The Swamp Thing Chicken Trailer conversion is almost done!

[LaurelC]

It is for all intents and purposes complete. There are a small handful of finishing touches that need to be completed, like covering wavy cut lines up with furring strips, and covering up a few small gaps where a mink might be able to squeeze in. The roost bars need to get installed, but I need a few things from the hardware store for that. It's taken almost 2 years to complete, we have been in the thick of having a house designed and built on the farm, and in 2022 and 2023, we got new batches of sheep, so the chicken enterprise has taken a back seat to the things that needed attention right then.

This chicken trailer will just be the roosting space for our flock of egg layers. It'll transit our farm, likely either with or adjacent to our flock of meat sheep. Our farm is in North Central Kentucky, and very hilly, so it'll basically always be on a hill. This made the flat roof an easy choice for us.

I picked the trailer up for <$500 at a farm equipment auction, with the express plan of turning it into a mobile chicken coop, thinking the homemade steel frame would be a great shortcut to building a wooden coop on top of a trailer (this was not the case) and I really SHOULD have just bought a beaten up old livestock trailer, cut the floor out of it and thrown some perches in, and used the tack box and feed area as nest boxes, but you live and learn.

When I got it back to the farm, I started by stripping the rotten wood out of it. Many of the screws fastening the wood to the frame were either welded on or just fused to the frame, so they had to be cut off with a cutoff wheel. It took probably 20 hours of time with a grinder and wire wheel taking the flaking off old paint and bubbled rust off. Then the frame got a couple coats of POR15 rust convertor, then needed a UV stable topcoat in all of the places that would be exposed.

 

[LaurelC]

Progress after it was coated was slow going. I covered the whole top in hardware cloth, and the metal that thing is made of must be hardened or something, it takes ages to get a drill bit through it in order to even start the self tapping metal screws. But I got the whole top enclosed, built a small frame from 2x4s to sit atop the top of the structure, affixed those, and then screwed some sheet metal left over from a friend's metal building build. The floor is a poly slat flooring built for use in large scale/industrial chicken house operations, and the nest box is the sheet metal frame from a cheap noname roll out nest box my friend got a very deep discount on, then we tossed all the roll-out stuff (it was designed to be entered and accessed on the lower side, which wasn't going to work for our layout where I hope to not have to go in the coop itself except in rare cases) Just figuring out how to get the nest box securely mounted was a whole ordeal, but we have it secure now. The rollout wasn't going to work as our farm is basically entirely hills and there's just no reasonable way to keep things level enough that rollout functionality would work for us.

 

[LaurelC]

I salvaged some of the old tin roofing (maybe galvalume? Not sure what the material is, but it's a bit rusty) from our old tobacco barn that collapsed in summer of 2022 (it was already leaning irretrievably when we bought the farm unfortunately, it was just a matter of time). The rest of the metal is leftover from a friend's shop build. He brought it over to my place to salvage what I could before we took it to the dump.

I have been saving big cardboard for a while now and was able to make a tub in the bottom of the coop to turn it into a brooder for our first batch of chicks. We should be good hanging heat lamps from the top with some chain, and keeping all of the chicks in the coop while they grow out, eventually transitioning the coop into our garden (before planting time) and removing the cardboard, then shifting it in with our sheep once lambing is completed in May (not sure how aggressive the hens may be with freshly born lambs/afterbirth, but it doesn't seem to be worth chancing things).

We have 45 sexed chicks (mostly smallish production breed) coming in a few weeks. I'm aware that this is a big number for a coop this size, but I expect to edit the numbers down as they grow (I expect I won't have trouble selling pullets locally). The hope is that we find what the carrying capacity of this trailer is, and use that information for future/secondary chicken trailer builds. We are somewhat limited in size as our little electric side by side doesn't have a ton of power to be able to haul big heavy trailers up our hills, and we don't have a tractor.

 

[Penpal]

You are more ambitions than I am. Last summer I made a hoop coop using PVC pipes, chicken wire, and a tarp.

You know, when you start out you could create a loft to give them a second story so they won't be crowded.

 

[LaurelC]

You are more ambitions than I am. Last summer I made a hoop coop using PVC pipes, chicken wire, and a tarp.

You know, when you start out you could create a loft to give them a second story so they won't be crowded.

Haha, we can get some high winds out here and I don't want to deal with it getting torn apart and displacing a ton of hens. I'm of the "overbuild and not have to deal with it again" variety.

The loft is an interesting idea. Probably won't work with my slatted floor design (the tractor will be "self cleaning" and their poop should fall through and fertilize the pasture), but I am planning to vary the height of the roosts in order to fit more in the same footprint. The roosts will run lengthwise front to back, and be supported by boards running diagonally from the bottom left to the top right when looking from the back.

 

[ShotgunDog]

Love it!