Chickens and The Chicken Tractor
Both Are a Boon to Your Homestead

So what is a chicken tractor? Think of it as a portable pen with an attitude. Basically, it's a coop on wheels with no flooring.

It gives your birds the two things they love best: fresh grass and new dirt every day for them to scratch around in.

Birds of the Wild
Mean Lots of Problems

But left to their own devices, they become wild. They're impossible to catch at butchering time, by humans anyway.

Without a coop for protection, your birds become easy prey for coyotes or neighborhood dogs.

Plus they hide their eggs. Everyday becomes an egg hunt.

The Hen House

Problem is, the hen house got smelly pretty quickly. Loaded with manure, it quickly became a toxic site that could make your birds sick if you didn't clean it often enough.

Plus, even if you provide your birds with a run, the grass in the area quickly disappeared.

Then your birds were dependent on the food you gave them - "dead" food consisting of dried, ground grains.

That meant a bigger feed cost and more work removing manure and urine.

The Beauty of the Portable Coop

Every day your birds get a brand-new patch of grass, with lots of tasty bugs and fresh greens.

Your lawn, in turn, get aerated and fertilized.

Your organic "lawn service" will do wonders for your grass.

For example: this is what our grass looked like immediately after we removed the portable coop. This was after one full day of the chicken treatment. It might not look very pretty in this picture, but check out how it looks a week or so later:







Look carefully, and you can actually see the line where the chicken tractor was.

Keep one of these coops in your backyard, move it daily, and you'll have a lush, dark green lawn by the end of the summer.

Better still, your pasture-fed hens will produce eggs with lower cholesterol and more of the healthy vitamins your body needs.

How Big of a Coop Do You Need?

So if you decide to keep four hens for example, your coop will need to be either two feet wide by eight feet long or four feet square.

Laying hens need a nesting box, something secluded and above-ground, approximately one box for every two birds.

Here is one of the coops my husband designed for our hens. It is eight feet long by three feet wide and is three feet high.













On each end of the coop we have doors that give us access to the laying boxes.

















There are six boxes on each end of the coop.

I line the boxes with hay the goats no longer want. Every day I change out the dirty hay for clean.

The dirty hay goes into the compost pile.















Our other portable coop was originally an A-frame design, but it was too difficult to get to the birds.

So my husband modified it, and turned it into a pop-up design.

You Can Build
a Chicken Tractor!

You Can Build a Chicken Tractor Provides you with step-by-step instructions on how to build a chicken tractor and also provides helpful information on how to get free wood and how your chickens can pay for themselves.

Click Here learn more.

More Homesteading Chicken Links