In this segment, Victor Justin Rhodes introduces Al Lumnah of Lumna Acres, who demonstrates how he built low‑cost, temporary winter housing for chickens and pigs on a new, heavily wooded property in New Hampshire. To avoid committing to a permanent layout before deciding on the best site, Al repurposed a seasonal greenhouse as a chicken coop, using its plastic cover to keep snow off the birds, let in natural light, and provide deep bedding for scratching and increased egg production during winter. For pigs, he assembled a portable pen from 16‑foot hog panels attached to T‑posts and housed the animals in an IBC tote, allowing the pen to be relocated every six months as new batches of pigs arrive. The design emphasizes portability, minimal expense, and flexibility while the farm evolves. The clip is part of a larger “Do‑It‑Yourself Abundance” crash course, with a call‑to‑action directing viewers to sign up for the full video series that covers temporary setups for goats, chickens, pigs, and eventual permanent barns.
This is my friend Al Lumna from New Hampshire, from the madly popular Lumna Acres YouTube channel. I'll leave a link to that in the description and more, but I want to show you this video of his on how he set up a temporary cold climate— very cold climate— chicken system and pig system. Check it out.
We didn't want to build anything permanent because we didn't know where we wanted it yet. The land where we bought had a lot of woods on it, and it's very terrained, and we knew that we need to figure out where the best place was to build something. So if we built something too soon, we'd regret building it. So we built a temporary greenhouse that we can use in the summertime for growing vegetables, which we're not right now, but we can use it to house our chickens in the wintertime.
It keeps the snow off of them, and it gives them a good run in here.
We can use deep bedding in here to give them plenty of things to scratch through in the wintertime and keep them busy. And then being the greenhouse plastic, it lets as much light in as there is out at the time. So we found that it helps us get more eggs throughout the wintertime. We also knew that spring we wanted to get pigs, so again, we didn't want to build a permanent structure, so we came up with a temporary one that has worked really well. We use hog panels that are 16-foot long We use the T-post to make a pen. We use an IBC tote to house them in. The really nice thing about this design is it's very portable. Every 6 months when we get a new batch of pigs, we can move them to a different location, and it works out great, and it's low cost to get into it first.
That was just part of an entire video Al has submitted for my Do-It-Yourself Abundance crash course. You can get that, get the rest of the video where Al talks about how he set up everything temporary for his animals— his goats, his chickens, his pigs, his barns— and how over 4 years he figured out where they should go and his reasoning behind that. And then he began to build permanent structures, and he shows you a little bit of his brand new barn in this video. So totally free video, sign up for it. There's other videos down below. I've talked about the webinar that you guys get the replay, and then I'll talk about more videos that, that are highlighted there throughout this week. But go, go check it out. Link is down in the description. Enjoy!
