IBC tote brooder DIY

Today I want to do something a little bit different. I want to tell you all about a brooder that we built and I am going to share the step by step video, but also send you to my husbands YouTube channel for the full tutorial because that's where we put it!

You see my husband has been talking about making me a new brooder for a while. I'm not really sure where he got the idea but I know he got the IBC tote from my son's work. They have a few extras every month and we picked some up since they were getting rid of them.

Lots of companies use them though and I've seen them for sale online so they're not hard to find at all!

We got a bunch of them because he wanted to make several into firewood holders and while they were almost all white there was one black one and he got the idea to to make it into a brooder for baby chicks.

I hatch chicks or keets every summer so that sounded like a great idea to me! 

To make an entry or door on one side he cut part of the metal cage off and cut most of the front panel off. He created a door of sorts for it out of plastic fencing and mounted a light through the top of it and voila, I have a brooder!

As you can see I've been using it for quite a while and have had a lot of guinea keets in there over the last 2 years. I'm actually quite impressed that it's been so easy to use!

Do you have to refrigerate eggs? Why do Americans do it?

If you're an American you're used to eggs being sold in the refrigerated cases at the grocery store. If you ever go to another country you'll see that's not very common anywhere else! They actually display eggs on the regular grocery store shelves.

But why? Is it safe? And why don't we all do it the same way?

Furthermore why do people who raise backyard chickens say their eggs can be stored on the counter and at the farmers market eggs are often sitting on a table in cartons not refrigerated at all?

Do hens need a rooster to lay eggs?

Some of the questions I get asked the most are about having roosters and eggs. People always want to know if I have roosters and can hens lay eggs without them? I really do understand not wanting roosters, they're loud and sometimes mean. They're also unnecessary if all you want your hens for is to produce eating eggs.

Now obviously if you want them to produce hatching eggs then you'll need a rooster to fertilize those eggs. Well, he actually fertilizes the hen but that's a story for further down in this post. For now, let's stick with egg production.

What to do with old hens?

When a flock of laying hens gets older, they don't lay eggs as often. Around the time they are 2 years old, most hens stop laying the 6 eggs a week they were producing up till now and the amount they lay will decline each year.

They usually drop down to 1 or 2 eggs a week by 6 years old.

What do you do at that point? This is especially concerning if you have a small coop in a suburban backyard which has rules about how many hens you're allowed to have. Do you really want 6 hens that are barely laying?

I've heard people say this when their hens stop laying: "I won't eat them. I would like to find a place that will take them and let them live out the rest of their lives." In fact, that exact sentence was clipped from a discussion a bunch of us were having in a chicken group!

Which is exactly what prompted this post.

Beet juice to keep chickens water from freezing!

A few weeks ago I saw something on tick tock that did not sounded interesting to me. Somebody was claiming that if you put a little bit of beet juice in your chicken's waterer, that it wouldn't freeze in winter!

Now I found this pretty hard to believe and actually reached out to ask questions but never got any answers. 

So I decided to experiment on this myself.

For the last few weeks I have been adding beet juice to all my non-heated font waterers just to see if it would actually keep the water from freezing. It didn't. 

But then I started thinking about that saltwater thing people did about 8 years back. It didn't really work to keep water from freezing, but it did help it to take a little longer to freeze for some people. 

So I decided to do an experiment using 2 bottles of plain water. One I left alone and the other I removed 1Tbs of water and replaced it with 1 Tbs of beet juice. I placed them outside on a day that was between 15° F and 20° F. 

If it's colder or warmer when you use this obviously your solution will freeze faster or more slowly, so take that into account.

I did this experiment to figure out precise expectations because this would be great to use in chicks water bottles because they do not have heaters available.