![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Looking up the hill I can see the chicken pasture unit that the crew transferred the hens into last night. There are fewer nestboxes than in the barn, and not all the chickens found them, so there are just eggs everywhere.
I can see my brother-in-law, holding an egg basket, and I just watched him come around the side of the pasture unit, stand there a moment, and then visibly sigh and get down onto his knees, bend over, and crawl under the unit.
(The pasture unit is a haywagon's base, wheels and axles and frame, with a semicircular apparatus over the top kind of like a greenhouse, with a wire base, and the whole outside is covered in greenhouse plastic to let light in and keep weight down, and it gets towed around behind a truck or tractor on the pastures. There's a second unit, too, that's a more traditional chicken-coop looking thing, a bit shorter with a tin shed roof and wood walls and real glass windows salvaged from some building, and it's full of nestboxes. The bigger unit is heavier, though, because on the front near the tongue to tow it there's a big cube for 100 gallons of water, mounted there permanently, and then the waterers hang along the sides of the unit on tubing. The feeders are then hand-carried and set up outdoors for the chickens. There are some solar panels on the roof of the tin-roofed unit, that power little lights in both units so the chickens can have supplemental lights in the dimmer seasons so they don't stop laying. There's your Pastured Poultry 101; the only other thing to know is that we don't have enough solar panels to run the electric fence so we have to pasture them somewhere that we can daisy-chain some electric fencing wire out to.)
I can see my brother-in-law, holding an egg basket, and I just watched him come around the side of the pasture unit, stand there a moment, and then visibly sigh and get down onto his knees, bend over, and crawl under the unit.
(The pasture unit is a haywagon's base, wheels and axles and frame, with a semicircular apparatus over the top kind of like a greenhouse, with a wire base, and the whole outside is covered in greenhouse plastic to let light in and keep weight down, and it gets towed around behind a truck or tractor on the pastures. There's a second unit, too, that's a more traditional chicken-coop looking thing, a bit shorter with a tin shed roof and wood walls and real glass windows salvaged from some building, and it's full of nestboxes. The bigger unit is heavier, though, because on the front near the tongue to tow it there's a big cube for 100 gallons of water, mounted there permanently, and then the waterers hang along the sides of the unit on tubing. The feeders are then hand-carried and set up outdoors for the chickens. There are some solar panels on the roof of the tin-roofed unit, that power little lights in both units so the chickens can have supplemental lights in the dimmer seasons so they don't stop laying. There's your Pastured Poultry 101; the only other thing to know is that we don't have enough solar panels to run the electric fence so we have to pasture them somewhere that we can daisy-chain some electric fencing wire out to.)
