Even saying "100% free range" doesn't tell the whole story.

Come see for yourself what a chicken's life should be.

"You should charge more!" We hear it all the time. But here's why we proudly sell our farm-fresh eggs for only $2 a dozen:

• we aren't looking for profit - we're just offsetting the expense of premium feed, and

• when you buy our eggs, you are helping our oldest son Nathaniel learn adult responsibility - twice a day he "does the chickens" as part of his daily chores. In return, he earns the money he needs to pay for the expensive luxury of owning and using a smartphone.

If you'd like to stop by for a visit, to catch up with our family and pick up a dozen or two, please give Scott a call/text at 615-549-8414 or shoot an email to scott@stonybrooktn.com and we'll set your order aside. If it'd be more convenient, Scott heads into town a few times each day and would be glad to meet you along his route.

After leaving our suburban backyard chicken coop behind back in Texas, we built our small hutch here at Stonybrook in our Spring - 2013. By the Spring of 2015, we needed to build something more substantial. So using left over 2x4s from a previous fence project that had gone pleasantly awry, we built a frame roughly 10' X 12'. Knowing a good deal when we saw one, we picked up the white metal roofing for $20 at the annual Smith County Ag Auction the year before. We also picked up some 55-gallon plastic barrels on the cheap at the auction; there was also a rainwater collection system complete with drip waterers. We bought the wood panel siding, trim boards, paint, door hardware, chicken wire and gutters at Lowe's here in Lebanon. (Keeping it Midwest Real, the red paint is actually Mark Twain House Brown.) All in all, our total budget for the coop ended up being around $800 dollars.

This coop could've lasted much longer, but the obvious design flaw of having been built with the wood frame placed directly on the ground was already causing a good degree of rot. This was made worse by the tendency of water pooling beneath nearly half the coop after a heavy rain. The decision was made to move the coop location towards the back of the barnyard, and to use a metal framed building. So in April of 2019, we ordered an 18' X 21' metal framed bulding from Max Steel Buildings. We had a load of limestone gravel delievered, leveled it using our tractor, and buried electric service to the site. Our purchase included professional installation, so all we had to do was build the interior wall separating the storage area from the rest, build the roost structure, hang the nesting boxes, and install the solar panels for the lighting and the automatic coop door.

The thing most people notice is the automatic door. The system, built by the fine folks at Pullet-Shut, has a solar panel that we installed on the South-facing wall, all the cabling you'd need to run wires wherever you want, a battery like you'd find in one of those Power Wheels kid toys, a daylight sensor and the metal door that has the motor unit attached. The Pullet-Shut's online specs give the rough opening dimensions, and since we knew we'd end up installing one eventually, we built the coop with this system in mind. We installed the entire system (solar panel, sensor, battery and door) in about two hours. Spending about $400 on what can only rationally be deemed a luxury item hurt our sense of thrift at first, but every time we see our flock spilling out of the coop as soon the sun comes up in the morning, we know it was more than a justifiable expense. We can barely even imagine having to close and open the coop up as we come and go in our busy lives; nor can we imagine having to schedule around such needs. After all these years of keeping chickens, we'd say that an automatic door is a necessity of hassle-free chickens.