One of the reasons for our purchase of the farm site is that the land is zoned for agriculture. Currently, our operation is based on land that is zoned for general commercial use or residential use. Keeping chickens on these lots is legal (we checked!), but people live nearby and we don’t want to be “those neighbors.” So, we will eventually move our chickens to the farm site, year-round.
For the summer, our goal was to move the broilers to the farm site as soon as they were fully-feathered so they could have plenty of fresh air, see the sky, and crow to their hearts delight. Unfortunately, setting up the summer pen for them was been delayed as much, or more, than the driveway project. We just completed the pen today, when the broilers are already 8 weeks old.
It almost seems a bit silly to build the pen now, since many of the birds are approaching 6 pounds, but we don’t want them in the coop a moment longer than they have to be. It is just too hot and too cramped. Even with the fans providing 100 cubic feet per minute of air change, the temperature and humidity are excessive. The only good thing about the rain delay was that the outdoor temperature was generally 55-65 F, rather than the more-typical 70-80 F.
In order to keep the chickens safe from predators, we had to dig a trench around the pen perimeter to allow the fence to reach the ground. Since the pen is 20’x20’, we had a fair amount of digging to do.
The ground in the pen area has 12” of moss in most places and some taller piles reach 24.” Working out there sometimes feels like walking in a bouncy house. Fortunately, there weren’t too many roots to deal with and the moss is not difficult to cut with a sharpened shovel. I made parallel slices and Melissa followed me, pulling out the moss in long blocks.
In the future, we plan to hire a bulldozer to scrape the moss off the areas where we will plant crops. There is no way we can do it by hand! It will be stockpiled out of the way. When our year-round chicken coop is in operation on the farm site, we will mine the piles and chop the moss for bedding material. After the used bedding is composted, it can be worked into the ground where it came from to help us grow more food for the chickens.
We are serious about running our farm sustainably and responsibly so we are storing the carbon from the cleared trees in our corduroy road base and will store the carbon from the cleared moss in the soil of the planted areas.
