Winter is one of the only times of year that we can dedicate time to farm construction projects, and we've been particularly productive this year! Here's what the Bellair crew has been working on, in between packing and delivering your Winter orders.

Greenhouse Maintenance: the baseboards of the greenhouse were in rough shape. Above, Clayton is working on replacing it. You can see where the greenhouse plastic was raised so that the old boards could be removed and replaced with new ones. The plastic can then be rolled back down and held in place with a wiggle wire.

Laying Hen Coop Renovation: Remember the new grapple attachment we got?! We put it to use right away. Nat used it to load two giant pine logs on a trailer. Then he drove them down to Buckingham where our friend Mason at Bear Bottom Farm milled them into useable lumber:

Nat is using the lumber to renovate one of our mobile chicken tractors that we use for the laying flock. We collect eggs twice per day, so anything we can do to make this job easier/quicker is great. Benefits of this new design:

It's larger and will house more chickens. If we can use one coop instead of two, that's fewer objects that we need to move during every chicken rotation. We move the laying flock onto new pasture approx. every week (except Winter), which means we're pulling the coops and their giant drinker with the tractor to a new location. Sometimes these moves are close by, but sometimes it's to a completely different field. Moving each coop requires tractor operator time and diesel. Fewer coops means this chore can take less time and resources.
This design will have "rollaway" nesting boxes that are accessible from the outside. The crew can collect nice, clean eggs without setting foot inside the coop itself. Our other coops have the rollaways facing inward. In the long term, we plan to switch them around on ALL the coops.
The inside flooring will be slatted, so manure falls through. This means we don't have to spend time cleaning out manure build up inside the coop, it stays cleaner/healthier for the chickens, and it fertilizes the pastures as it gets moved. This is actually already a feature of our coops, but it's worth mentioning, because it's a win-win-win design feature!

See the in-progress photos below: Nat with one of the 'wing' additions. The rollaway boxes will get installed and the walls closed in soon.

New Broiler Coop: Dale has been working on an upgrade for the other chickens as well. Similar to the laying coop, this new broiler coop design will be better for both the livestock crew and the chickens. This is a larger hoop design instead of the low Salatin-style coops. More room for the chickens, tall enough for the crew to stand up inside (instead of bending over the small coops) without compromising safety from predators. The entire structure is covered in chicken wire. This is not shown in the photo below, but eventually it will also have a tarp on top for shade/rain protection. This coop will rest directly on the ground on sleds, so we can move the coop every day using the ATV. The livestock crew were previously dragging the other coops along the ground by hand!

Two New Hog Feeders: Last week we hosted a special guest, Bellair alum George who now runs Kestral Hollow Farm in Earlysville. George helped build some of our existing hog feeders and thankfully was available to come back and build us two more. The original feeders are still working great, but have two more is helpful as we expand the herd and also if we need to pasture multiple groups of hogs in separate locations. These bulk feeders are made with modified IBC totes. We can easily fill the top with feed, and two PVC pipes at the bottom help control the flow of feed to minimize waste. The hogs jostle the pipes at the bottom to release feed.