Don’t laugh: Wild and wonderful tractor chicken coop
Besides the sheer pleasure of telling your friends with a straight face that you’re tending your garden with something called a “tractor chicken,” there are a ton of other benefits to working the land with a few of your animal friends. First, getting rid of pests without using chemicals; second, letting them weed and till the soil—not to mention spreading natural fertilizer; and don’t forget to fill the bill for chicken feed. Oh, and fresh eggs and meat, if you like.
Below is an excerpt from Gaia’s Garden By Toby HemenwayIt has been adapted to the web.
One way to introduce diminutive animals to the garden is with a diminutive, mobile run, called an animal tractor. By keeping livestock in a mobile run, the gardener can decide where the animal will feel most comfortable, rather than allowing the animals to wander and wreak havoc in freshly seeded beds. Bottomless pens concentrate weeding, cultivation and fertilization of animals in a diminutive space, which is the key to a successful combination of animals and gardens. With an animal tractor you can have weed-free, surface-ploughed, perfectly fertilized raised beds with only a few minutes of (your) work per day.
Chickens are ideal for animal tractors, although ducks, rabbits, pigs, and guinea pigs have all been used in these mobile pens. Andy Lee has written an entire book on the subject, Chicken Tractor, which I recommend to anyone planning to utilize an animal tractor.
The chicken tractor is a bottomless pen on wheels that fits over a garden bed.
A typical one might be four feet wide, eight feet long, and about two feet high. This design, one of many, is an open box with a wooden frame, covered on the sides with one-inch poultry mesh, roofed with plastic panels, with wheels or runners at one end and a door through which the birds can enter and exit. Inside, food and water containers hang from the roof; in some models, perches extend from the sides.
There are other designs, including round ones, but that’s the gist of it. To move the pen, simply lift one end and roll it on the wheels or runners. Animal tractors work best in garden beds the width of a tractor, and best in lengths that are multiples of the tractor’s length.
The number of birds per tractor varies with breed, but as a rule of thumb, a laying hen needs four square feet of space, while a broiler needs two square feet. So a tractor with thirty-two square feet of space can hold up to eight layers or sixteen broilers.
You can utilize a tractor-chicken house to cultivate the soil in three basic ways: rotation, sheet mulching and deep mulching
In rotation method, first thing in the morning is to move the pen and hens to an unused garden bed. The birds can stay inside while you move it – they will hang around in the pen. Withhold their food until they have been in the recent bed for an hour or more. This way, the hungry birds will eat the vegetation inside the tractor area. Let the birds weed, till and fertilize the soil throughout the day.
The next morning, drive the tractor across the bed to the next fresh spot and spread some mulch on the first bed. Rotate through any unused beds. This system requires that some garden beds lie fallow for part of the time so that the hens have the soil to improve. Andy Lee’s garden is twice as vast as he needs, which allows him to rotate the coops in each bed every other year.
As the tractor moves away from each raised bed, you can sow a cover crop of buckwheat, winter rye, or vetch, then turn the hens out to feed and re-tille the soil once the cover crop is about four inches high. Not only does this significantly augment soil fertility and life, but it also reduces the chicken feed bill. The result is excellent soil that can be obtained with little work and, if you wish, also eggs and meat.
Down sheet litter In the case of chickens, leave the tractor in one place for a few days.
Add about an inch of mulch each day and let the hens work the mulch and add manure to it. When the mulch is about four inches deep, move the hens to a recent spot and repeat the process. This way, you (and the hens) add both nutrients and organic matter to the soil. The mulch fixes nitrogen and other nutrients in place while the whole mixture composts. Treat this bed as you would any recent sheet-mulched bed and plant it with seedlings in the soil pockets or seeds in the top layer of potting soil.
You can also utilize a tractor-chicken coop to make deep mulching garden bed
Useful in gardens too diminutive to move a tractor around every day, or where the soil is very penniless. Leave the chicken tractor in one spot and add about an inch of mulch each day. After about five weeks—the time it takes broilers to grow from chicks to adults—you’ll have a hefty, raised bed to plant in. Andy Lee warns that leaving the tractor in one spot for that long can give predators—dogs, skunks, foxes—time to dig under the yard and attack the birds. If you are building a bed with deep mulch, it is recommended to lay netting around the pen and secure it to make it harder for predators to dig in.
Both bedding techniques work well on slopes and flat ground. On a slope, the hens—and gravity—will leave thicker bedding on the lower side of the pen, creating a flat, terraced bed.
Chickens are also free to graze in the garden, where they will gather insects, snails and weed seeds, but it is best to keep an eye on them in case they find a crop they really like, such as berries or tomatoes. Wait until the garden plants are ripe before letting chickens into the garden, as poultry will happily eat tender seedlings. If you let the birds into the garden in the delayed afternoon, they will not be there long enough to do any damage and will naturally return to the coop or tractor at dusk, saving you the trouble of a long chase after the chickens.
Growing some of your chicken feed will assist keep costs down and reduce imports to your farm, but you can’t realistically expect to grow all of your feed.
A hen needs about eighty pounds of grain per year, which could be grown in about 1,000 square feet of space. The numbers add up quickly: feeding a diminutive flock of eight hens would require an eighty-by-one-hundred-foot garden and countless hours of work to grow and harvest the food. Instead, I would suggest growing multipurpose plants around your yard to supplement your chickens’ diet, which will reduce costs and provide valuable vitamins and fresh food.
These plants could be nicely integrated into the garden design, providing habitat, food, nutrients, and all the other needs of an organic garden, rather than just acting as a single feed for the chickens. And growing feed for the chickens creates another closed cycle for the garden. As the chickens build the soil, the resulting food plants will be healthier and more vigorous, and the chickens, in turn, will be stronger and more productive.