The Cattle Panel Chicken Tractor Works

…though it’s not the best.

Here’s the video from a year ago in which I filmed the build and shared my thoughts on how it turned out:

Though it’s unwieldy, it’s been quite useful on our new property. It was strong enough to just set on top of a trailer and haul over here, and since there was no place to put chickens, it’s become our current chicken house.

Half of my chickens are still at a friend’s place, actually. One of these days I need to go get them. This single coop isn’t big enough for all of the birds. One of my goals for the new year is to build a better system.

Yet even this small, super-heavy cattle panel chicken tractor is working just fine for now. We get maybe 4-6 eggs a day, plus the birds are clearing the ground out for us.

They’re under the black walnut tree by the Grocery Row Gardens right now.

You can see the mucky mess they leave behind. That’s some serious soil fertility, there!

We throw almost everything in the compost, from used paper towels to paper plates, meat scraps, crushed eggshells, kitchen scraps, sour milk and more. The chickens happily convert it to beautiful eggs and quality manure.

You can see the large square they’ve chewed up so far.

That’s 9 moves, there, since they were put in this area. They’ll stay on an area for a few weeks, then we move them.

Some of this area is planted with sugarcane and some of it will be tilled into veggie beds. We’ll see how they do with the walnut roots nearby.

You can also see a wild lily to the middle right, growing back after being shredded down to the ground.

It’s not the idea chicken tractor, but it keeps thirteen birds for us and they live way, way better than the poor birds in factory farms.

Ideally I would have them ranging the entire area around the pond and woods, but we’re not quite there yet. Right now they’re close and safe, and they’re taking out grass and building up rich soil for spring.

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