Marriage Therapy: Building a Chicken Tractor
The chicken tractor is complete!
It took us a while, but we managed to buckle down and through a lot of research, looking at a lot of options, we designed and settled on this option.
Let’s take a tour.
The entire thing is wood framed. We used hardware cloth, not chicken wire. (Better security)
We already owned a set of vintage nesting boxes, so we used those as our guide for measuring the house part, raising it off the ground so the chickens will have space underneath.
We repurposed metal roofing from a building we tore down.
The food and water are now inside the tractor, but we are considering moving them outside because chickens are messy, and I am tired of cleaning off the lids.
The food and water containers are buckets, and each has unique dispensers, which I will link at the bottom of this post.
The wheels on the back are actually trailer jacks, and the front hitch is used to move the whole unit with a trailer dolly.
We crank it up and roll it around the yard every 5 days or so, ensuring we don’t leave it sit too long to create a bare spot in the grass.
We still let them out to free range when we are home, but when we are not here, its nice to know they are safe from predators and won’t get out on the road.
At the end of the day, we are happy with how this project turned out. We completed it before vacation and it made it much easier for our house-sitter to care for the animals.
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