Outdoor Grow Out Pen

In addition to dairy farming and gardening, we also have laying hens and raise meat birds. While there is still a large portion of my food I buy, I do love to raise as much of my own food as I can. The Farmer was nice enough to help me with a project for my chickens. We put a coop in the old bank barn but it's not a great set up for meat birds, we built it mostly with layers in mind. So, we decided an outdoor grow out pen was in order, and it will also work for growing out layer chicks I hatch. We typically order our meat chicks from the feed store. I selected my layers for egg colour such as blue, green and dark brown so I haven't gotten into any good dual purpose breeds yet. The outdoor pen we built (mostly the Farmer, he's great at building things!) is 8x12 so it's a decent size. We are already talking about adding to it. My thought is to add a small coop area so they can be locked up night. We've had a lot of trouble with animals breaking into various set ups we have tried for growing out chicks so this grow out pen is solid, but I would still feel better if they had somewhere I could lock them in for the night that's entirely closed off as the predators seem to do their break ins at night.

I am very happy with how the pen turned out! We intend to move it every few days so they will be on fresh grass. It's hard to see in the pictures but the far end is sheltered for them to get out of the wind or rain.