FREEDOM FROM THE SUPERMARKET! Raising meat birds on very small acreage!

hey folks this is Josh Stoney Ridge farmer welcome back to the farm today is the day that we move our baby chicks out of the brooder and into the mobile coop from the outside we've got a little bit of drama to talk about we've got a fox that's been roaming around the farm here we'll tell you a little bit about that we'll show you our mobile coop set up we'll talk about predator control and we'll have a little bit of fun here on the farm so come along as we take our birds and introduce them to grass for the first time out on pasture [Music] guys before we start this video I want to thank Maya hatchery for helping out with the chickens this year this is just the best place in the country to get your birds great genetics and they treat their birds with respect as you can see up there those are our Cornish cross birds left over from last year let's get busy so we've got to drive up to the place where we store our mobile coop and it's basically on the edge of the forest up here and we only have one coop and it's a 10 by 12 coop it's made out of PVC if you haven't seen that video there'll be a link to it at the end of this video it's called you've never seen anything like this it's about our mobile coop and how we built it we've got a whole series on chickens and raising chickens so there's some awesome stuff out here on our channel so we normally store it right over here and we'll just pull right up here I've got a rope attached to the front very very simple so we'll take our rope and this is when we move the coop with every day we pretty much just take it right here and just slide it and we're just loop this right over top of the ball here on the front of the Gator basically we're just gonna back the Gator up and we'll back all the way up to where we want to put our chicks for their first start and the whole process here is moving them through our lawn so you could do this in a small plot of land in the city we basically will move the birds either every one day or every two days these first couple days as they're young we'll just move them every two days and then as manure progresses in other words as they start pooping more we'll move them more and as they start matting the grass down more we'll move them more let's drag this thing on back very very lightweight setup now for bad drivers there is no compensation it's just me bad driver let's get back on the Gator I had to drag it back from the bushes that Gator is the most used tool on our farm hands down by far I use that thing all day every day just about I could have easily drugged that out of the woods and drugged it down here 200 yards but the Gator just makes life so much easier from now on we'll move this plot by plot square by square throughout the yard and you can see the yard pops from this it just makes the yard pop that chicken manure doesn't kill the grass unless you leave the chickens on it for too long so if you're moving it on a daily basis square square square it will make your lawn pops if you have a nice place in the city you don't have to worry about it killing your grass now as we're putting chickens in here and as we're putting the feeders in the waters in here you can look at the construction of this coop it's very simple it's made of PVC drain pipe at the end of the video I'll walk you all the way around it and I'll talk to you about the construction materials and the sizes of most of the things it's pretty simple to build all you got to do is glue it together screw it together and you're good to go now I'm going to show you the waters and the feeders that we use that make this very very easy so we can lift them out move the coop and set them back in lift them out fill them up move the coop set them back in and the chickens will follow the feeders and the waterers everyday too it's really really cool it's an interesting setup and it makes your meat birds taste great for demonstration purposes right quick I'll show you how the lid goes on basically we just leave this lid on and we put in removable screws so we put a zipper screw in here zip a screw in here and a screw in there and every day we'll move it and it just takes pretty much one hand or two hands and we just slide it just like so very very easy it's very lightweight but it's not so lightweight that it blows away in the wind a lot of folks are really concerned with the design of this and saying oh my goodness one windstorm that thing is gonna blow away it's so low to the ground that it doesn't blow away and this shiny tin not a dark-colored tin reflects the sunlight and keeps the birds cool now we've got all the feeders and stuff stored from last year in our old tobacco barn so we're going to go up to the tobacco barn it's kind of a treat going up there [Music] you guys might notice a few other things going on on the farm the chickens aren't the only thing that's going on on the farm blog here guys be sure and found that like button subscribe to the channel there's a lot more fun stuff going on here at the Stoney Ridge this is our tobacco Shack our tobacco barn this is a circa nineteen I'm gonna say teens tobacco barn hand-built tobacco barn this is where they used to hang tobacco up back in the old days pretty cool we'll try and go in there the lights pretty low but and it's a mess so don't hold it against me it's a storage area this was a huge mess a huge storage area a huge disaster of a mess it's still a moderate mess but I got a big pile of trash to take to the dump on the trailer now instead of a big pile of stuff we might use everyday into the tobacco barn we go this is the tobacco barn those are called tear or peer poles I think they're called tear poles and this is where they used to string up tobacco and dry it this would make a pretty awesome cabin huh really cool this is also where we store our fancy feeders there's one fancy feeder here is our water er let's talk really quickly about the feeders and the waters that we use this is a five gallon easy clean type water er and it has a little float in there that allows water to trickle out right through here it works great on a slope in other words when you're moving chickens on a hillside or when you're on a mobile coop the water tends to drip out of your standard type water err not with this and if we want to clean it all we got to do is open it up and you can get right in there so it's a whole lot easier than unscrewing and sliding and taking stuff apart all you do is put water in there and it works it works great let's show you the feeder so here's the feeder system that we use this is easy to handle I think it's four feet long maybe five feet I think it might be a five foot long feeder this will hold about 25 pounds of chicken feed the chickens fifty chickens will go through one of these in a day once they're about five weeks old these birds are two weeks old now and they're going out there already feathered out and they're going out on past year what's really interesting is that when we restricted their food intake when we restricted the feed that we gave them a high-protein mix of feed when we restricted that prior to their slaughter prior to putting them in the freezer the birds were absolutely full of grass and being out on pasture like this allows them to get some microbes allows them to get the bugs allows them to eat the grass it allows them to get the stress of hot and cold and sunlight and dark and movement and all the things that they don't get in a commercial chicken house which builds immunity and that immunity that it builds with the chickens transfers to you when you eat the chicken if you get what I mean in other words if you eat garbage you're garbage and if you eat good your body is made of good stuff everything you eat is what your body's made of so if all you ate was beans and weenies for the last six months your body is made up of the things that were in those beans and weenies yeah so here's how I do my lid I just lift it slide it up here I set my feeder and my water right here and we're gonna go ahead get our feed our water set up and get our baby birds it's so fun watching these baby birds the first time they see grass they're like huh what's this I don't know what to do and by the end of their cycle out here they know what to do you move into a new patch of grass and they're like how about now we'll set our feeder over in here and we'll set our water into our bucket and we'll pour our water in now I know what you're thinking I know what you're thinking right now man I gotta carry a five-gallon bucket of water down everyday well you don't you can set a five-gallon bucket here and then one there and then one there on down the line if you go to the gym and walk on a treadmill that's exercise and so is this what's better exercise feeding your family or walking into a wall at the gym now here's the funnest part for me watching these birds see grass for the first time they pretty much have no idea what to do but they do know how to poop which fertilizes a lawn like crazy well what do you think this is pastured poultry 101 right here guys this coop works absolutely great it's very easy to move around it held up all last year it's holding up this year we've been through two hurricanes with winds sustained at 80 miles an hour it did not blow away we have not had any issues with predators getting in it digging through it getting through the wire I think if a predator had its head set on getting in here it would get in here as with any chicken coop I've got some solar-powered motion lights that I'm probably going to put on the perimeter edges of this just to deter predators because what's a predators biggest fear being discovered so the lights will really help with that but so far so good this will be our second year we're going to start a new prototype and we'll probably split these chickens into two groups of 25 so stay tuned on the vlog as we build our new prototype if you want to see how this one was built there'll be a link right up here just click that link and check it out so guys I hope you enjoyed today's vlog the birds flock together even if they weren't in the coop they would still all be occupying this small 120 square foot area over the lifespan of these birds each bird will be able to occupy 2,000 square feet of sunshine grass rocks ticks worms and bugs more than any bird you've probably ever tasted in your life I encourage you to do something like this thanks a lot for watching today guys please pound that like button subscribe to the channel if you come back and see me I promise I'll show you something cool I've got a lot of oil changes to do today I've got to change the oil on every truck on the farm all the tractors and the Gator today so I got to get busy we'll see you next time on the Stoney Ridge all right don't break [Music] Pearse we had some ways opposed to me stone Tyrion Oh