What is a chicken tractor
We have three chicken tractors, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we have twice that many in a few
years. For the uninitiated, a chicken tractor is a moveable
chicken coop/run with everything your chickens need in a small
space. Each morning, I move the tractors to a new patch of lawn,
where they scratch for bugs, engulf greenery, and fertilize the
ground. We get free lawnmowing and fertilizing along with better
eggs
while the chickens get healthy additions to their diet — it’s a
win-win.
Animals are an important part of any natural
ecosystem, but most modern
farming tries to cut them out of the picture.
Chicken tractors
put animals back in, but in a controlled manner. Left to their
own devices, free range chickens would make short work of a vegetable
garden, eating up your tomatoes and strawberries, scratching your mulch
aside, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. (Yes, I
speak from personal experience.) On the other hand, pen chickens
up in a permanent coop/run and they will eat all of the greenery in a
matter of days, leaving bare earth which doesn’t provide any of their
food.
Some folks drag
the tractors directly over their garden to fertilize, but I’ve found
this is difficult with raised beds, and also gives the chickens less
food. So we added the mulching lawnmower to our chicken tractor
system, allowing us to cut grass fertilized by our chickens, then use
the greenery as mulch or compost in the garden. Thanks, hens!
We invented our homemade chicken
waterer specifically for tractors. Check it out to prevent
spilling of water on uneven terrain.
| This post is part of our Introduction to Chicken Tractors series. Read all of the entries:
|
Introduction to chicken tractors
We firmly believe that automatic chicken waterers
and chicken tractors go hand in hand since they both keep your chickens
happy and healthy. Every time we see chickens in a conventional
coop setting, we cringe, but we realize that it can be a bit daunting
for first-timers to build a chicken tractor from scratch. It’s
really not so hard, though, and can be surprisingly cheap — Mark
built our most recent chicken tractor for under $20.
During the three years
that we’ve lived on the farm, Mark has built
five chicken tractors. In the process, he’s learned a lot,
documenting most of that information on our homesteading blog.
I’m going to be summarizing the most relevant bits of information from
that blog on
this blog over the next month or so. Now is the perfect time to
start thinking about next year’s chickens. Why not curl up with a
hot cup of cocoa and plan a chicken tractor while you’re at it?
| This post is part of our Introduction to Chicken Tractors series. Read all of the entries:
|