Homemade rollaway nest box in action

I'm live look at that so it is a beautifully gorgeous day uh I wanted to show you guys our Rollaway nest box in action so this is two days worth of eggs I found that I can save a lot of time by collecting every other day and I'll collect these in the morning and I'll let the cool night air cool off the eggs for me um so that when I collect them they'll all be cold they'll be about 45 degrees and there's probably about 50 of them sorry about 80 of them here and yeah look at that so I have not washed these this one has a turd on it that's very rare but if I go along [Music] look at that there's one spot at the tip of my finger there get the next three look at that spotless there's one there's one spot on that one look at that I cannot express to you oh there's a double yolker right there look at that egg poor chicken and laid that we usually get one or two double yolkers every other day or so look at him clean eggs there's a spot on one here's a spot on one [Music] look at that if you can if you have the materials I highly suggest making or if you have the money if you're a rich person and you want to get your swiftly devaluing currency out of the American dollar buy yourself a best Nest box they make good ones they're I think prohibitively expensive but that's me um but as you can see there's zero labor involved not zero labor what am I trying to say it makes collecting eggs hyper efficient that goes down I can access it from the outside I'll show you inside though Banner here I've gotten them locked out of the nest box there's our fake egg so that was to train them to lay eggs in here and not on the floor in their winter housing we have this piece of electrical conduit with this piece of it's like a one and a half by half inch piece of wood held on with zip ties here because they were still getting in with just the bar there that's probably a five inch space and a three inch space [Music] so if you do not lock them out of a Rollaway nest box at night they're going to drop massive chicken squats on your mat or whatever if you have like a golf course like a putt-putt golf course astro turf in there they're gonna drop a turd right on that and then every egg that goes across that part of the mat is gonna get dirty and then well ask me how I know it's because because I thought that sounds like a lot of work uh getting up early in the morning to let them into the nest box because it takes them a while to all sync up and get into a rhythm and so when I had them in the chicken coop during the winter they would start laying eggs at like three in the morning and I was like how the heck like are farmers getting up at three in the morning every day to let their chickens into their nest box I'm like that is untenable I I cannot manage that I I can be a morning person if I have to wake up in the morning I don't mind it but not three o'clock that's not morning yet for me so when we put them out here on pasture I did not lock them out of the nest box for the first few days and then I would go there in the morning I'd say I hope it worked and there'd be about 12 chicken turds on the roll away mat and so I'd have to take it out it's removable it just lays in the bottom of this Nest box and I'd have to take it out and I'd and I would have to clean it and then it would have to dry and then I would put it back in so I'm like well this isn't working until then I started coming out in the morning to open up the nest box so first I came out at four o'clock and I opened it up and none of the hens had laid eggs on the ground so I was like cool then the next morning I came out at 4 15 to open up the nest box and there were no eggs everywhere so I'm like cool they haven't started laying at 4 15 and I went further and further in about 15 minute half an hour increments until at about 7 30 is when they'll start laying eggs right now um and so that's about either that timer before then is when I come and I open the nest box to do that I just untie this knot I have to open the door now because there's a knot and then I just let the string go and then it goes through that eyelet and drops the nest box I don't have to go in this thing I don't have to crawl around inside I don't have to go inside that portable Coupe I just open it up and we're good to go Zachary says there's burgers at home that's my brother sounds good Zach I'll be there in a bit I'm just informing the General Public of my marvelous invention I'm very pleased with how this is this Rollaway nest box is going one thing I would change I would have made the floor out of some sort of mesh um either a large hardware cloth or a heavy duty plastic coated wire checkerboard type thing because as you can see that's a yoke of an egg that got broken I mean you could see that the chickens are not eating the eggs they can access them they can come through and Peck at them there's actually a Broody hen that's always in this corner that's pulling out her feathers to make a nest and she will pull these eggs up back into the nest box like this with her beak and sit on them but they're not pecking them they're not eating them sometimes they'll lay a soft one it'll break and then it will stink if it stays wet for too long and that's not good so I would single there's a plywood floor I would have made this mesh so that if an egg were to break it would just fall onto the ground or fault underneath the nest box that's in there and then the chickens could eat up the shell or whatever that's one change I would make um everything else has worked really well so far so I just wanted to show you guys that show you how clean the eggs are this cost us like less than a hundred dollars to make and we spent fifty dollars on the astro turf mat this is made specifically for eggs we got it from hen gear hengear.com they sell different size mats for the nest boxes they made so we baste this Nest box off of their matte Dimensions pretty much so that we knew that when we bought the mat it would lay in there perfect so we could just buy the mat and have that so that's it for now give you guys again look at these gals watch they'll follow me they're gonna follow me out of the out of the pen hello ladies [Music] just moved these guys on Monday that's where they were my brother came out and mowed the pasture with a brush hog so now this is where they're at beautiful beautiful all right this went longer than I thought hopefully I'll get some free time later here and I can edit the video of us making this I filmed that whole process so all right I gotta go burgers at home did I go did I just flip the screen around I did didn't I

Channel: Haven DeZeeuw

Views: 90,957

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Id: TUK815a62Uo

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021