09/17/2026
New shelters!
We’ve come a long way since our first mobile chicken shelter in the late 1990’s, which was built out of the roof from an old silage wagon that we used on the dairy farm. Over the years we’ve tried several different designs. It was always a bit of a design challenge because our shelters needed to be light enough to easily move every day with a small UTV (or sometimes even by hand), while also being strong and heavy enough to withstand the moving process and also the volatile weather that we experience in northern Ohio. (More than once we’ve had to flip our shelters back over after they were flipped over in wind storms…) They also needed to provide shade for the hot summer days, and be “predator proof”, as we have many predators such as raccoons, skunks, opossums, hawks, and eagles who are constantly looking for a weak spot and an easy meal. Nowadays there are many companies that make shelters for backyard chicken flocks, but back then, we were on our own.
For years we used our own design consisting of various combinations of CPVC pipe, hog panels, and chicken wire. While they worked, they were quite low to the ground and made collecting the chickens for processing difficult. As pastured poultry has become more popular we have been able to locate a local business who has been making custom shelters for us for the past several years. These shelters meet all of our requirements and come with everything we need to grow our chickens in a safe and healthy environment. Some assembly was required and instructions were not included…but Dan, Jason, and Cara were able to use their problem solving abilities to put our new shelters together after they arrived in pieces last week.
Adding more shelters will allow us to increase the number of chickens we grow in a season. These new shelters arrived just in time to house our larger groups of fall chicks that are ready for pasture, and that will in time allow us to have more chicken for our customers!
