Chicken Tractor, oh, Chicken Tractor,
Where art thou, Chicken Tractor?
Can you guess what I have been teaching this week in Ninth Grade Literature? I know in the depths of my being that William Shakespeare appreciated the serenity of communing with a flock of chickens. However, I cannot be sure that he and his Elizabethan counterparts utilized chicken tractors to exercise birds and improve nutritional health. On our farm, preparing to build and maintain a Chicken Tractor is imperative because we cannot let our chickens range freely. Due to dogs, foxes, coyotes, hawks, owls, and other predators, a chicken tractor gives us options to improve our flock’s quality of life. Chicken experts explain the purpose of a Chicken Tractor:
“The idea is you move a chicken tractor across your pasture (or backyard) every day, or every few days, so your flock constantly has fresh vegetation to forage in. Chickens like to eat the tender tips of grass and weeds, and they especially relish bugs, slugs, and snails—which helps make a dent in the pest population on your property. As you move the tractor around, they leave their nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich manure behind them” (Modern Farmer, https://modernfarmer.com/2016/08/chicken-tractor/).
Chris will focus more on the construction of the tractor because we want to use materials that we have readily available. For instance, my daddy had a metal framed tarp covered shelter in his yard. The tarp long ago rotted, but the metal frame still stands. I can actually see Chris’ ideas about utilizing that frame for our future tractor at Cypress Lane Chicken Farm. How will he construct it? How will it remain mobile? What areas of the property will we allow our chickens to graze? For a man who works with metal each day, this metal frame gives him the opportunity to be creative as well as practical. Here’s to our future tractor. As we plan the construction, I will update the blog with plans and pictures of finished product. At the end of a Shakespearean play, the stage directions would say: EXEUNT!
Here are a few links of Chicken Tractor plans that I like:
https://insteading.com/blog/chicken-tractor-plans/
https://lemonslide.com/a-frame-chicken-coop/
https://www.wayfair.com/pet/pdp/tucker-murphy-pet-lapoint-walk-in-pen-extension-kit-tkmp2485.html
Curvaceous Chick's Coop 