Adkhunter1590

These wagon running gear would work perfect for mobile deer blinds! I actually mentioned that to my neighbor the other week when we first started this project lol. I’m keeping my eye out for another set of running gear for cheap. Problem is a lot of people think they are made of gold and want a fortune for them. I wasn’t having much luck on Craigslist this winter, thankfully my neighbor saw a set down at Jack Millers New Holland in schoharie and he was able to get me a good deal on it. But if you already have a few wagons laying around it wouldn’t take much to turn them into blinds.

Very nice! Sounds like a whole lot of fun right there! I really wanted to get meat birds this year but I figured if I built this pasture coop the way I wanted it would cost me a small fortune. Which is turning out to be true haha. So I figured I’d wait another year. I’m real excited about it though. It will probably take me all next winter to design pens for them like it did with this pasture coop. I tend to over think stuff and I hate having to redo stuff after it’s already done and I realize I didn’t do it right. The coop I have my smaller layer flock in right now has gone through at least a dozen design changes in the past 3 years so I learned a lot through that. Hoping if I study enough meat bird pen designs I can knock it out of the park on the first shot. Not to mention I looked into the butchering equipment and that alone will set me back close to $1500-2000 for decent stuff. Rome wasn’t built in a day I keep telling myself. Though it’s been hard not to come home with a few dozen Cornish crosses from TSC everytime I go down there. Especially when they mark them down to half off! My wife wants to get into raising pigs next. My neighbors wife also wants pigs so the two of them are telling us we need to finish up our projects and get to work on pig pens[emoji849]. I’ve warned here a dozen times that these pigs won’t be pets they will end up at the butcher in 6 months or so. She tells me she’s alright with that but idk if she’s being honest lol. My next big venture I think will be a few beef cows. That’s what my neighbor farms primarily so I’ve got a lot of help through him for that right off the bat. Maybe next year but I’m thinking most likely the year after we will dive into that venture. Will have to see how it all shakes out.

That’s a really good idea! I think I’ll take that idea and run with it. I’ll see if I can’t find some scrap tin panels and figure out a way to mount them to help divert the poo. Thanks for the tip!

Gotta love hay! Had to do the same thing this winter to keep the run dry. With all the freeze/thaw this winter I had a river running through the run at once point. Had to dig a trench to divert some water plus lay down a few bales. Works like a charm!

Moveable “chicken tractors” as they call them are pretty popular. That’s basically what my coop is but on a larger scale with free range thrown in. I’ll have 48in tall electric netting to use as a predator barrier that will keep out yotes and fox. So they will be semi limited to how far they can range but I’ll have a lot of netting so basically still free range. You can build a chicken tractor pretty easy for a smaller size flock that is full contained to keep all predators out. There’s a million different designs but here’s an idea of what one can look like. Most tractors like that won’t House more than 6-12 birds at a time though so you’ll have to keep the flock size to a smaller size. You can always build bigger but it will get heavy real quick and become harder to move. But a design like that will let you move around a small flock to fresh grass everyday pretty easy. Concrete pads and chickens don’t really mix all that well. By nature they are foragers and instinctively scratch the ground to search for food. I’ve read that prolonged exposure to concrete can cause feet problems on them as well. Unless you were using the concrete to raise it up due to wet ground and then added a bunch of dirt on top it’s not really the best idea. Of course you can always make a concrete pad just to set the coop on top of for stability and levelness concerns but then leaving the run as bare ground.

Ducks are also on my to do list! Lol. My other neighbor has 2 or 3 that basically just live in his pond that me and the kids use to fish for bluegill and bass during the summer. He tells me the eggs are great for baking but they prefer chicken eggs for eating as a normal egg meal. That wasn’t the first time I heard that so I’m guessing it’s true. I’ve looked into coop designs for raising ducks and it seems like they have some different requirements so I plan on building a separate coop just for them that I’ll place on my property line so it’s close to my neighbors pond for them to have access to water. Just another project for another day! Haha. The plan is to slowly grow this place into a fully functional diverse farm. With me working a full time job already it’s going to take me a little time but I keep telling myself I’ll get there! I’ve got 2 young boys that I hope as they get older over the next few years will play a big part in helping us grow and accomplish our goals. We are about to pay off almost all our debt in the next few weeks which will help us buy a new tractor this summer so we can really start getting some work done. It’s a lot of work but one thing at a time my wife keeps telling me!

Shouldn’t have too much of an issue selling them all. I’ve got a lot of guys at work who will/are buying off me already. My wife’s family is large and will take a bunch. A small corner store diner down the road from me has said they’d like to buy eggs off me once we are up and going. Ya a lot of people have hens but most don’t keep them for more than a year or two before they get tired of it. Not to mention I can advertise as true pasture raised organic non-gmo. There’s a few very affluent towns on my way to work where people will pay a premium for organic/non-gmo stuff. I was going to do meaties and turkeys this year but decided to do one thing at a time so I didn’t overwhelm myself. Next winter I’m going to build some pasture pens for meat birds and invest in butchering equipment to do it the right way. I don’t like to half ass stuff so I didn’t want to jump into this year. Yep we will be ordering a bunch of plain cartons pretty soon, once I get done dumping all my extra cash into the coop build. Wife is working on designing a custom logo for stickers for the cartons as well.

You don’t have to free range at all if you don’t want. You just need to build a big enough run that will give them enough room to spread out and be happy. If I remember correctly the rule of thumb is like 10sqft per bird for the run and 4sqft of coop space per bird. Of course going bigger is always better. Chickens are hard on the ground so any vegetation in the run will be mowed down to bare dirt in no time. Do yourself a favor and make sure wherever you put the coop and run that it has good drainage. The poop smell is only noticeable if there’s a lot of moisture on the ground. My current coop is literally 6 ft away from my bedroom on the backside of the house and we don’t have any problem with smell. If there was a problem my wife would be the first one complaining! I would suggest not going too far away from your house as you have to remember you’ll be out there on a daily basis feeding, watering and collecting eggs. There’s a guy down the road from me who moved in last summer and built a coop some 250ft from his house down a hill. When he was building it I almost stopped to offer some advice. Now I watch him shovel a path through all the snow just to get down there and watch him struggle carrying water and supplies all the way down there. I’m betting he regrets going that far away now! There’s a million ways to build a coop and run and the only wrong way is if it’s too small, other than that you can’t really do it wrong. There’s a forum called backyardchickens.com that has thousands of pages of good info to browse through on coop/run construction to feeding and raising chickens. It’s a good resource to check out. Hope this helps you out, if you have any other questions let me know, I’ve made just about every mistake you can make at least once so I like to think I’ve got a good handle of this stuff! Haha

Thank you! Paper pusher or not you got some skills man. If you get into doing side work let us all know on here. I bet you could pick up a few projects to keep you busy! My old man is a mechanic so I learned more about engines than I ever did construction type stuff. I did learn from him not to mess with electrical after he shocked the hell out of both of us when we were working on our hot tub one time! Lmao. Thankfully we live in a time of YouTube and I can find how to videos on just about anything. You’d laugh at how much I use that to fix stupid things around the house. Haha. After working on this coop the last couple weeks I’ve gained some confidence in my framing abilities and I’m thinking I’ll try redoing a sunroom on my house this summer. Big old single pane windows need to be torn out and reframed to fit some new normal size windows and a new front door. I wasn’t to keen on doing it myself before but I think if I can get my neighbor to come over and sit in a lawn chair and supervise I should be alright!

Forgot to mention that if anyone in my area wants eggs I do have layers right now already laying. Granted it’s a smaller flock doing about a dozen a day but I usually have some on hand. Just message me and we can meet up or you can stop by whatever works best. In a few months once these new ones start laying I’ll have lots of eggs! Haha

Thanks guys. I actually misspoke, I forgot about the 40 more Easter egger chicks we have coming soon from my wife’s friend. A yet to be determined number of those 40 will be roosters and will be culled but I’m gonna say at least 20-25 will be hens. So that will put us up to around 120ish. Gotta have those colored eggs! Haha. Go big or go home right?[emoji15]

Thank you! Haha. Most of the people who stop in to my neighbors have caught a glimpse of this thing from the road and had to swing in to see what the hell he was up to. He keeps telling people it’s his new house for when his wife kicks him out! Lol. I’m pretty sure it’s built sturdier than my own house that’s for sure Haha.

What’s up guys. Just wanted to share a new project I’m working on the last couple weeks. We’ve been raising chickens for about 4 years now and love having them. Family and friends are always looking for eggs from us and we usually can’t keep them in stock for long. So we decided to up our game this year and added 100 new chicks to the family. [emoji15] As of right now I’ve got all these chicks in big wooden shipping crates in our house as it’s been too dang cold to keep them in the garage or our coop. Hopefully with warmer weather coming I can move them into the garage for a week or two before I get their new coop finished up. When trying to figure out how to house all these new birds I went back and forth between expanding our current coop and run and making a whole new setup. We wanted them to free range but I didn’t want them to be all around the house pooping all over the driveway and deck like our current older ones do when allowed to roam free. Not to mention they tear up flower gardens like no body’s business. So I came across mobile pasture coops and I was sold on the idea right away. I can move them around my back field and my neighbors pastures, giving them fresh ground every couple days. This will help fertilize the ground as well. I spent most of this winter researching different designs of how I should build this thing. In other words, I looked at so many pictures and read so many blogs my eyes were about to bleed. I enlisted the help of my neighbor who’s a full time farmer and raised chickens in the past. He helped me come up with a design and locating a decent set of used hay wagon running gear. I picked up a older used set of running gear from a tractor dealer in schoharie and we went to work on breathing some new life into it. It needed a little tweaking to straighten it out and some grinding to take off the worn paint and surface rust. Greased all points and added grease zerks to the hubs as well Gave the running gear a fresh coat of paint and slapped some 4x6x16ft boards on to be the new main frame rails. Then bolted 4x4s on top of those to complete the frame work. Also cleaned up the wheels and painted those and found some used tires to replace the worn out ones that came with it when I bought it. I was going to put tubes in the tires but so far they are holding air. I’ll most likely replace all 4 tires with brand new ones later this summer or over next winter. But these will do for now. Now that I had the running gear freshly rebuilt and the frame bolted all together it was time to start the floor. I wanted to have a partial open floor so that the chicken poop could fall down onto the ground to fertilize the fields and make cleaning easier. My neighbor had a heavy gauge expanded metal panel laying around that we decided to put in the center of the floor. Whatever droppings don’t fall through can be easily swept through with a stiff bristle broom and I can sweep the droppings from around the edges on to the grate every day or two. It’s also heavy enough that people can walk all over it and not worry about falling through. I jumped up and down on it and it doesn’t even budge. All the lumber besides the frame rails are rough cut, making this thing sturdy as all can be. Not to mention working with true to size lumber is so much easier when doing measurements. Although finding 4 inch nails wasn’t as easy as I thought. Lowe’s doesn’t sell anything in 4 inch in anything bigger than a 1lb box. Had to hit up TSC and a local lumber yard for bigger boxes of nails of that size. So far we have the two side walls up. One wall is 6ft the other is 7ft. The 7ft side will have two windows and a full size steel exterior door with window recycled from my neighbors barn. On the 6ft side I’m going to put a portion of the siding on hinges to open up for ventilation along with vents on each end wall once those get put together. Roofing will be your standard metal roofing for ease of installation and long lasting durability. Off the back side we are making a small deck that will hold a 55gal barrel to feed a pvc water nipple system that I’ll route underneath the coop and strap against the main frame rails so it’s out of the way and doesn’t interfere with anything when I move it around. Planning on using another tank on my atv with a small pump to refill this barrel every couple days when needed. The coolest part I think will be the chicken door. I’ve decided to go all out and invest in a fully automatic solar powered pop door. No more rushing out in the AM to let the chickens out or rushing over at night to close them up so predators don’t get at them. I can’t wait to see it in action. I’ve been wanting one for awhile but with our current coop being so close to the house I could never justify it. Since this coop could be a couple miles from home at any given time, I figure it was a necessity this time around. To make life even easier we decide to forgo the traditional style nest boxes and go with these cool rollaway community next boxes. My older laying hens make a mess of their eggs in the normal style nest boxes and sometimes eat their eggs which makes a bigger mess. Cleaning a dozen eggs a day isn’t so bad but with 100 chickens laying each day, egg washing will get old real fast. This will also enable us to sell unwashed eggs as some people prefer to buy them that way. Well that’s what I’ve been working on for the last few weeks with a few more weeks of construction ahead of me. So far I think everything is coming out really well and everyone who’s seen it in person is really impressed. Hoping it will last us a long time and provide some good fun and learning experiences for my kids along the way. It’s also been a great way to bond with my neighbor and learn a lot from him along the way. He’s a great guy and I can’t begin to think how crappy this would have turned out without his help and guidance. Hope I didn’t bore anyone with my long winded post, and I’ll keep this updated with new pics as we continue the build. Should be done within the next few weeks.

Very nice! You do some great work. That’s something to be real proud of! I never considered myself all that handy with woodwork before but after buying a house I’ve started getting myself more and more into projects. I’m still learning and basically self taught. Getting better and better each time around lol. Here’s my latest project. We decided to up our game in the egg business this year and have added 100 new chicks to the family. I don’t want to hijack the thread so I’ll just post one pic of what I’m up to so far. I’ll make another thread about how it all began

Had my eyes done 9 years ago now. Best thing I ever did. I almost forget that I ever had to wear glasses or contacts. It wasn’t cheap but easily the best $4500 you could spend on yourself. I ended up with 20/15 in both eyes with my right eye almost slightly better than that. I can’t remember what they were before but I couldn’t read anything past 12 inches away before. My buddies call me eagle eye sometimes when I can spot stuff from so far away. It’s made hunting a lot easier that’s for sure!! I did have one side effect from it though. I’m quite sensitive to bright lights now. I wear sunglasses on cloudy days because it looks so much brighter to me compared to everyone else. Car lights while driving at night do glare a decent amount now but it’s not terrible, just need to focus on where I’m going and not look to close at the lights around me. I also tend to get headaches if looking at a computer screen a lot. I wear dark tinted safety glasses at work because our lights are many and very bright. Other than that lasik has been a godsend.

So I’ve been cleaning out some of my hunting totes lately getting ready for spring turkey season and I’ve got a real nice Sony HD camcorder I would like to unload. I filmed a couple turkey hunts a few years ago with it and thought I’d get deeper into filming hunts but I just don’t have the patience for it. It’s been sitting in a protective soft case getting no use at all and I’m tired of looking at it. I won’t bore anyone with all the specs when a simple google search will tell you everything you need to know. I see they still sell for $130-170 on amazon and eBay so I’d like to try and get $100 for it. I’ve got all the original cables, 2 batteries, soft case and I’m pretty sure I still have the original box and manuals in the garage. It’s in like new condition, no scratches or blemishes that I can see and it works like the day I bought it. I charge it up and prep it before every hunting season in hopes I’ll get around to filming something but never do. Would make for a great cheap cam for any of you looking to try your hand at filming some hunts. It has great clarity and the optical stabilization works awesome for those shaky hands. If any interest let me know in this thread or PM me. I’m located in Greenville and work in Albany so I can meet up with you anywhere around the capital district. Posting this while at work and don’t have any pics at the moment but I’ll update this post over the weekend with some pics of it. Thanks guys

Just waiting for my wife to give the go ahead and we will be out of here as soon as I can get the house sold. Probably going to have to wait until my step son either graduates or drops out of school, with the latter being more likely it should only be a few more years lmao!

Welcome aboard. It’s been 17 years since I took my hunters ed class but I do remember there being all age groups in it. Same for the bow hunter ed class. You shouldn’t be worried at all about it there will be plenty of older guys in there. And once it’s over, you don’t ever have to do it again. And don’t forget to ask any questions you might have while your there, no matter how dumb you think it might sound. Plenty of others sitting in that room might have the same questions but don’t have the courage to speak up and ask! The instructors are there for this very reason! Good luck and welcome to the hunting community!

Nice. I’m from Northville, on the sacandaga. I’m sure you’ll find many trails around and people will tell you where some are, but the likelihood of them being legit “atv” legal trails are slim to none. Most trails are just ones that locals have used for years and years that most of the time are tolerated by property owners because most everyone has wheelers and likes to ride as well. All the trails I grew up riding on were used by everyone and no one contested it. But they weren’t technically “legal”. It’s more of a socially accepted thing around those parts. O and don’t forget to keep an eye out for DEC, they love to ruin a good day of riding!

Nice clean machine you got yourself there. I grew up in Fulton county, I don’t know of any “legal” atv trails anywhere. There are lots of trails around but without a trailhead or parking lots, it’s hard to get on any. Plus they all lead in and out of private property all over the place, none I know of are marked in any way shape or form and I’ve never seen any documented on paper. There are several hunting clubs that have large tracts of land up that way with many interior trails and roads that members are allowed to ride on. Growing up we just rode wherever we wanted to with little regard to who owned what. Didn’t seem to be a problem back then, not sure how much that’s changed since then. NY in general sucks for atvs, without belonging to a club, there’s no legal place to go with them other than your own property obviously. Plenty of snowmobile trails around that area, but atvs are restricted and the snowmobile clubs don’t like Atvs tearing stuff up so that’s basically a no go as well. Good luck in your search, wish I had better or more helpful news!

And what in the hell were all the anti trumpers running their mouths about Trump not being physical fit for office??? This woman can’t even walk down a flight of stairs!!! She looks like she’s knocking on deaths door for Christ sake. My 94 year old grandmother got around better than her!

Chicago students allegedly trash Walmart during National School Walkout protesthttp://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/16/chicago-students-allegedly-trash-walmart-during-national-school-walkout-protest.html And they wonder why people think these walk outs are BS. Nothing but a bunch of no good punks. All these kids deserve to be expelled. Not that it would matter as I’m sure most of them won’t graduate their dump of a inner city school to begin with.

Where in Montana are you looking to go? I spent some time there in guide school not far from Missoula. Lots of public land around the side of the state. It’s rough terrain though and you’ll need to be in the best shape to do it. The biggest problem people have is the elevation. I got a touch of elevation sickness my first hard hike in guide school, it’s no fun let me tell ya. I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal but boy was I wrong. I’d suggest strapping on a 80 pound pack and hiking the biggest steepest nastiest hills you can find here in order to get ready. When I went I was 18 and in the best shape of my life and trained for months before going and still got my butt kicked for the first week or so before I began to acclimate to hiking so high up. It’s beautiful country though and you’ll love it. The best piece of advice I can give you is to study topo maps of the area your looking to go and find a few good high points to get up on to glass around for herds of elk. Don’t just go bushwhacking hoping to run into them, you’ll wear yourself out and most likely be unsuccessful. Get up high and let your Binos or spotting scope do the work for you. Find a herd and then look for a good bull in the group and make a plan to cut them off. Once you get in close you can start calling to pull the bulls in to range. Best of luck to ya!

Group hog hunt? Lol

Big flock crossed my yard the other day and this morning on our way to my one sons kindergarten orientation we saw the same flock in my neighbors yard. 3 toms were strutting. Can’t wait until May!