The Ultimate Chicken Tractor! Moving our chickens on to pasture today!

it's a windy day today guys welcome to the Stoney Ridge farm channel today we're going to be moving our baby chicks out from their brood er which is inside our shop and into our mobile coop right here so come along as we teach you a little bit about raising chicks about our mobile coop design I think it's probably a one-of-a-kind design we'll also link to the build of this coop at the end of the video so in case you're curious about how this was made this is version 2 will be building version 3.0 later this year so if you're not subscribed to the channel please jump in here and subscribe it's just a great time here on the Stoney Ridge farm so let's get busy without further ado we're going to hook the side-by-side to this mobile coop we're going to pull it out of the cow pasture and over here in front of our house alright waiting free to word freedom [Music] that's my freedom I tune as well chicken key so once again guys if this is your first time to the Stoney Ridge farm channel welcome this is an awesome place to be we learn a whole lot of stuff we have a little bit of fun with equipment and tractors and all kinds of things we homestead we farm we tour farms and we have a good time what we're gonna do right now is I'm going to grab this coop and you're going to see just how lightweight it is this is PVC drain pipe with tin on it custom ordered tin if you look around your local area you'll find out that you can custom order your metal your sheet metal or your tin to size so however you want to make it we're going to talk about this coop and we're also going to talk about version 3.0 version 3.0 is going to be awesome it's going to be a little bit more insulated to keep the heat down on the birds in the middle of the summer so let's grab it I'll show you how light it is and the easiest way to haul this long distances is not dragging it we'll just throw it over the ball on the side by side here and we'll pull it right on down in front of the house what we have here is just a rope I'm a big fella my wife can move this she's about five foot two and weighs about 105 pounds and she can move it this is a handle that's designed for pulling this mobile coop pretty cool huh pretty handy so we'll hook up the side-by-side this is our cub cadet side-by-side we're gonna hook up to it pull it down here in the yard it's just as simple to tow and move we'll pull this guy up just a little bit lay this right over top of the hitch right here the ball and we'll pull it across the farm alright guys what we're doing here is just slowly dragging this we're about three miles an hour I'm breaking any speed records really cool setup [Music] just trying to pull this to a safe place where we can start moving our birds and we'll move our birds either every day or every other day here on the farm until they're ready to go in chicken mobile and you'll see that being built in the future video also we're gonna get these guys out here I have them fairly close to my house because we don't have any livestock Guardian dogs yet once we get livestock Guardian dogs we'll be able to move these guys way across the pasture over there and move them in behind the cows so this right here is an awesome way for you to fertilize your yard without having to put any chemicals on your yard so in other words all we do is put chicken feet in there and out the butt of the chicken comes awesome fertilizer and it makes our grass green and it makes it pop now we are just in March here early March and we're gonna start seeing a lot of grass growth right here so this is the mobile coop we're gonna walk around it a little bit once I start getting birds inside of it here we go so this coop is around a 12 by 10 and in that tote right there that's kind of my little transport box for the baby chicks they've been in the garage and here in the shop and the brooder is just too heavy for me to pick up so what we're going to do is open this up and these birds will either fly out or I'll just gently set them out into the coop here now again this coop is 10 foot by 12 foot and it's all constructed out of four inch drain pipelines so it's not scheduled 40 heavy-duty it's the light duty drain pipeline so it's all about conserving weight and keeping the chickens in the shade okay we love our baby chicks on our farm we love the fact that we can let them loose and eat grass and live naturally and pick up some of the debris off of the ground here to get grit in their craw we're also going to go to the creek and get a shovel full of sand sandy grit and we'll put it in here in a tray so that these birds have access to it now we're going to take the lid off I'd imagine some birds will start flying pretty quick for those birds that don't want to fly and chickens are a little skittish we'll just set them out nice and gentle very cool so these are again from Murray McMurray hatchery these our red sex-linked laying hens these are all female birds and the white ones are white leggings and the white leggings are quite skittish compared to the red sex Lynx so they'll figure out that they can get out we'll just tip this over just a little bit and these guys will come right on out birds of a feather remember they're going to flock together so they'll follow each other wherever they want to go if you have one bird alone it will fight like crazy to get back inside this coop typically this is what will raise our meat birds in from about the two and a half week mark got a got a baby chick buried under here so from about the two and a half week mark we'll leave our meat birds in here and this is our birds first chance to see grass so it's interesting to see their reaction to grasp I'm gonna go reload and bring in the next bunch again this will house 50 chicks this will house 50 meat birds Cornish cross meat birds from the time they come out of the brooder all the way through to the time that you process them it's a very very cool setup you do have to move it every single day with the meat birds but with these laying hens they won't eat quite as much and they won't poop quite as much so they won't damage your grass birds and they're all laying down in here this is one of the red sex links they are SuperDuper friendly chickens so we're putting them out here on pasture but what we really need to think about is predators we need to think about what can get to them so far I've had this coop in use for two years and I've had no predator issues whatsoever but every year we do a bit of a checkup and make sure all the wire is good on our PVC coop right here slide this guy in here and we've already got pre-drilled holes to mount up right there right there and right there to mount up our roof system right here so what this does is it keeps the chicks out of the hot hot Sun and it keeps most of the rain off of them now these are young birds I've been doing what you call hardening the birds in other words you can't just take your baby chicks straight from the brooder where it's 85 degrees and put them out here in 60 degrees and it's gonna probably be 36 tonight you're gonna have to harden your Birds off in other words you have to slowly get your Birds used to colder weather and that's what we've been doing for I guess about two weeks now so we'll turn off the heat lamp we've actually removed the heat lamp totally from the brooder and these birds are good to go down to 22 degrees which was super awesome I can't say enough about the birds the health of these birds from Mary McMurray hatchery has been absolutely phenomenal they're doing an absolute great job we're gonna pull the cub cadet away from what we're working with here I'm gonna walk you around the coop and kind of show you a little bit of it and we'll link to the video where we constructed this I don't have plans out there so you're gonna have to use your imagination until I can get plans the 3.0 version of this coop is going to be a little bit lighter weight we're going to use two inch pipes and we're going to insulate the roof right here now our kitty cats are gonna have to get used to baby chicks out here and hopefully they won't bother them too bad if you're not a very large person you're not a very strong person and you don't want to have to move this you can always hook it on to a bumper ball and pull it wherever you want I prefer to move it by hand sometimes my wife can't pull it up the hill so we'll hitch up to the UTV and pull it up the hill so there are a few things we need to think about with our birds out here on past year the first thing we need to think about is shelter this is a great shelter for the birds although it does not protect them from all wind and all rain and/or snow we've had birds out on the snow before too so when it snows you're not moving this thing you just have the patch of grass that the birds are on now chickens are omnivores in other words they're scavengers they'll eat pretty much anything but they can't survive just on grass so if you're thinking about pastoring your birds you're either meat birds or your egg layers you're gonna have to supplement them with a little bit of feed now these baby birds again they're somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four weeks old we've moved up and graduated out of the inside brooder which had this small feeder in this small water we're not going to get away with that out here on pasture so we've moved up to a mobile coop feeder like this guy right here this is from Brower I'll post links in the video description there's also a link i'll post here at the end of the video on how to set up your brooder for your baby chicks but this is a Brower feeder you can see the feed in there it's all PVC construction the way it's designed here is so that the birds can't get their feet in there and dig out the feed so there's a little lip right there and it's easy to tote because it has a PVC handle right here now for our waters we're going to go with something a little bit different too this is I believe a four or five gallon water system and the way it works it's very easy to tote it's very easy to move around again this is for mobile coop so it's easy to move around the lid you don't have to twist it or anything like that it just opens up and you take a five-gallon bucket and pour your water in there so good cleaning water now Josh what if it rains what if this feed gets wet it's okay it's okay if it gets wet again your chickens love to eat garbage they like to eat stuff off the land so later on when we start doing meat birds this year we're what our food down so we'll take our organic chicken feed which consists of all sorts of kind of powdery ingredients and we'll wet that food down well actually let it ferment a little bit and it makes our Birds taste just wonderful they eat less food they gain more weight and they drink less water which is a bonus all the way around so what we're going to do is we're going to set this guy over inside the coop we'll just slide back our piece of ten I've had no issues with that piece of ten if you have a lot of predators in your area we have two German Shepherd dogs on our farm that keep an eye on this stuff but if you have a lot of predators you want to make sure that your birds are protected again we're going to walk around the coop here at the end of the video show you a little bit about the construction and show you some spots that we need to address folks I want to let you know you can do this on a third of an acre you don't need a large piece of land to raise your own food and raise your own eggs if you're tired of eating that garbage from the grocery store this is the solution right here okay so we'll set this guy in where the birds can get to it that's our feeder then we'll set our water right over in here and we want to make sure when we put our water in that the spot where the water comes out is facing down the hill in other words once water fills up to about right here that will stop the water flow if it's facing up the hill water will never rise up and it'll all run out onto the ground and waste all your hard work so again we'll face that down the hill remove the lid and it's just as easy just pouring some good fresh water in there that's a full 5-gallon bucket of water and fit in there like a champ we'll put the lid on right here now the birds can't get in there they can't make a mess they can't poop in their water and we're set also one more feature of this feeder I got to show you so having chickens they like to get on the high place they like to roost this right here this PVC bar see how it's rolling okay it's designed to keep the birds off if they get up here it'll roll and they'll fall off and therefore they can't roost on top of here and poop in their feet very important so that's the mobile chicken coop that's the chicken tractor I like to keep the tow-rope up out of the dirt if I can just slide this guy back over we'll reinstall our screws to hold this guy down so that the wind doesn't catch it and blow the roof off of it so a quick overview of the construction right here this is just 2 foot chicken wire this thing is about 24 inches high and basically we took self-tapping screws we wrapped it with chicken wire and we use the self-tapping screws with a great big washer we'll get it closed up in a second around the outside edge to attach our chicken wire if we run into a problem we just put more wire in and twist it up and fix some spots we got a little torn spot right down there so this 10 if you google search suppliers of metal roofing or sheet metal roofing you'll find a local person that will make this for you basically it comes in flat sheets they'll roll it out and cut it just to the size that you want so if you don't want a 10 by 12 coop you can build this a little bit smaller this is not schedule 40 in other words this is drain pipe this is four inch drain pipe like you'd go buy at Lowe's or Home Depot again I'll post a link at the end of the video at the end credits and you can take a look at this and how it's all constructed with this lightweight PVC construction you see here this thing just glides along the edge of the ground no problem whatsoever so we've got a tee right here we got a little piece here we've got a tee here elbow elbow and that's it the basis of every corner of this is based on that tee tee elbow elbow the other corner is exactly the same way now you see a little support right there in the middle I'll talk about that in a second this is how we attached our wire so we use self-tapping screws with a great big washer all in all I'm gonna say this entire coop right here we have about 220 dollars in it and so far it's lasted two to three years now and I see no problem with it lasting for another 10 years now we do have to look at our wire make sure our wire is in good shape all the way around and you can see we've got a problem area right here cow might have stepped on that you can see kind of a hoof mark right there so we've got to fix that okay so we'll get some more wire well twist it up and we'll fix that guy right up pretty cool little coupe there's a little piece of pipe in right here support we started getting a little bit of a sag so if I had to build it again I would probably put a support right there in the middle again this is 10 by 12 we could make it a little bit bigger and probably has a few more chickens now when it comes to meat birds we have the meat birds in here for approximately six weeks they get a little bit crowded and you got to move them every day for sure these birds will be okay right here for the next probably three days and then we'll move them to the next spot and they'll leave that good but fertilizer that we like so much here on the farm so guys thank you so much for joining me here on the Stoney Ridge farm today if you're not subscribed to the channel please jump in pound the like button subscribe the channel all sorts of fun stuff going on utility vehicle reviews farming tractors all kinds of good stuff here we're on a 200 acre farm here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and we'd love to have you thanks a lot guys we'll see you next time on a Stoney Ridge Pierce we had some ways Denis Tony Reed [Music] all we're gonna do fix this market phone in my pocket moving our baby chicks you're gonna get a whole lot of I believe I got dogs