On Sundays we move our Layer House to a new location… the better to spread the wealth (of poop, that is) across the pasture, and reduce the stress on the earth, since inside their house is the hardest hit areas on the land. (It’s one of the reasons we move it, as well as chicken health and happiness and our health and happiness.)
What we move is a 10’ x 20’ portable garage built on a base comprised of six 4” by 4” x 10’ lumber… add the wire that protects them and the doors in their frames that give us access and them egress , plus the nest boxes and roosts and the whole thing weighs around 300 pounds. Moving such an object across fields with the classic small bumps and dips, roots and rocks found in our area (to say nothing of the slight gradient that runs along our entire land and which we are now moving along uphill)… well, you can imagine it takes some effort and ingenuity. Effort we’re willing to apply (obviously, given our lives here) and ingenuity we also have in decent measure~ our own, not too shabby, and the contributions of others I will now name.
The Bowmans, from whose farm we purchased a bunch of used material from when we first started and who had a clever lever system to raise and lower a metal framed 10’ x 10’ pasture pen for broilers. (While I believe it was a neighbor of the Bowmans, I don’t know that person’s name and I believe it was the Bowmans’ idea.) We didn’t purchase the very heavy and too small frame, but we did take pictures and a movie of its workings.
Sue, who found these swing- into- place trailer jack wheels that we attached to the base. Jules, who figured out how to lever the house up with a dolly in order to swing the wheel into place.
Tony, who welded a jack onto a triangular frame that allowed us to raise and lower the wheel by using the crank only… and then Tony and Wesley (his son) who came in their church clothes last Sunday to check out the problem and ended up spending hours removing the set-ups, repairing and re-installing them for greater strength, then attempted to roll it along to its new location.
Conclusion at this point, as stated by Wesley “Hard wheels for hard surfaces and soft (pneumatic) wheels for soft surfaces.” After much effort and strain, the house rolled to a new spot, barely one width from the old one. [Now some of you regular readers may recall that we had been inching the house along in order to avoid chickens wanting to bed down in their house’s previous location… to avoid another tragic pile-up. After many weeks/several months of such incrementally farther moves, we’ve reached a place where we can move the house a reasonable distance for nicely-spaced placement.] The wheels on their mounts were stressed to the max, as would the chickens have been with all this activity, except that Sue moved the pasture as well, so the gals were out and about while this was being done… we gather them back in once the fence is up by banging buckets of feed and calling~ they have their priorities, you know.
So, that move was last week and we weren’t looking forward to this week’s relocation. Tony is working on another prototype but he lives in upper Illinois and is often quite busy building feed mills so didn’t have new wheels to us in time. John is another prototype wheel developer working on the problem. Sue's father is yet another contributor to the engineering input of our effort to relatively effortlessly move these big houses around the land.
But I digress... back to this week's work. To the rescue comes first our new neighbors David and Kim, with their tractor and their heavy duty moving strap and their willingness to keep trying to maneuver the tractor and play with the chickens (David and Kim, respectively) as it proved not simple to simply pull the house along the ground.
Enter Bernie, visitor and handy gal extraordinaire… who commented that the pyramids were built with gigantic rocks being pulled only wooden slats, then commenced to collect a couple of nearby 2” by 6” boards. David lifted the house, we placed the boards under the front end, he lowered the house and backed up and the house slid (easily!) along the boards until it came off them. We repeated that once and had moved the house two lengths- perfect!
Sue and I can work this system on our own by using the dolly levering to fit the boards under each side, and using the truck to pull it along… at least until our fancy wheel assemblies are done and work.
Someday we’ll have a tractor… ahhhh, the dreams of a small and low income farmer.
We thank everyone who has helped over the past year to move our houses and our farming efforts along!
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