Poultry Farming and Chicken houses

Steps to erect a poultry house

This was our last installation. Located in Cala in the Eastern Cape. The site is about 45km from town on top of a mountain in a village called Sifonondile. The chicken house picture are taken by me - I am the mlungu in the yellow raincoat. All our poultry houses are built on site, anywhere in South Africa.

Our terms and conditions say - Electricity, running water and level ground - well this place only has electricity - and barely enough to run the welding machines without tripping. Luckily I brought the generator! What was a 4 day job has turned into an 8 day job. We had to build the house on stilts. These we knocked into the ground one and half meters deep. The wind was icy and kept blowing the steel structure off the bricks we had originally placed it on. Every couple of hours the rain would come in horizontally. - then the sun would break out and we would strip off our gear again,

'Fantastic view and beautiful people - let's hope the project works. 90km North of here we put up two 18m x 6m structure in Polar Park, Elliot. Now, 3 years later I visited the site - everything is locked up and there is no poultry farming happening - such a shame.

These chicken house pictures are taken in sequence. The poultry structure is 21m x 6mm. There was supposed to be a concrete slab when we arrived... there was 2m of slab. We trusted that this was level - bad mistake - the contractor is an amateur and he had a 15 degree slope. Have a look how we worked around this problem. Unfortunately we had started to weld before I realised that the piece of slab was sloping - we had big problems trying to true out welded structure.

After finishing the chicken house we told the community and government to throw concrete into the base of the chicken house - ASAP. You can see the gaps under the bottom of the house on one side - the ground was not level.The concrete anchors the house down - we also added anchor ropes and stakes before we left - 10 in all, with steel cable and 2m stakes driven into the ground. My worry is that the wind is going to get in under the house where it is off the ground. And boy, do the winds blow on top of this mountain - they call it the big snake, and it comes every few years. They believe that the shiny steel roofing attracts the snake. You can see the homes have painted roofs to thwart the snake. Let's hope the big snake does not come before they throw concrete.

Poultry Site Pictures

These chicken house pictures show how to build a chicken house, or the steps required. Poultry houses are generally steel structures, if you want more details on how to build a house I am happy to give some pointers. Building a poultry house - especially a large steel structure is not as simple as it may seem. Well here is the latest update on this chicken house - the big wind came - took the chicken house and all the village rondavils with - it literally cleared all the structures off of the top of the mountain. Very sad!

lines of credit