With so much interest in how food lives before hitting the dinner plate, I wanted to share what we do with our laying hens.
In years past, we housed them in a garden utility shed allowing free range of the property however; this allowed them to dig and make a huge mess of my gardening - they ate a lot of the plants too.
The next year we had them in a mobile "hut" allowing them to be grass fed.
It was enclosed with chicken wire to keep them safe from skunks, coyotes, etc... but, we had to move the unit frequently for accessibility of fresh grass.
This became tedious as the summer went on and brought us to the plan of 2018:
The Chicken Trailer.
It's not fancy but, it does the trick.
The Chicken Trailer is an old livestock trailer that my husband revised.
Simply put, he lined the floor with a thick wire mesh and placed roosting rods across the trailer. On the back door he hung a laying hut with 5 slots which is easily accessible for collecting eggs.
We filled it with 30 hens who can graze a cover crop field or pasture or stay in the trailer for shade, water and grain.
The outside food options are whatever we have planted in the field which could be a 10 way polyculture mix along with their natural diet aka. bugs.
Above, you can see the droppings of the birds after 7 days.
Full disclosure, the trailer should've been moved prior to this density of droppings for optimal fertilizing.
We recently relocated the trailer to the home farm property where my parents live. There, we have our our cattle who graze the pastures and we plan to incorporate sheep in the rotation as well.
The idea is to mimic the natural environment where species live harmoniously.
Plants are grazed by larger livestock who leave behind trash/fertilizer/manure.
Smaller animals follow in their footsteps ingesting insects and plants while kicking and spreading manure from the cattle.
The remaining droppings are then composted naturally and feed the soil for another season of planting.
This provides us with more natural elements and less synthetic nutrient applications are needed - saving time, money and soil health.
The Catch
They're available for predators.
We minimize their interactions with predators by locking the door at night as laying hens have a natural instinct to "go home" and roost at dusk.
Although they are supposed to go in at night, they don't always.
Unfortunately for them, we still shut the door and keep the others safe and hope the ones remaining outside are still there in the morning.
Our groups have always returned to roost in the evening safely stowed away however, they lived in a home that didn't relocate, unlike this group.
With these free-range-mobile-home hens - we started with 30, now we have 18.
The reasons we can think of them not returning are:
We relocated the trailer to my parents home, making them a little unsure of new surroundings
They over explored during the day and couldn't find their way back once darkness fell (they don't see well in the dark)
They think another living area, like under big trees, is ideal (totally unaware of predators hoping this)
They're stupid.
Whatever the case may be, we still get our, now, 18 eggs a day.
