Farming often feels like feast or famine. We believe we have exited a 3-year-long drought that started … oh, our FIRST summer of production. We made it. By the Lord’s grace we made it. But the pendulum seems to have swung the opposite direction, and rain has absolutely been dumping on us this spring! It started as two heavy snows with some ice, and then turned into cold rain, and then turned into not-so-cold rain. But it left the chicken paddock in a downright mess.

All our critters are in non-stationary paddocks, meaning they are never in a permanent location. This is called rotational grazing ,or perhaps more correctly, since chickens don’t exactly graze, rotational management. It means we move the chickens every 2 or 3 days. But it just-so-happened that when the snow hit, the chickens were a few hundred yards from this big beautiful pond:

 Which was not quite so big and beautiful at the time. 

Then it started raining. And it didn’t quit. For days. For weeks. Rain every day. And every night. We got like 7 inches in a day. So the pond started to overflow. And the chicken paddock became a mudslide. After the icey weather subsided, Matt was catching back up on chores, one of which was to move the chickens (remember that every-2-or-3-days idea?). Well as it turns out, the overflowing pond decided to fund some underground streams which led right to the land surrounding the chickens. And the tractor got stuck. Again. And Again. It was like a new routine item on the checklist. Try to move chickens. Check. Get tractor stuck. Check.  

Thankfully Matt is pretty clever and was able to pull himself out each time using his hay fork. (Oh, if only I had THAT on camera! But alas, it was too slick to bring the kids down with me. As if I didn’t already have enough wet-weather laundry…) And for a while, he had been mulling over a new skid design for the bottom of the chicken house that would solve some issues with wheels on soft pasture. So he brought a large steel bowl down and planned to attach it to the egg-mobile. The problem was that the ground was so soft, there was no way to lift the structure to do undercarriage work without the tractor. And the problem with that was that there was no way to get the tractor down there without getting really, really stuck.

Finally one day he decided the ground was approaching a firm enough state to drive on, but the chickens had been there so long that the ground was really slick. You see, the main reason we are committed to this rotational management stuff is because any animal, left in the same location for too long, will decimate the landscape there. To their own detriment, in fact. It had only been 3 weeks since the chickens had been moved, but every lick of grass was gone and manure was starting to cake up. Most “range-fed” or “yard eggs” chickens are often in a permanent chicken run that gets filthy and stinky and downright miserable to live in. 

The scary thing is that as far as chickens are concerned, this is considered normal. Most folks don’t have the means, knowledge, or ability to rotate their chickens on a regular and frequent basis. Sadly, it turns into a filthy mess in no time. Above is what it looked like after only four weeks. Four weeks!  Chickens have a productive life span of 3-4 years! Can you imagine what it would have looked like after that length of time?

Matt was determined to get that chicken paddock moved asap!

So after a day of sunny weather, he brought the tractor down again to try to use it as a jack to install the new sink-resistant skids. But he was still up against the issue of traversing the slick mud to get to the egg-mobile. The tractor slid down the hill… and the hay fork crashed right into the tire—pop! No more tire. The hay fork had skewered it! And the ground was still so slick that there was no way to navigate the tractor to lift up the house. Plan… C? D? Where were we at this point?

Matt called our neighbor, who has a slightly larger tractor with a winch cable. The plan was that Matt would hook up to the egg mobile, and Neighbor would hook up to Matt with the winch and pull the whole assembly uphill to a new paddock.

It actually did work, but that popped tire acted like a plow and left a long, deep rut in the pasture.

That’s what shovels are for, I guess.

The chickens are now on new, dry ground where Matt can repair the egg-mobile and move it with his own tractor. And they are happy. I can tell because I got over 3 baskets of eggs that afternoon!

The lesson learned? Next time we’re expecting 7+ inches of rain… keep the chickens far from the pond!