Man, what an amazing setup. Super entertaining content. And the fact that it's so entertaining that you don't need all the fancy music and crap is a good thing. Keep up the amazing work and keep being you
Love your videos. Subbed. Youre channel will take off. Great content. Great Production Quality. Good luck. Can't wait to watch your channel grow. Keep the content coming.
Great video! Thanks taking your time to film it and speak to us. I’m new here and an probably looking forward to doing a trial run with about 50 birds to see how it goes, how can I find more information on where to by the young broilers and sell them once they are ready? I’m in the Dallas Fort Worth area.
I suggest going to your local feed store, and ask them if they know of any reputable Hatchery‘s that are close to you. as to selling, that is half the work. Health food stores, gyms, or people who are interested in homesteading/regenerative farming is the place to start. Give up free samples. Do it like the crack dealers, the first one is free.
I feel like you're missing out on some design opportunity. Take advantage of that top part being a screen. Hang your water bucket on the inside. Hang your feeders on the inside. That way they move with the tractor and don't have to be taken out. You can pour feed and water into them through the screen without even having to open it. Question though, why do you line your tractors up diagonally corner to corner?
They are lined up like that because it allows me access to the inside of the shelter from two sides without having to step in chicken manure during evening chores “when they don’t need moved”. Also, it makes ventilation better.
He does. We wanted to use aluminum roofing, but it is prohibitively expensive to purchase new, and we couldn't find any used sheeting when we were building these shelters. We built the shelters so the entire rear of the shelter folded down for maximum ventilation, because we knew that they would be warmer than the original Salatin design.
They are fed a non gmo broiler feed that is primarily corn and soy, with mineral, an essential oil additive, and another additive to prevent the feed from clumping together.
They eat more and more every day as they grow, because they grow so fast, but depending on the weather, they will eat about 3-4 pounds of feed for every 1 pound of dressed weight.
How do you get the water hose way back there? I see you have to drive. Curious on how long the hoses are or if you just drilled a well back on the pasture
We trenched about a third of a mile of 1 3/4 inch water line from my brothers house down the road. He also has cattle on the property, so we tapped into a frost free hydrant line underground outside one of the barns, and ran a line to the edge of the pasture. We use garden hose from that hydrant throughout the pasture for water.
Nice chick mobiles! 180 is heavy but you’re not lifting it too far off of the ground! I’m seriously considering raising chickens but my biggest concern is a moderately high bear population in our area (Roanoke VA). Would these hold up if a bear tried to get in?
Probably not. But then again, I’m not sure what would keep a bear out short of split steel. Polyface farm is in Roanoke VA., have you ever been? They are the farm in whose footsteps we follow. They should have a whole bunch of these structures out on pasture right now. They accept visitors all the time, and I highly suggest you go visit if you haven’t already. I’ve been there once and it was a great place.
I didn’t have plans, I just built them from scratch. Joel Salatin’s book “Polyface designs” has chicken tractor plans. I suggest borrowing it from a library or from a friend who has a copy and photocopying the pages you want.
We do have 24 layers on pasture. There are a lot of videos on them on my channel. It’s has been hard to find people to pay what the eggs are worth. It seems like people don’t want to eat “expensive” food everyday. They are much less profitable than broilers, and they need to be looked after year round, as opposed to broilers. I would love to have a few hundred layers and sell all of their eggs, but I can’t seem to sell the eggs yet. We can only grow what we can sell.
When we built them in 2020 they cost 200-250. Now it might be around 400 or so depending on the materials. I might use rough cut lumber for everything except for what touches the ground to save money nowadays.
2 foot tall by 12 foot long by 10 foot wide, and we put about 75 birds in each one. If you search online for “Joel Salatin Chick in Tractor“ you’ll find all the information you need on them.
that's amazing job and I commended ! if I adept your idea and increase the nr. of cages around 60 which mean 5000 thousand chicken , how much land should I have in disposition for this number !?
@@hdezoo nice bro and thank you.. im really inspired.. act right now im going to finish my own chicken coop and i plan for it to fit only 50 chickens.. just a small project in my backyard and im so excited to get it done.. im looking forward to expand it in future.. thank u for your sharing really appreciate it thumbs up
I know this is going to ruffle a bunch of puritan feathers but....It would be dead simple to automate moving these things once a day with todays technology.
It could be done relatively simply, but on a small scale like we are at now, I don’t think it makes sense. If we were growing thousands of birds, we would probably use a larger greenhouse type structure on skids, and move it with a machine.
We plan to continue growing them how we always have. There was an avian flu outbreak last year as well, but we didn’t change anything. I know it’s a lot worse this year, but I’m not too concerned. Hopefully our birds will have a good immune system.
We haven’t had any predators find success digging under the shelters. There’s a lot of wetland around the pasture, and there’s mice, rabbits, and voles everywhere, so the predators have a good food source. We hope they never get under the shelters, and it is possible that may eventually, and they haven’t yet.
I see them around the pasture quite often. Within half a mile of the pasture. Someone who drove by the pasture last year said they saw a fox on top of one of the chicken tractors looking down into it, trying to figure out how to get in probably. But we have never had anything be successful in getting into the shelter.
Possibly. We are raising Cornish cross, a breed that likes to eat a lot of feed. They chow down on clover, but I don't know how much that displaces their feed intake. If you moved them more often, they would eat more green, that's a fact, but I don't think that it would increase growth. That's my opinion. That would be a cool experiment to do. My guess is that the additional labor cost would cancel out any benefit, but again, I don't know for sure.
@@hdezoo What if the tractors had wheels and Roomba Drone AI and just kind of very slowly wandered the pasture like a vacuum cleaner always seeking the place it had visited least recently? You've got plenty of room on the steel for a solar panel.
We gave a lot of the first birds we grew away to people who had large families. It was all word of mouth and giving them to people we thought would appreciate them. About the profit: We sell for $4.00 per pound dressed, and we process ourselves, and our average bird is a little over 6lbs. The chick costs &2, the feed costs about $6, and the packaging and other expenses are a few dollars more. So we can sell a chicken for about $25, of which $10 is expenses. The other $15 will pay for our labor, and some profit. Scale that up to 70 chickens, and that’s a gross profit of $1,750. Once you take out $700 for chick and feed costs, that’s $1,000 left to pay yourself with, from one shelter. The math works. Now, if you’re not willing to process chickens yourself, then the math doesn’t make sense, unless you can charge like $7 per pound or more. We saved enough money processing birds ourself in the first year to reimburse ourselves for the equipment we bought for processing.
That’s biochar. I add it to their feed when we move them from the brooder to the pasture to prevent potential coccidiosis brought on by the stressful move.
We have something similar, called Michigan ermines, and we also have muskrats. We have never (knock on wood) had anything get into the shelters and kill chickens. But I can tell you that if we ever did, electric fence is the first thing we would put up.
We saved a lot of money because all the roofing steel we used was from a barn that collapsed at our place, so it was free. But if you were to buy everything new, you would probably spend $200-$300 not including tools and fasteners, if you used the same materials. But the first one we made was free except for the 2ft tall chicken wire, because we had some lumber lying around, and had 5ft tall chicken wire lying around. If I was growing chickens just for myself, I might make it smaller and put less birds in it.
We processed all of our own birds and sold them for $3.50 a pound dressed, as a whole bird, shrink wrapped. We thing we may go up to 4 this year. That is very low compared to the national average. Some people get 7 or 8 a lb in other states.
It allows me to get 100% even manure coverage, and it keeps the shelters from rubbing against each other when I pull them ahead. Also, if they were side by side, I would be forced to either walk around the whole group of shelters to access the back of the shelter I was moving in order to retrieve the dolly, or step over the shelter. In other words, it wouldn’t be as efficient to move them.
We tried a hand truck at first as well. Yes, the wheels are 6 inches in diameter, and the cart is about one foot wide by two foot long. The curve in the handle keeps the part I grab from dragging and getting manure all over it.
We feed a non GMO feed that is 62.5% corn 25% soy 7.5% extruded soy 5% P. Premix (Mineral) .15% Opti remedy (an essential oil blend) .15% Diffusion plus (Makes the feed not stick together) I also feed Bio char daily to keep coccidiosis away and at low levels.
thanks, I:m inspired, making plans as a 75 yr old widow
It's never too late to start!
Go for it😀
If u lived near me i would build u one ❤
Man, what an amazing setup. Super entertaining content. And the fact that it's so entertaining that you don't need all the fancy music and crap is a good thing. Keep up the amazing work and keep being you
Thank you!
Thank You. Looking forward to following Your progress. Those around You are Fortunate to have such a neighbor. May We All weather the storm.
I loved that you showed the moves from several angles very thoughtful.
Thanks! I felt like a dweeb moving the camera so often but I’m glad I did.
I’m so happy I found this channel.
Thanks for saying that, I’m glad I can help.
Nice video. Thanks for sharing your chicken experiences with us. I subscribed after hearing the sincere message at the end of this.
I’m glad it was was helpful. Thanks so much for subscribing.
Got the book, got the dream. Cool to see someone doing it. Thanks for sharing
integrated sour cream advertisement:)
Just a dollop.
Love your videos. Subbed. Youre channel will take off. Great content. Great Production Quality. Good luck. Can't wait to watch your channel grow. Keep the content coming.
Great video! Thanks taking your time to film it and speak to us. I’m new here and an probably looking forward to doing a trial run with about 50 birds to see how it goes, how can I find more information on where to by the young broilers and sell them once they are ready? I’m in the Dallas Fort Worth area.
I suggest going to your local feed store, and ask them if they know of any reputable Hatchery‘s that are close to you. as to selling, that is half the work. Health food stores, gyms, or people who are interested in homesteading/regenerative farming is the place to start. Give up free samples. Do it like the crack dealers, the first one is free.
Great job on the video and the information. Can't wait to see more.
Fun on the Homestead thanks for watching!
Thank you you have helped us so much.
I feel like you're missing out on some design opportunity. Take advantage of that top part being a screen. Hang your water bucket on the inside. Hang your feeders on the inside. That way they move with the tractor and don't have to be taken out. You can pour feed and water into them through the screen without even having to open it.
Question though, why do you line your tractors up diagonally corner to corner?
They are lined up like that because it allows me access to the inside of the shelter from two sides without having to step in chicken manure during evening chores “when they don’t need moved”. Also, it makes ventilation better.
@@hdezoo Those are great reasons, thank you!
Thanks much, I learned so much from your videos.
Those are some happy Birds
I heard Joel say in a video that he uses aluminum instead of steel on the tractors to keep the heat down.
He does. We wanted to use aluminum roofing, but it is prohibitively expensive to purchase new, and we couldn't find any used sheeting when we were building these shelters. We built the shelters so the entire rear of the shelter folded down for maximum ventilation, because we knew that they would be warmer than the original Salatin design.
That was a nice touch and I like how you move this with a regular hand cart and don't need anything special.
Thats awesome man, great job 👍👍👍
Thank you!
Congrats on 100 subs!
Thanks!
@@hdezoo I am setting a timer for four months to acknowledge your response.
@@hdezoo Thanks for your response!
Thank you. Good idea. QUESTIONS: 1) What do you feed them? 2) How much one day per chicken?
They are fed a non gmo broiler feed that is primarily corn and soy, with mineral, an essential oil additive, and another additive to prevent the feed from clumping together.
They eat more and more every day as they grow, because they grow so fast, but depending on the weather, they will eat about 3-4 pounds of feed for every 1 pound of dressed weight.
Good job friend
Great Video! Educational and Inspiring...Thank you.
Thanks!
Thx for showing the day to day ritual
Once they are on pasture, watering and feeding them takes no longer than 40 minutes a day total.
🎉 awesome Mr haven
Great video. Thank you
You’re welcome. Thanks for watching!
How do you get the water hose way back there? I see you have to drive. Curious on how long the hoses are or if you just drilled a well back on the pasture
We trenched about a third of a mile of 1 3/4 inch water line from my brothers house down the road. He also has cattle on the property, so we tapped into a frost free hydrant line underground outside one of the barns, and ran a line to the edge of the pasture. We use garden hose from that hydrant throughout the pasture for water.
Thanks for your video. Who do you sell your chickens to?
Mostly friends and family.
Nice chick mobiles! 180 is heavy but you’re not lifting it too far off of the ground! I’m seriously considering raising chickens but my biggest concern is a moderately high bear population in our area (Roanoke VA). Would these hold up if a bear tried to get in?
Probably not. But then again, I’m not sure what would keep a bear out short of split steel. Polyface farm is in Roanoke VA., have you ever been? They are the farm in whose footsteps we follow. They should have a whole bunch of these structures out on pasture right now. They accept visitors all the time, and I highly suggest you go visit if you haven’t already. I’ve been there once and it was a great place.
@@hdezoo Roanoke is about 1:40 south of Staunton where Polyface is located. I’ll check them out.
Use electric fencing to deter bears and other predators.
nice, thx
How many weeks from start to processing? Love the vids.
Around 7 weeks. Glad you’re enjoying them!
Nice wish you would share the plans to build tractirs
I didn’t have plans, I just built them from scratch. Joel Salatin’s book “Polyface designs” has chicken tractor plans. I suggest borrowing it from a library or from a friend who has a copy and photocopying the pages you want.
Cool videos. Just a question. Why don't you raise chickens that lay eggs too? Wouldn't you get more revenue because you then have 2 income streams?
We do have 24 layers on pasture. There are a lot of videos on them on my channel. It’s has been hard to find people to pay what the eggs are worth. It seems like people don’t want to eat “expensive” food everyday. They are much less profitable than broilers, and they need to be looked after year round, as opposed to broilers. I would love to have a few hundred layers and sell all of their eggs, but I can’t seem to sell the eggs yet. We can only grow what we can sell.
How much total it cost to build one tractor?.Like it.
When we built them in 2020 they cost 200-250. Now it might be around 400 or so depending on the materials. I might use rough cut lumber for everything except for what touches the ground to save money nowadays.
We are from Uruguay, could you tell me the measurements of the meat chicken tractor?
Hi, what are the dimensions of the chicken tractor and how many chickens do you keep in each?
2 foot tall by 12 foot long by 10 foot wide, and we put about 75 birds in each one. If you search online for “Joel Salatin Chick in Tractor“ you’ll find all the information you need on them.
@@hdezoo thank you, much appreciated!
that's amazing job and I commended ! if I adept your idea and increase the nr. of cages around 60 which mean 5000 thousand chicken , how much land should I have in disposition for this number !?
Just over a tenth of an acre per shelter.
Where did you get the little hand truck?
you sure that wasn't Poison Hemlock? :))
Have you ever had problems with bears?
How much chicken do you put in each tractors? 80 chicken? And how much is the length and width of the tractors? Thanks!
We put about 75 in each tractor. They are 12 feet long, and 10 feet wide.
@@hdezoo nice bro and thank you.. im really inspired.. act right now im going to finish my own chicken coop and i plan for it to fit only 50 chickens.. just a small project in my backyard and im so excited to get it done.. im looking forward to expand it in future.. thank u for your sharing really appreciate it thumbs up
Can we used these type of Tractors in 40 to 45 degree?
Yes, for sure
I know this is going to ruffle a bunch of puritan feathers but....It would be dead simple to automate moving these things once a day with todays technology.
It could be done relatively simply, but on a small scale like we are at now, I don’t think it makes sense. If we were growing thousands of birds, we would probably use a larger greenhouse type structure on skids, and move it with a machine.
How are you dealing with the avian flu with this system?
We plan to continue growing them how we always have. There was an avian flu outbreak last year as well, but we didn’t change anything. I know it’s a lot worse this year, but I’m not too concerned. Hopefully our birds will have a good immune system.
how do you keep predators from digging under the "wall2s" ?
We haven’t had any predators find success digging under the shelters. There’s a lot of wetland around the pasture, and there’s mice, rabbits, and voles everywhere, so the predators have a good food source. We hope they never get under the shelters, and it is possible that may eventually, and they haven’t yet.
Have you a problem with foxes?
I see them around the pasture quite often. Within half a mile of the pasture. Someone who drove by the pasture last year said they saw a fox on top of one of the chicken tractors looking down into it, trying to figure out how to get in probably. But we have never had anything be successful in getting into the shelter.
so the chickens get an x amount of their food from the pasture. are you able to increase this amount from the pasture if you move them sooner?
Possibly. We are raising Cornish cross, a breed that likes to eat a lot of feed. They chow down on clover, but I don't know how much that displaces their feed intake. If you moved them more often, they would eat more green, that's a fact, but I don't think that it would increase growth. That's my opinion. That would be a cool experiment to do. My guess is that the additional labor cost would cancel out any benefit, but again, I don't know for sure.
@@hdezoo What if the tractors had wheels and Roomba Drone AI and just kind of very slowly wandered the pasture like a vacuum cleaner always seeking the place it had visited least recently? You've got plenty of room on the steel for a solar panel.
Do you use just two feeder troughs per tractor?
we did this past summer, yeah. I filled them in the morning and the evening
How do you sell the meat birds? I’m interested in trying this out but I don’t see how to make the profit.
We gave a lot of the first birds we grew away to people who had large families. It was all word of mouth and giving them to people we thought would appreciate them.
About the profit: We sell for $4.00 per pound dressed, and we process ourselves, and our average bird is a little over 6lbs. The chick costs &2, the feed costs about $6, and the packaging and other expenses are a few dollars more. So we can sell a chicken for about $25, of which $10 is expenses. The other $15 will pay for our labor, and some profit. Scale that up to 70 chickens, and that’s a gross profit of $1,750. Once you take out $700 for chick and feed costs, that’s $1,000 left to pay yourself with, from one shelter. The math works. Now, if you’re not willing to process chickens yourself, then the math doesn’t make sense, unless you can charge like $7 per pound or more. We saved enough money processing birds ourself in the first year to reimburse ourselves for the equipment we bought for processing.
just wondering what the black looking addative is that you are putting with the food thanks
That’s biochar. I add it to their feed when we move them from the brooder to the pasture to prevent potential coccidiosis brought on by the stressful move.
sorry i just rewatched your video again to see it is biochar if that is right thanks for sharing your vidoes
@@hdezoo Thank you
Do you have weasels where you live? Trying to decide if I need to invest in solar electric fence to keep them out where I live
We have something similar, called Michigan ermines, and we also have muskrats. We have never (knock on wood) had anything get into the shelters and kill chickens. But I can tell you that if we ever did, electric fence is the first thing we would put up.
@@hdezoo ermines are what we have here in northern Wisconsin too. I will try without the fence then and hope for the best!
How much did it cost you to build one of these chicken tractors ?
We saved a lot of money because all the roofing steel we used was from a barn that collapsed at our place, so it was free. But if you were to buy everything new, you would probably spend $200-$300 not including tools and fasteners, if you used the same materials. But the first one we made was free except for the 2ft tall chicken wire, because we had some lumber lying around, and had 5ft tall chicken wire lying around. If I was growing chickens just for myself, I might make it smaller and put less birds in it.
What state are you in?
Are those 45 days chickens? Sorry if I missed it.
Juan Kauayan Depends on how big you want them to get. These are Cornish cross, so they are marketed to reach 5 lbs dressed weight within 8 weeks.
@@hdezoo how much does it run per lb for dressed and for live weight in Michigan?
Are you asking about what we charge per pound?
@@hdezoo yes. The market value
We processed all of our own birds and sold them for $3.50 a pound dressed, as a whole bird, shrink wrapped. We thing we may go up to 4 this year. That is very low compared to the national average. Some people get 7 or 8 a lb in other states.
Why do you stagger the chicken tractors and not have them side by side?
It allows me to get 100% even manure coverage, and it keeps the shelters from rubbing against each other when I pull them ahead. Also, if they were side by side, I would be forced to either walk around the whole group of shelters to access the back of the shelter I was moving in order to retrieve the dolly, or step over the shelter. In other words, it wouldn’t be as efficient to move them.
what/where did u get that low profile hand truck for moving the chicken tractor?
I made it out of an old cart we had in a junk pile where I work.
u no the size of the wheels? I use a hand truck and it failed
We tried a hand truck at first as well. Yes, the wheels are 6 inches in diameter, and the cart is about one foot wide by two foot long. The curve in the handle keeps the part I grab from dragging and getting manure all over it.
How do you sell almost 300 eggs in a day?
In the future
These are meat birds, so we process them before meat before they ever lay eggs.
Sorry if i missed it, but how often do you move the tractor? once per day? does it becomes more frequent once they grow?
We move them once a day. They could be moved more often once they get older, but it’s not a must.
Is there an issue with fire ants?
Not at all.
How do you collect the eggs?
Those are a meat breed so the are harvested for meat before the reach egg laying age.
What's the composition of the feed
We feed a non GMO feed that is
62.5% corn
25% soy
7.5% extruded soy
5% P. Premix (Mineral)
.15% Opti remedy (an essential oil blend)
.15% Diffusion plus (Makes the feed not stick together)
I also feed Bio char daily to keep coccidiosis away and at low levels.
And what about the grasses
Mamadou Dia there is a lot of clover, wild carrot, and grasses. I'm not sure what species.
@@hdezoo where do you purchase it
We purchase the feed in bulk from Country feed supply in Mio Michigan. They deliver it with an auger truck, directly into a gravity wagon we have.
You need a truck
A little fam truck would certainly be nice.