Eight Acres

After a few posts on chicken tractors , its time for some more details.  Well we did have to make life difficult for ourselves and hatch 16 chicks just at the end of summer, with several other poorer hatches over spring, we have ended up with too many groups of chickens that can't be in the same cage due to size difference, so here we go again building another tractor! At least we are getting better at it.  Our first large tractors took 3-4 weekends to build, with the doors and wheels being particularly fiddly, this one took only half a day for Farmer Pete to cut and weld the frame and then another day with me "helping" to finish it off. The only things we had to buy were 30x30mm box section for the frame, cut to 4m lengths, about $150 worth, the hinges and catch for the door ($20), and the wheels ($9/each).  We already had the corrugated iron and wire at home. To start with, Farmer Pete measured up the wire and the car trailer to determine the size of the fr...

Round bales are a cheap way to buy hay for stock when the grass dries off in winter or if you're keeping them in the yards.  Round bales without round bale holders don't last more than 24 hours with our cattle!  They tend to pull the whole thing apart and then lie down in it, poo in it and refuse to eat the rest.  It makes a very expensive pile of mulch!  With a good round bale holder, most of the hay will be eaten and only the stalks are discarded, but the holders are expensive to buy, around $400 in our area. Before we owned a round bale holder (and after making a few expensive piles of mulch) we made a quick and cheap version using three cattle panels arranged in a triangle around the bale.  Farmer Pete made one of the panels with wider rung spacing so the cattle could poke their heads through.  This worked quite well, as a triangle is very strong and the cattle couldn't push it over, but it wasn't ideal for them to access the hay (and we needed the pa...

As I said in my previous post ( How to use a chicken tractor ), I've had a lot of interest in our chicken tractors, so I wanted to write more about how we use them, and in this post, how we build them. Chicken tractors can be constructed from many different materials, but with my husband being a welder, our material of choice is always metal.  All the tractors are built using "box section", metal mesh and roof sheeting.  I've seen tractors made from wood (very good example here ) and from poly pipe, so if you're not into metal, then there are plenty of other options.  You can also size them to fit on your garden beds or between rows in an orchard to till the soil and catch bugs.  If you make them from light material they will be easier to move. What you start to plan a chicken tractor, look for materials that are cheap or free.  We got the roll of mesh for our first tractors at a closing down sale, and sized the tractors to fit the mesh.  All the ro...

Living in a sugar refining state like Queensland gives us easy access to a by-product called molasses, which we feed to our cattle.  If you don't live near a sugar refinery, its probably not worth trying to source it.  However, if you can get some molasses cheaply, it is a great supplement feed as, according to our text book " Dairy Cattle Science ", it contains: calcium cobalt copper iodine magnesium potassium iron biotin + various other B vitamins other trace minerals These are all the good things in sugar cane that are removed to make pure sucrose sugar for us humans to eat, see why we shouldn't eat refined sugar?!  In Natural Cattle Care , Pat Coleby mentions briefly that consuming excess sugar in the form of molasses can make cattle more attractive to insects, so we don't feed molasses during summer when buffalo flies and ticks are a problem.  However it does provide valuable energy in winter when our grass dies off. We have been buying mol...

One of the most difficult decisions that we small-farm para-permaculturalists have to make when we need something is whether to make it out of materials that we already own, or should we buy/make something new that is designed to do the job at hand?  From a permaculture point of view, we should be minimising our inputs and using materials that are recycled or reused.  But so many times we have decided to make do and ended up creating huge amounts of rework for ourselves. For example, our constant renovations of the chicken run before we decided to just build some decent movable pens .  At one stage we were even using the top of an old horse float as part of the chicken nest box/roosting area, with old bits of corrugated iron screwed into it, it looked AWFUL and was the first thing you saw from the kitchen window, we were both so pleased to take it to the dump (added to the scrap metal heap of course).  Another example is my husband's welder, he put up...