Why Everyone Should Have Chickens! Living a more sustainable life is easy!

hey there folks this is Josh Tony rich farmer and mrs. Danny red and we're here on our farm here in the rural foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and we want to show you a little bit about what we do with our garden if you don't know about the YouTube channel this is the Stoney Ridge farm our YouTube channel we're starting a first generation farm here on 200 acres of rural property that was overgrown and an absolute disaster and we're turned it into something beautiful and wonderful so we can feed our family our neighbors and our friends and whomever wants to buy food from us so it's a pretty cool operation today we're going to show you and talk to you a little bit about these troubled times that we're having right now and why it's necessary for you to have chickens chickens are part of the symbiotic relationship with everything here on the farm chickens manure compost gardening all that fun stuff even out here on the yard you can see how luscious and green the yard is it's just absolutely wonderful we're going to talk about chickens we're gonna be fencing them into our garden spot that we just tilled up with the tractor over here we're gonna have a little bit of fun here on the farm today alright [Music] alright we got a chicken singing her egg song over here you guys are gonna hear that so a white leg on hen will sing the egg song when a chicken lays an egg it's like announcing I just laid an egg so all these birds right here that we have under this mobile coop are moved throughout our land they're moved on our yard and right now basically the sustainability portion of our farm is based on about a three acre spot now we've got about a forty acre field over here with our cattle and we just purchased our cattle probably I don't know three or four months ago and this is the spot where the chickens have moved so the chickens are getting fed chicken feed and grass and worms and bugs and they're all moving around in this mobile coop this coop houses anywhere from 35 to 50 Birds and you can see as we go up through here it's a little dead a little less dead a little less green green green green green all the way up through there so got a lot of huge projects going on here on the farm so if you're not subscribed please jump in pound that like button and subscribe to the channel we live in a $3,500 mobile home that we bought and we live on a beautiful acreage here in North Carolina but it didn't always look like this so this is our garden spot and me and mrs. Stoney Ridge are going to be putting some poultry netting which is in the back of the side-by-side right here we're gonna put this poultry netting all the way around our garden and we're going to release our chickens come on down here and we'll show you the chickens this is our deer fence you can see those fence post right there walk on down here we'll explain our deer fence they'll be a link now at the end of the video here to teach you how to keep deer out of your garden with a very very simple fence so here's what we have and again this is all about living sustainably some of our young birds are in here in our coop and some of our older birds so I think we have three older birds that are probably three to five years old inevitably chickens will stop laying after about 3 to 5 years and those chickens well they get put in the pot that's it so this is our laying box or a little apparatus right here and you'll see mrs. Stoney Ridge is gathering up the eggs right now it's a pretty simplistic system this is a 4x8 mobil chicken coop in other words i don't move it every day but if I needed to lift it up and move it and take it to a different spot on the farm I could now this is our garden spot it didn't always look like this let's squat down here and get some soil our soil did not always look like this this is a compost heap this has all of last year's seeds and weeds and composted sticks and stuff like that all in there in that compost problem will slowly work through that spreading it around our garden veggies as the year goes on now we've tilled out our garden spot we built this with compost compost and manure that we got from our local landfill so check your local municipalities you may be able to go get a whole truckload of compost for 20 bucks that's what we had to pay for a truckload of compost this is enough garden spot right here and it's approximately 50 by 80 and it's enough garden spot to feed five families pretty awesome this is our orchard and we just planted all this stuff within the last three to four years we've only been on the farm for five years and this was forested it was an absolute disaster trees falling all over top of each other but we've taken down the forest we put in pasture and we're getting ready to fence this whole area in so we can rotate our cattle these are our honeybees our honeybees are right here by our orchard for a reason so if the honey bees swarm they land in the orchard and voila we can catch our honey bee swarms and that's like catching a hundred dollar bill in a tree it's pretty awesome plus all of our garden veggies and all of our fruit is definitely pollinated by the bees which are right there we're gonna get started planting the garden in about two weeks that's when the last frost date is supposed to be but for right now we're gonna wrap this up we're going to go ahead and put our premier one fencing around our garden let me go over here and show you that so before we had over the winter this garden area about half of it was fenced in with this poultry netting right here and this is electrified poultry netting you'll get a lot more view of that here in just a little bit and now we're going to take it down from where it's at and we're going to put it all around the garden spot what that's going to do is allow those chickens to get in here and eat this stuff volunteer plants that are coming up so the chickens will scratch through all this and spread our compost for us and then we'll help with weed control and they'll put out that good but fertilizer that we love so much that makes the plants just grow chickens love love love to get in here and take dust baths so it's a great thing for the garden and it's a great thing for the chickens now over here I'll show you what we have we have an automatic chicken door opener this is from chicken guard and basically you can just hit a button we can program it to come up and down with sunrise and sunset or we can set a specific time the chickens will automatically go back in the coop every single night and that door automatically closes so they have access to all this space throughout the day they lay us awesome eggs and they go back and go to sleep tonight and they'll be safe pretty cool we also feed all of our old food scraps I'll let mrs. stoneybridge show you those these are her food scraps from the last few days we usually keep tracking for a couple days and the chickens love it no matter how moldy or old it gets it's good chicken treats it looks pretty gross the birds will love it I guarantee you guys we learned all this and I hope you're enjoying the fact that we're sharing it with you we learned all this from experience and overtime these are our gourds that we grew here on the farm we've got a lot of gourds and these just aged right here up on top of the chicken coop and they also provide the chickens with a little bit of shade so year after year we take our old gourds and we put them right up on top of the chicken coop all this stuff is for the garden later but we put all these old gourds these birdhouse boards right up on top of the chicken coop and we make birdhouses out of them so they provide shade and they dry out good they're they cure out and we make birdhouses so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to get this premier one fencing poultry netting we're going to go all the way around the chicken coop we probably won't even have to put power to it because the chickens will have so much room to run and play and do their things and be chickens it's just gonna be awesome let's get busy [Music] probably gonna hear the drone in the background but this is a roll of premier one poultry netting it's electrified right here by those little strands or little strands of electric wire aluminum aluminum eyes are aluminized electric wire we're just about got half the garden done I'm gonna sit down here to the other side of the chicken coop [Music] alright guys we got it done yep yep so that took all of about ten minutes to wrap up our entire garden with this premier one fencing I'll post a link down the video description to the fencing that we use here on the farm and I'll also post a link to the chicken guard automatic chicken coop door opener that thing kicks butt and that's it guys I just wanted to show you what was going on on the Stoney Ridge farm today talk to you a little bit about how chickens are a necessity here on the farm let's talk one more time real quickly say bye mrs. Stoney Ridge let's talk one more time real quickly about our mobile chicken coop set up there'll be a link at the end of this video this is a PVC mobile chicken coop that we move about the farm we don't have to move it far and you don't need a large acreage you can have a third of an acre and still do this and still feed your family those are all laying hens typically we'll put our meat birds in there we use a Cornish cross meat bird most of the time they dress out to be about an eight pound meat bird and we don't have to worry about being hungry as long as we got chickens as long as we grow a garden and we preserve our food and we live clean a good clean sustainable life we're not dumping chemical fertilizers on this garden we're not dumping chemical anything anywhere here on the farm guys so SuperDuper awesome stay tuned the end credits will show you the cool chicken coop chicken guard door I'm gonna hit the button we'll release the chickens and they're gonna have a blast guys thanks a lot for joining us here on the Stoney Ridge farm today I hope you'll come back and see us me and mrs. Stoney Ridge look forward to seeing you again thanks a lot see you next time ringing Wow [Music] Pierce we had some way supposed to be Stone Tyrion [Music] remember we let our chickens be chickens but you can't just let chickens run free or you'll have dead chickens so we've got to have a safety net for our birds and that's what this is see you later guys