PEN & TELL'ER

Building a sustainable chicken tractor has its ups and downs.

- BARRY BROWN

I'LL BEGIN by stating that I don't understand the expression "The best-laid plans of mice and men." I fathom completely that the best-laid plans of men - myself in particular - oft go astray, but the mice seem to do alright.

They plan to eat a hole in the feed sack so the contents will fall out for them to make off with, and that plan goes swimmingly. They plan to avoid any store-bought or homemade traps, and they come off like some cross between Einstein and Houdini. In this article, I'll share with you my experience planning and building a chicken tractor: what I wanted to do, how I did it and what I learned.

PLAN PARAMETERS

My mobile pen parameters build a low-cost, high-mobility, low-maintenance chicken tractor that allowed me to use chicken litter and chicken behavior to fertilize my pasture. Rotational grazing livestock followed by chickens makes sense to me. The idea is that chickens spread the livestock manure by their natural scratching and add their own litter to the soil. So, I wanted to be able to move my chickens around 20 acres of pasture.

My design needed the ability to let the chicken litter from daily activities and roosting to amend my soil under the tractor. Low maintenance dictated a plan where I didn't have to shovel the tractor out every few days. Low maintenance also meant not having to provide water and food or open and close chicken doors multiple times each day.

Finally, my farm is an absolute hobby farm rather than a quasi- or full-blown commercial operation; therefore, my budget needed to be low enough that egg sales could pretend to offset the cost.

I started with a condemned car hauler trailer that a friend gave me. This was a flat 16-footlong trailer with two axles and a wood floor. It had a ball hitch that would permit me to pull it around the fields easily with my actual tractor.