Barn life

These are shelves that Frank and Tad built for my feed room. They made the part that is screwed to the wall in the shop and carried them down, and then put shelves on top. The bottom shelf holds my feed container and the others are for supplies.

This is our water solution, rather than using multiple heaters and still hauling water (hoses freeze and will bust) we will instead fill this barrel as needed. When we walk down for chores, we take 2 gal of water and use them first. As we are walking down a minimum of 2 x a day that makes sense, we take down 4 gal that way. We use about 6 a day. We have to stretch the hoses from the garage down to the barn now that we are in a hard freeze. The timer in the outlet here allows us to have a "sunlight" bulb on a timer for the chickens. They have a heat lamp also.

Rabbit stand, we built this in the garage a few wks ago and I posted the making, but not its use. The big rabbits have litter boxes with hay in their cage, they eat the hay and at one end, they potty. Daily we dump this and refill, they leave little waste hay. This keeps the area under their pen completely potty free, they never potty outside of a box if they have one available. These 2 bunnies are our last from the butchering, we want to keep one of the females as a breeder so she has a friend as well until we can move across to breeding row.

I found wool crepe a few yrs ago, 7 to be exact, for 2$ a yd because it was damaged. I never found a use for it until now. This brings the barn temp up about 10 degrees, possibly more. It is water and wind proof. yes, the wind can blow it open but it does not come strongly from that direction.

The chickens have a heat lamp full time, and plastic on their upper walls for warmth. The sun bulb is on during the day and it encourages egg laying.

Most chickens do not lay in the winter, but the electrical cost for the sun bulb comes nowhere near the cost of eggs, and I am going to feed them for the winter anyway. These egg crates make great egg laying boxes. We lined them with cardboard.