Chicken Tractors Help You to Feed and Raise Chickens with Less Work

chicken tractors

Now a chicken tractor is not a brand of tractors but is a movable chicken cage without a bottom. This allows you to keep your chickens under control while still moving them around your yard. A chicken tractor allows you have all the advantages of free-range chickens while protecting them from predators.

They can also be used with other kinds of poultry.  Most chicken tractors are a lightly built A-frame which one person can drag about the yard.  It can have wheels on one or both ends or it can be on skids.

The term chicken tractor comes from the chickens performing many functions normally performed by a modern farm tractor: things like digging and weeding the soil in preparation for planting trees or crops, fertilizing the ground and keeping down the insect population.  They love ticks.  You have less clean up, instead of shoveling out the coop, you just move it before it becomes a big mess.

chicken tractors
A moderate chicken tractor designed to be lifted by two people or dragged

With chicken tractors you can raise chickens in an environment where the birds have access to fresh air, sunlight, wild foods and exercise, which caged birds in commercial coops do not have. With the coop on only a small area at any given time, the field has time to regrow and more birds can be fed than if they were allowed to freely roam.  A properly designed chicken tractor also gives protection from predators and weather.  On the back of the chicken tractor, you attach nesting boxes that are easily accessible for you to remove eggs.

A chicken tractor does several things for you.  You buy less food and they eat what nature intended them too.  The manure reduces your need for petroleum-based fertilizers.

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chicken tractors
A fancy chicken tractor on wheels

There are literally hundreds of different designs for chicken tractors on the internet.  They vary from very simple to very fancy.  But they all seem to work.

Try it and you will have happy chickens and less work.

Howard

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3 thoughts on “Chicken Tractors Help You to Feed and Raise Chickens with Less Work”

  1. Can you leave them in the tractor overnight or do you need an other coop? What about real cold nights (I am from Idaho)?

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