The animals are conspiring against me

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I live on a small farm and one of my chores is feeding our outdoor cats. I usually feed them in our barn, under the idea that they would hang out there and supplement what we feed them with mice. In the spring, summer, and fall, that works out great. The problem comes in winter. Our barn is maybe 100 feet from our house and is basically just someplace to store hay bales. Since there isn’t much reason to go there, during the winter the space between it and the house fills with snowdrifts. For years I would stomp my way through the drifts to feed the cats. But last winter I realized that I could put their pans in the back of our garage and feed them there without having to go through snowdrifts. We want to feed them away from the house so they’re not always underfoot looking for treats. Anyway, when it started getting cold a few months ago, I took the cat pans out of the barn and put them in the garage. Unfortunately, we also have chickens. For some reason, a couple of them don’t feel like laying eggs in their coop – which is further from the house than the barn, but in a more traveled area – and instead made a nest in the barn. So I’m still tramping through the snowdrifts every day to get their eggs.