Portable Goose Coop Video Tour

The newest enterprise at The Promiseland Farm… GEESE!

GOOSE COOP VIDEO TOUR!

We bought two pairs of American Lavender day old goslings for breeding stock from Holderread’s and six day old white Embden goslings for the freezer. Geese are fabulous weeders, lawn mowers and poopers. Yes, I said poopers! They poop a lot. The best place for our new geese is on the pasture where their poop is more valuable than gold! 🙂

As you can see from the picture above, Andrew is the resident genius, builder and designer. I’m am the one who gives him more work to do and snaps pictures 🙂

The portable Makita table saw and compound miter saw are two essential tools on our place. They always work, don’t break and are easy to set up and use. We’ve had them for 3 years with no issues.

PORTABLE WAGON BASE

The structure is roughly 7′ x 10. We built this portable goose wagon on running gear. The coop is on wheels, for portability, and a deck that allowed the poop to fall through! The best part is we ordered it online and it was delivered to our door, easy peasy.

RAIN COLLECTION

Between a pond and drinking water, geese go through a lot of water. We needed a way to fill the water on the pasture, rain collection and a 65 gallon water storage tank from our local farm supply store was the answer.

A 1.5” inch rain on this 70 square foot roof fills up the entire 65 gallon bulk tank. We catch water on a metal roof fitted with house gutters from our local hardware store. If it doesn’t rain we just park the wagon by a hose and fill up the bulk tank.

Each side of the roof has gutters and a poly tube (with a mesh filter) that goes to the bulk tank. We also installed a water over flow poly tube. When the tank fully fills up, there’s a hole in the lid that would get all the geese bedding wet if we didn’t have an over flow.

On either side of the bulk tank is the geese bedding and nesting area.

PORTABLE POND

The Goose pond is a Rubbermaind 50 gallon stock tank. There’s a hose from the bulk tank with a float valve to the pond. We drilled a hole in the side and put a spigot to make water dumping easy.
The tank sits on a small wagon frame that we bought from a neat Amish Dairy, Noble Road Milking Equipment in PA. The handle has a pin that is removable and the handle slides in if you want to hook the wagon up to a lawnmower or ATV.

At night we close the geese up to protect from predators. There’s a small trough with a float valve. The geese can use it for drinking and wadding at night time.

WALKING RAMPS

The wagon and pond are quite a way off the ground. We have a ramp up to the coop and another from the coop to the pound. The ramp to the pond doubles as a door and window. We covered the ramps with a rubber mat. Geese are pretty clumsy and don’t appreciate slipping 🙂

PREDATOR PROTECTION

Update as of 2/6/2014: We couldn’t keep the geese from coming and hanging out on our porches. They would leave us PILES of poopoo and they are extremely naughty and curious… they chew up EVERYTHING that’s fabric or rubber. I got tired of  cleaning my porches TWO TIMES A DAY! It was really nasty stuff. After they chewed through my toddlers shoes, towels, break lights on our ATV, our swing set! toddler toys etc, we decided we HAD to fence them or I was going to kill them right then and there. We choose to go with two sets of electric poultry netting (Premier or Kencove.com), a quick ground rod (Kencove.com) and small solar energizer (Stafix brand). The whole system cost about $400. It was worth the investment. We now have our chicken tractor, goose wagon in that poultry netting. At night our guard dogs were roaming a bit to much and waking up the neighbors, so we also put our guard dogs in there at night. Since our Anatolian and Pyrenees are in there, we don’t even close the chicken door or lock the geese up. The chickens go to roost, but the geese… well they “roost” on the ground/pond or wherever, they’re geese 🙂

SLIDING DOORS

There are two sliding doors on either side of the wagon. They are hung with two steel ball baring hangers on a stand ball track.

What kind of set up do you keep your geese or ducks in? Comment below!

Thanks for reading!

This tour was featured at Small Foot Print Fridays, Party Wave Wednesdays, Unprocessed Fridays and Homestead Barn Hop, Fresh Eggs Daily Barn Hop, and Tasty Traditions.