced. We will make sure that our micro hatchery will develop to meet the needs of our customers. Check out our website www.TheHatchingHouse.com.

My next blog I will talk about how we transitioned our horse/alpaca/goat farm into a chicken breeding farm!

-WF

Why a Chicken Tractor...

I have been keeping chickens at my small farm for about 16 years. When I first began, they were mostly free range because I liked seeing them peck around the yard. The drawback was that collecting eggs was a daily Easter egg hunt. Some birds would go broody in some obscure bush and I would assume they were eaten. Other issues when you free range, you take the chance that something will take your chickens. Everything eats chicken. I mean EVERYTHING. I remember coming home in the morning after working a long Midnight shift to find the Helter Skelter of chicken massacres in my front yard. There were 13 of my chickens strewn all over the yard. Some were headless and some were perfectly intact, just no longer breathing. Only one of my birds survived the attack and she was never the same again. I kept them in a coop that I had built to look like and old corn crib. Sometimes someone would remember to shut the door at night, mostly not. I lost birds that I had had for nearly ten years.

Fast forward a few years later and I started purchasing birds that were a tad more expensive than the $2 feed store birds. Not only did I want a safe place for my chickens to live, but I also wanted more consistency in collecting eggs without the hunt. Keeping your birds in a stationary coop is a lot of work trying to keep the coop and the run clean and trying to keep the birds from having to walk around in their own poop.

I had seen Chicken Tractors before and really liked the idea that I could move it around the yard and provide my birds with fresh grass. Not only does it cut down on their feed, but it provided my birds with a clean new patch of grass and no messy build-up of chicken poop.

Upon further research, I learned that once you move the Chicken Tractor, the chewed up patch left behind will eventually grow back greener and thicker than before, Bonus! Another cool use is in the early Spring, you can put the Chicken Tractor in your weedy garden beds before planting season and the chickens will not only eat all the weeds, but they will mix up and fertilize your garden beds too!

After months of research, I found a really nice design that provided shelter and a grazing area for my chickens and it could easily be moved around the yard by the smallest person.

I now build custom Chicken Tractors and coops for the chicken enthusiast. Go to my Wicked Koops FaceBook page to see the different designs I have that can meet your needs and don’t forget to “Like” my page for updates. You can also contact me at WickedKoops@gmail.com.

Stay tuned for new related products like: roll away nesting boxes, rat proof feeders, dusting boxes and perching ladders.

- WF