The Chicken Tractor

This weekend's main project, aside from a continuation of spring cleaning, was to build a chicken tractor. The butcher chickens are getting too big for the brooder, and it's time to clean the winter bedding out of the layer chickens' coop, so I needed a place to put birds.

Chicken tractors can be whatever you want them to be, but in essence, it's a chicken coop or cage without a floor, that can be moved to a different location. I have seen some very fancy designs ranging from very small for two or three chickens, to quite large, requiring a tractor to move them. Many of the designs I've found are too small for our purposes. Currently we have six laying hens, but that could double pretty quickly if we decide we want more. I also need it to be large enough to hold a dozen or more butcher chickens if needed. Also, I don't want the birds to be packed so tightly that they dig down to bare dirt too quickly. For our purposes, we wanted something fairly large, but light enough that my 14 year old son could move it. Now, there are many many websites that have designs and pictures of chicken tractors, so I'm not going to go into that part too much. Suffice to say that if you look at enough different pictures, you'll figure out what you want in a chicken tractor pretty quickly.

We had some 8 foot 2x4s left over from a project last fall, so we decided to use them. Our chicken tractor is nothing but an 8 foot by 8 foot, 4 foot tall cage, wrapped in chicken wire, with a partial roof for shade and a nest box and small shelf for the chickens to roost on at night. Currently, it's incomplete, as I still have to put plywood on the back side both to block wind and to provide additional shelter from hot summer sun. Currently we're staring a spring blizzard in the face, so completion of this project and actually using the tractor will have to wait until that passes.

My son attaching chicken wire to the partially completed chicken tractor. Still to be added in this picture, plywood on the side he's standing on to block wind and sun, a rope attached to the bottom frame to pull it, and a nest box. After that, we'll just put the feeder and waterer in the tractor and move it to a new spot every day or so.




More examples of chicken tractors:
http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/chicken-tractors-mobile-chicken-coop-designs