We have one nice brooder house (the milk house next to our old dairy barn) and two horrible old ones that are supposed to be pasture houses, but were pressed into service more or less at random.

We're replacing the two horrible old houses with one big new one, building it on a pair of concrete slabs that have been here for decades (which, oddly, touch each other but are not at the same level.) Here are a couple of pictures of the brooder house under construction:

You can see the horrible old brooder houses in the background of the second picture.

Features of interest:

• We're using three courses of concrete blocks to make the house rat-proof and rot-proof, even with more than a foot of deep litter on the floor. This is essential. Not that we have a rat problem all the time, but even "once in a while" is way too often.
• We found a four-foot-wide exterior door, which makes it easier to get a wheelbarrow into the place.
• The three windows wouldn't provide anywhere near enough ventilation for a henhouse, but this is used solely as a brooder house, with the chicks removed to pasture houses once they no longer need heat. Smaller openings are adequate. (See Fresh-Air Poultry Houses for a complete treatment of this topic.
• A brooder house can be designed so it can be used later as a shed or studio or whatever kind of outbuilding strikes your fancy. In this case, the two-level floor would be a bit of a nuisance, but that could be fixed with more concrete.
• It's as close to our house as we can reasonably make it. It's good to be able to hear a commotion in the brooder house without going all the way out to the back forty.
• We'll be insulating the roof. This isn't strictly necessary in a well-ventilated brooder house, but is a nice touch.

[Here's a brooder house update, showing the house in a nearly-finished state and giving some more helpful hints.]

I like portable chicken houses. My henhouses are mostly simple little 8x8-foot houses that I move with a tractor. I don't put litter on the floor. The chickens don't spend much time on the floor anyway: they use the roosts.

I don't shovel manure, either. When the manure starts getting to be a bit much, I don't remove the manure from the houses, I remove the houses from the manure. I hook up a house to my tractor with a handy chain and drag it to a fresh patch of ground. Then I come back and use the rear scraper blade on my tractor to spread the manure over a long swath of grass. The grass soaks up the manure greedily.

We shuffled our houses around on Friday afternoon. Took about an hour.

For pastured broilers, we use lighter houses that are moved by hand, because the broilers are kept inside the houses at all times (broilers are so young and dumb that they don't know to come in out of the rain, so we keep them under a roof at all times). Hens are older and smarter, so they come and go as they please. In fact, only one of my houses has a door! They get out of the way when the tractor arrives and when their houses start to move around.

The big trick with henhouses is that, if you move them too far, the hens get confused and sleep on the ground where the house used to be. So don't move the houses too far. The first time you spring this on a group of chickens, ten or fifteen feet is plenty. Later you can move them as far as fifty feet or so.

The other trick is to move the houses as early in the day as you can manage, since that gives the chickens more time to get used to their changed landscape.

Chickens in the Snow. 7:30 AM, 18°F, Light Wind

It's 18 F outside and there's about four inches of snow on the ground. My chickens are all in open coops that most people would consider suitable only for summer housing. All my feeding and watering is done outdoors. What's up with that?

Yesterday there was snow, and the day before there was a little bit of snow, but it was above freezing. My chickens didn't like the looks of the snow and most of them stayed inside. To get them out to the feed, water, and nest boxes, I drove them out of their houses. The first time, there was hardly any snow, and you could see their reaction of "Hey, this isn't bad!" Once out of the houses, they were in no rush to go back in. Later, with more snow, they were less certain, and some jumped back inside right away. We'll see what happens today. They'll get used to it eventually, but they need to keep eating if they're going to keep laying, so I want them to get used to it now.

Today, the temperatures are going to stay below freezing all day, so I'm going to have to schlep buckets of warm water out to them. In very cold weather, the water in the buckets will freeze, but I just bring them back inside and put them next to the stove, and eventually they thaw. A lot of people like rubber feed pans because the ice can be dumped on the spot, and I'll be trying that, too.

My houses don't have insulated roofs. It usually it doesn't matter, because with open housing like mine, the inside temperature is the same as the outside temperature, so water doesn't condense on the ceiling and drip on the chickens. If temperatures are above freezing but there's snow on the roof, this isn't true anymore. The floors in the houses were pretty nasty yesterday. No doubt they're frozen now. I haven't been out to check yet.

I'll report back later and tell you how it's going. Based in past experience, the chickens' health will be completely unaffected by any of this, just like it says in Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, (great book, by the way). I'll post some photos, too.

First Look, 8:15 AM, 20°F, Light Winds

This photo shows some early birds hanging around the range feeders.

Here is one of my "low houses," whose occupants don't seem to want to go outside. Note that some of the hens are roosting on the front wall rather than inside. The cold doesn't seem to bother them.

Only a handful of chickens were moving around outside, but I scattered some whole wheat and drove the chickens outside. Once there, a lot of them started their usual routines, heading off to the feeders or the nest boxes.

Here's a view after I scattered some grain and made them go outside. Business as usual, more or less.

The snow is a very light powder and my houses are very open, which means that there's some snow in all the houses. The chickens look active, alert, and dry, though they would like the snow to go away.

The chickens all looked fine, except one hen who was shivering badly. I think she spent the night outside. I put her in a nest box, which gets her out of the wind and should allow her to warm up quickly.

Later I'll bring them some warm water. Their waterers are hidden under the snow and are frozen solid.

Noon, 21°F

Partly sunny. I brought two buckets of water out to the chickens, who pretty much ignored them. Obviously, they aren't very thirsty. They showed more interest in the grain I scattered for them, but they aren't acting like they're starving. There were a reasonable number of eggs to collect. The hen I'd put in one of the nest boxes died, which surprised me, because I didn't think she was in that much distress. I also thought the nest-box trick would work. I have community nests (with are big nests that hold a lot of hens at once, and have no interior partitions), and I knew that there would be other hens right up against her in there, which would help warm her up. It wasn't enough.

All the other chickens look fine. The situation looks stable. Tonight at dusk I'll go out with a flashlight to make sure there aren't any other hens sleeping outdoors.

This cold snap is supposed to last about a week and will reduce egg production significantly unless the hens get used to snow in a hurry. I don't expect any other ill effects (except for any remaining chickens that sleep outdoors).

This kind of cold snap occurs only about once every five years. If it happened more often, I'd have feeders and waterers in every house. Filling them would then become such a nuisance that I'd have fewer, larger houses.

7 PM, 19°F. All Quiet

I took a a tour around the houses. One hen was sleeping on the roof of a house, a couple were roosting on the side walls, and at least a dozen on the low front walls. I moved them all inside.

I retrieved the two galvanized buckets I'm using for waterers, since they'll just freeze solid if I leave them out. I'll take them back onto the pasture first thing tomorrow morning. I used to have some bucket heaters, which would keep the water in the buckets from freezing, but I tossed them after I stopped running hundreds of feet of extension cord onto the pasture for winter lighting. I still have enough extension cords, but no heaters.

By the way, I have two products to recommend. One is Coleman's wonderful new LED flashlight, as shown in the Amazon box below (though I bought mine at BiMart):

The other are "Hot Shot Hunting Gloves." These are wonderful winter gloves: waterproof, with Thinsulate insulation that keeps your fingers toasty. I have the kind that are fingerless gloves with mitten flaps. The standard gloves are probably even better.

I forgot to mention that I've seen weather this cold before, and this much snow before, but not both at the same time. Before, with cold weather but no snow, the hens were not reluctant to leave the houses and visit the feeders, and my only problem was providing water. In previous snowstorms, the above-freezing temperatures meant that the watering system worked and (more importantly) that the snow didn't last long enough to cause much trouble. We're in for a week of this snowy, below-freezing weather.

Tuesday Evening, 19°F

Today was more of the same, except that the chickens look happier now that they're getting used to the snow. They're spending more time outside. They greeted buckets of water and scratch feed with little more than polite interest, meaning that they're probably making it to the feeders on their own and learning to eat snow. If anything, they looked less cold today, although the temperatures weren't any higher than before.

Bottom line: except for one hen sleeping out in the open, none of the chickens seem affected by the cold, in spite of wide-open housing and temperatures as low as 15°F. Being freaked out by their first encounter with snow has been by far the biggest problem.

The weather report is for pretty much the same kind of weather for another week -- highs in the twenties or low thirties, lows in the teens or twenties, occasional snow -- which is very unusual for around here, a once-a-decade event at most.

Our household water system nearly gave out, but we kludged a fix for it. We have a two-pump system, with a submersible pump in the well, which pumps water into a 1500-gallon cistern, and a jet pump that pumps water out of the cistern and into the house. The path between the well pump and the cistern was frozen. I didn't notice until I peered into the cistern this morning. It was almost empty and had a skin of ice on top. Not good! The pipe-heating cable that was supposed to keep things flowing had failed. We managed to bypass it with a length of garden hose from a convenient spigot at the wellhead and into the top of the cistern. The water comes out of our well at 50°F, which should prevent any more ice from forming in the cistern.

(In a colder climate, we'd have put this 1500-gallon black plastic cistern in a shed, but as it is, we just left it out in the open.)

Saturday

The weather is slightly above freezing but there is more snow than ever. The chickens are behaving normally and there are no problems. As I said before, my previous problems were not caused by the cold but by the chickens' reluctance to go out in the snow, but they had to in order to eat and drink. In a normal operation with feeders and waterers indoors, there would have been no difficulty at all.

The snow causes another problem, though. Normally, my highly ventilated houses don't have any problem with condensation. The air inside the house is the same temperature as the air outside the house, so there's no tendency for moisture to condense on the ceiling or walls. But when the temperature is above freezing and there's snow on the roof, water condenses like mad and drips into the house.

I only have to put up with this for a few days a year in my highly ventilated coops, but people with ordinary coops put with this all winter. By going to great lengths to shut their coops up tight and to keep the temperatures higher inside than outside, moisture is condensing on the walls and ceiling all winter long and dripping back into the house. It turns the chicken house into a disgusting, unhealthy mess. The dampness leads to frostbitten combs, the sight of which tends to make people redouble their attempts to add heat and prevent ventilation. It's a vicious cycle.

I've republished Prince T. Woods' excellent book, Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, to help get the word out. You should at least click on the link and read the sample chapters. This week's bout with unusually cold weather (for here) has certainly vindicated Dr. Woods' main points.

Link: http://www.plamondon.com/faq_deep_litter.html

The "deep litter method" was one of the most important poultry developments of the Twentieth Century. It resulted in a dramatic drop in disease and a reduction in the amount of labor it took to keep a flock of chickens. It also gave an early example of how biodiversity works to our advantage, even with confined livestock.

People these days think they know what "deep litter" is, but mostly they don't. Here's a quick checklist:

• Deep litter is not about compost. It's about healthier chickens. Do your serious composting on a compost pile.

• More is better. It's not deep litter unless it's at least six inches deep.

• Compost as a clean-up tool.If the top of the litter gets caked over with manure, skim off the caked part and toss it into a corner. Within a few days, natural composting will cause
  it to turn back into litter again.

• Litter is a probiotic. Deep litter has anti-coccidiosis properties (it develops a population of microbes that eat coccidia), but only after it's been around for a few months, so never remove it all. When you start bumping your head on the rafters, remove part of it, but not all.

• Lime helps. Stirring in hydrated lime at about ten pounds per hundred square feet will keep the litter more friable.

• Chickens don't wear gas masks. If you can smell ammonia in the chicken house, you don't have enough ventilation. Open the windows, even if it's twenty below outside. Ammonia is a poison gas; cold weather is just a nuisance to grown chickens.

• Don't break a sweat. If you're spending a significant amount of time messing with the litter, you're doing it wrong.

Check out my Deep Litter FAQ for more information.