My day job is as a network acceleration expert at Citrix Systems, which is feeling the economic slowdown (as who isn’t?). Wednesday afternoon they announced they were reducing their workforce by 10%. Thursday afternoon I learned that I was not going to be shown the door — which meant that I still had to meet my horrendously difficult Friday deadlines!
I’m sure we all know people who have lost their jobs in this recession. I feel fortunate to have been through this before, having been given the old heave-ho at Activision in the Eighties and WEITEK in the Nineties when their respective wheels fell off. Plus some other gigs when I was a free-lance contractor. Once you’ve been through it a few times, the prospect is a nuisance rather than a terror. In fact, I’ve never left a job of my own free will. Gigs don’t last, not in high tech, anyway.
So I’m still on the job at Citrix, which is good, since there are some cool things in the works that I want to help push out the door.
As for recession-proofing tips, I don’t suppose that I have any special insights. The key is to keep your expenses well below your income and avoid debt so you can constantly build up savings for emergencies and retirement. In our case, we bought a farm that was within our means, never buy new cars (our newest vehicle is a ’96 Toyota pickup), pay off our credit cards every month, and if our income goes up, we put most of the increase into savings. We fell off the wagon around 2000, running up considerable credit-card debt just before getting hammered by the recession that followed the dot-com bubble. That wasn’t very smart of us. But we got back out of debt eventually and are in okay shape again.
My chicken coops have always had metal roofs, and now I’m trying out metal siding, on the grounds that I want anything I build to last 20 years without maintenance, and the exterior plywood I’ve been using doesn’t deliver that.
[Update: Seven years after writing this blog post, the corrugated metal walls are holding up well. Seven years is long enough for plywood walls to start falling to pieces, but the metal walls are holding up well, with only a bit of rust here and there.]
One of my old pasture houses, with a 15-year-old metal roof and 7-year-old metal siding.
Does Metal Promote Condensation and Wetness?
People will tell you that metal siding sweats, because of condensation. This is true if the inside of the house is warmer than the outside, since moisture from the warm house will condense on the cold walls and ceiling. But it’s not about metal vs. wood, since condensation forms on any kind of roof or wall, no matter what it’s made of. In marginal cases, it’s more visible on metal because it’s 100% non-absorbent.
A Fresh-Air House is a Dry House
But you can dodge the problem with a fresh-air poultry house. If you add enough ventilation, the inside of the house is just as cold as the outside, and you get no condensation. My metal roofs don’t have condensation unless there’s snow on the roof and temperatures are above freezing. The rest of the time, my highly ventilated houses have dry ceilings and walls.
Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, by Prince T. Woods. Reprinted by me!
This is one of the main points of Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, the chicken-coop book I’ve republished (check out the sample chapter if you haven’t already). It focuses on the advantage of well-ventilated houses, a concept that still needs to be repeated constantly today. You won’t read anything about metal walls or roofs in this book, since it predates their use, but it’s a treasure trove in other ways.
You can also prevent condensation with insulation, but I don’t do that.
Can you really prevent damp chicken houses through ventilation alone? Well, it works for me, and I live in Oregon, which has a famously wet climate!
Installing Corrugated Sheet Metal Walls
Back to the construction project. In keeping with my other rule of construction (never use a saw when you can buy stuff that’s already the right size), I ignored my existing stock of 10-foot metal roofing and obtained some cheap 8-foot corrugated roofing from Home Depot. My chicken houses are 8×8 feet.
Karen and I banged these sheets onto a couple of sides of a chicken house where the old OSB siding was falling to pieces. We used roofing screws. These are hex drive screws with neoprene washers. We used to use roofing nails, but they pull loose too easily and we hate having roofing panels flapping loose in the breeze! And using power tools instead of a hammer keeps my shoulders and back from seizing up. I bang the screw in a short way with a hammer, then drive it home with a cordless drill.
I’m told that roofing screws have three times the holding power of nails.
These panels went on very quickly, and if they ever rust through (which they will, at the bottom edges anyway, if I allow chicken manure to pile up against them), I can take the screws out and replace them just as easily.
So far, so good. The shiny metal really brightens up the interior of the chicken house, and because it’s non-porous, it provides no place for roost mites to accumulate.
Cheap Roofing is Good Enough
Plain old “ripple metal” (corrugated steel) is less rigid than V-channel roofing, but it’s proven to be stiff enough, even for a house that gets dragged around behind a tractor, which can put all sorts of stresses on it, especially if it gets hung up on holes and bumps along the way. So far, so good. That means that, so far, the cheapest possible corrugated metal has been perfectly adequate.
Watch out for translucent corrugated fiberglass. In my experience, it’s not very strong and becomes increasingly brittle over time. I’m sure it has its uses, but don’t think of it as being structural in the way that plywood and corrugated steel are.
You Don’t Have to Settle for Ugly
Of course, you can build a much prettier house with metal roofing with baked-enamel finishes in designer colors, and you should probably do this if you don’t want a silver house, since it’s hard to get paint to stick to galvanized steel. While I’m always looking for the cheapest, longest-lasting, easiest-to-build designs, there are plenty of other ways of approaching the problem of chicken-coop design.
I have about a zillion patent applications filed with the Patent Office on behalf of my employer, Citrix Systems, where I’m something of a network acceleration guru.
Patents are weird, especially the way other people do it. My goal is always to write up the idea just as clearly and completely as I can, which is the least-weird (weirdless?) way of doing it. An alternate school of thought is that the patent should be lawyered up to increase its protection even at the expense of clarity (or comprehensibility). That’s what happened to these two. Yet a third school is that the patent should be made incomprehensible on purpose, and even given a misleading title, so that only you know what it means. This theoretically gives you advantages in court, but I think it’s too clever by half.
Both patents (patent 1patent 2 have to do with fancy compression techiques like we use for the Citrix WANScaler network accelerator. Which is very cool stuff if you’re into that sort of thing. I sure am.
Patents are a topsy-turvy world. They don’t give your invention any direct protection — there are no Patent Police — they basically are just a license to sue infringers. Getting a patent is also a strange process, something only the federal government could come up with. It took nearly two years for these applications to thread the maze, and that’s pretty quick! I have some applications that have been in the mill twice as long.
Also, frankly, just because an idea has been patented doesn’t mean it’s any good. Anybody who can cough up the filing fee and a lot of patience can get a worthless invention patented if it’s worthless in the right way. Me, I don’t see the point — in the topsy-turvy world of patents, coming up with a good invention is the easy part — but some people get a kick out of it.
I’m a fourth-generation back-to-the-lander. This means I’ve done the back-to-the-land thing twice: once when my parents moved from Los Angeles, where my dad was an aerospace engineer, to Northern California, where my parents built and ran a campground nestled into the redwoods. Then later I moved from Silicon Valley, where I managed a technical writing group, to Oregon’s Coast Range, where I do the sort of thing you read about in this blog.
It’s interesting watching other people embark (or at least talk about) their back-to-the-land journey, and to compare them to the folks who’ve been here for a while.
For example, take hygiene. Long-time rural residents want indoor plumbing, hot water, and flush toilets. These are non-negotiable. But there’s a whole industry built around people who want to make their ablutions and bodily functions less convenient and more expensive. I shudder to think what Freud would have made of this.
The emphasis on inconvenience and unreliability mystifies me. Try this test on people: tell them your house is a geodesic dome. If they say, “Cool!” they’re newbies. If they ask, “Does it leak?” they’ve been around a while.
I think the difference is that, once you achieve the lifestyle, you no longer need the toys. Toilets and roofs are no longer interesting: you have other fish to fry.
The other thing I notice is that newbies and wannabes talk a lot more about the wonderful rural lifestyle than long-time practitioners. If you read back-to-the-land literature, only a fraction of it was written by people who have been on the land for more than three or four years. Sadly, that’s about the amount of time it takes for newcomers to become completely broke and move back to the city. The people you really want to listen to are the ones who’ve been on the land for five years or more, but they aren’t so communicative.
I will close with a piece of rural old-timer wisdom: “Never do by hand something you can do with power equipment. You only get one spine, so make it last.”
I like portable chicken houses. My henhouses are mostly simple little 8×8-foot houses that I move with a tractor. I don’t put litter on the floor. The chickens don’t spend much time on the floor anyway: they use the roosts.
I don’t shovel manure, either. When the manure starts getting to be a bit much, I don’t remove the manure from the houses, I remove the houses from the manure. I hook up a house to my tractor with a handy chain and drag it to a fresh patch of ground. Then I come back and use the rear scraper blade on my tractor to spread the manure over a long swath of grass. The grass soaks up the manure greedily.
We shuffled our houses around on Friday afternoon. Took about an hour.
For pastured broilers, we use lighter houses that are moved by hand, because the broilers are kept inside the houses at all times (broilers are so young and dumb that they don’t know to come in out of the rain, so we keep them under a roof at all times). Hens are older and smarter, so they come and go as they please. In fact, only one of my houses has a door! They get out of the way when the tractor arrives and when their houses start to move around.
The big trick with henhouses is that, if you move them too far, the hens get confused and sleep on the ground where the house used to be. So don’t move the houses too far. The first time you spring this on a group of chickens, ten or fifteen feet is plenty. Later you can move them as far as fifty feet or so.
The other trick is to move the houses as early in the day as you can manage, since that gives the chickens more time to get used to their changed landscape.
