As many of you know, we took out a loan from a farm supporter this summer, to take down our large, somewhat failing mobile coop. After the demolition, and during the season, we built two structures. The first was a quick for our old farm flock; the second build was a much larger, and fully insulated mobile barn for the new flock. The first image in this series shows both new barns, in late fall, just as we moved our two flocks into our storage brassicas. The remaining images are all made in one day, February 9th. While our laying hens spend the majority of their days outside, these images of deep winter, when the temperatures drop to single digits, shows both the secret life of how we care of our chickens in deep winter and just what goes on, when the bulk of our two laying flocks spend a good part of the day inside: our chickens, behind the scenes, in deep winter.

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I’m deeply grateful to Mary, for encouraging me to keep our laying hens when the first big barn went south, literally, and for the farm supporter who gave us a $3000, no-interest loan in the spring of 2018. We spent a bit more on that on all of this infrastructure, but without that initial injection of cashflow, we wouldn’t have had the courage to continue this wild ride, deep into winter.