LOW COST DIY ROLL AWAY NEST BOXES

Welcome back to another episode, folks.

Today's video.

I'm digging into the archives and looking at how we built the low cost rollaway nest boxes that we have in our eggmobiles. I get a lot of questions about that, so I've dug up some more footage when we're actually constructing them so you can see the dimensions and cut lists that we put together.

So we're in the process of constructing two new sets of egg boxes, which is each set is three of these units joined together with long pieces acting as perches to jump up in the nest box, but then allows us to close them at night time, like you've seen in the other videos. Now, These cost about 4,500Euros for a set of three of these. That's enough for 400 hens in an eggmanville. And it's interesting to think about that because if you look at some of these sort of fancy automated systems, like you might have seen in Chicken Caravan, etcetera, they have these lovely features of being automated, but they also cost about €7,000 for the equivalent size nest box. And it's a very heavy structure too. We've actually decided to now make them modular. The two existing eggmobiles have a set of three with a perch and they can't be taken apart easily. But these are going to be bolted together just with a simple butterfly bolt. You'd have to remove the perches that will span all three, but it will make it much easier to move like two people. Even one person can move this one, but when they're joined together as three, it's a little bit heavier than you might want. It takes a few strong people to move them about. We're only moving them twice a year in and out of the eggmobile into the polytunnel or wherever they are over the winter. And so I thought we'd just show you the cutting list and how to get to this point. Now, in most countries, the regulation for nest is like a 30 by 30 by 30 space. So each of these levels is enough for four hens. So this is enough for 12. Sorry, this is a 12 nest box equivalent. But each nest box is good for a few hens to share. That will depend on your local regulation, so you need to look that up. Nicholas, just writing down some of the dimensions to build a set of three of these. It's good enough for an egg mobile with up to 400 birds in. You need how many sheets to be used in the end? Four for each one? No, we had in total nine for all of them, two sets. So four and a half sheets. These are standard ply sheets. It's like a marine type ply. It's got a shiny surface that just helps keep it cleaner. Wood is potentially a risk for attracting mites. They typically form in the corner of the nest boxes. We don't have an issue with that. We use diatomaceous earth if necessary. But this hard, shiny wood stays clean. It's really easy to clean it too. So four and a half boards and you know, in Europe, that standard dimension, it comes in at 1.2 by 2.4 typically, or 2.5. And so this, this is the back piece, 1.2 meters by 1.2 meters. And then you've got your two end walls that make up the slanted roof. That helps keep the nest box clean. That's 120 by 104 and 30 wide. And then all of the plates that the shelves for the. No, hang on. That's the roof, isn't it? It's 34 by 120. And then the actual nest plates are bigger because you need this space for the rollaway to get the eggs away from the birds, keep them clean. So that's 1:17.5 by 49.5. Then we're using timber 28 by 45 millimeter. It doesn't have to be exactly that dimension. What's important is that as they stand up, it's tall enough for an egg to sit under there. And what's critical is the bar that supports the flap that keeps the eggs clean is placed high enough up that when you have your nest mats inside, the eggs can still roll under it. So you need to determine the thickness of the mats you use, measure that and then measure some standard size eggs or an extra large egg and add 5 mil. It's a bit of a balance because you want this to be as low as possible so the hens don't reach down and pick the eggs as well. So it's important for keeping the eggs clean. That's why we're doing the roll away. So These battens are 45cm on each side and one 17 and a half on the back. And then we have a 120 wide strip which makes this strip that we use to hinge. We're just using a simple light fiber board as the lid. And we attach a little bit of thin. This is wood that they use to separate layers of wood in the timber yard you can pick up for free. And that's basically all there is to it. And they're all built around whatever nest mats you can get. You can see where you can buy nest mats in the link, but you want to definitely go for industrial quality nest mats. It's not an Astroturf. It's specifically for eggs. And that allows you to get a pressure washer in and clean this properly. You see that they do dissolve on contact with egg yolk after time. So they have a limited life. These have been going a couple of seasons, but they don't last forever because of broken eggs, typically. So you can see how this is just simply screwed together. And two more of these boxes will then be bolted straight side by side in place. And there will be a double foot rail to keep that sturdy. So this will go up. This will be placed on a simple hinge with a bolt. One placed in a horizontal plane, one in a vertical plane, like so, to keep it strong across the length, because it's going to be 3.6 meters wide. And then they're just on a simple hinge and fold up at night to stop the hens getting in the nest box. And that's critical because otherwise they will shit all over the nest mats and you have dirty eggs. Even so, you typically want to change the mats at least once a week. That's typically how often we take them out, swap them over. So it's important you buy a couple of sets of mats. They're not the cheapest, but they, you know, it does result in very nice clean eggs. So that's all there is to it, really. There's a 10 degree angle to these. Yeah. The angle of the. Is it 10 or 14? I measure 10 now. Okay. These are set at 10 degrees, the slope. I think our original ones had 14 degrees slope and that's as steep as it can be. Now, that doesn't matter too much. You want to make sure there's a slope, but you want some way of adjusting the angle in the eggmobile. So we have ours on some kind of come along bolt where we can move it forwards or backwards if we want to. Because unless you're driving on a flat field, the nest box is obviously going to be at whatever angle the eggmobile sits at. So you want some ability to be able to shift that. The other critical bit to strengthen this is that we usually take a big piece of timber like this and lay it vertically on the floor of the eggmobile. Dimension isn't important as long as it's strong and we sit all of the nests on that. So that's got some rigidity because the floor of the Eggmobile is wire mesh, so it's not totally stable and so this will sit across all of the pillars or framework of the trailer and make it a lot stronger so that it's not bouncing itself apart through the fields. And likewise we put a couple of strips joining the backs of all of these together, but it's pretty simple process, it's mostly just cutting out to a pattern and then off you go, you just join them together. So it's a bit noisy in here, it's only early in the morning, but just have a peek, you can see.

Lovely clean eggs and that's perfect.

Ready to go out to the customer. Alright, so it's a bit of a.

Jungle in here already. I'll be putting up some videos seeing how the market garden's doing as well as some more aerial flyovers so you can see how the site's developing over the season. I just wanted to let you know we've been building a bunch of new websites recently, so over at our main site, Richard Perkins Co, that's where we'll be doing our monthly giveaway of my book Regenerative Agriculture. If you go over there in the links below and go to get started, you'll find out how you can be in to win a copy of that. Also want to say thanks to everyone that's joined the Farm Like A Hero Experience. So far we've got people from over 35 countries and that's our really low cost membership site running through till November this year where we're releasing two to three long form episodes with Europe's best regenerative farmers and we have questions and answers weekly with myself there as well as the private Facebook community to really bolster the network here in Europe. So it's open to anyone. Doesn't matter if you're from Europe or not, there's going to be hundreds of hours of content on there. The Hero membership is only open now till June 11, so hope to see many more of you in there.

I'm super excited to announce the Farm Like A Hero Experience is Now Live. Our 2020 special features more than 70 interviews with Europe's best regenerative farmers in long form, conversation, weekly Q and A sessions with myself as well as the private Facebook community. Our Epic Hero membership is now only open until June 11th, so join now@farmlikeahero.com and we'll see you in there.