This is our second year of raising chickens in a "chicken tractor". We get them as day old chicks and keep them indoors for about three weeks. Here is a shot of the chickens just before they are moved into their outdoor homes.
The idea is to raise them in a cage that can be moved around the garden, roughly weekly, to provide a mulched area for next years vegetables. We start them on a green area that the chickens love to munch along with the feeders that are provided. The chickens eat and drink and poop. We add hay for bedding daily
This years version made some improvements over last years inaugural design. The main improvements are smaller doors which are easier to open and close and a new watering system that is a HUGE improvement over the old fashioned waterers that needed constant filling and cleaning as chickens aren't known for their sanitary habits.
Both versions that I built start with 10 ea. lengths of 10' 1-1/2" PVC. 4 pieces are cut in half and 6 pieces are cut into quarters. The assembled frame looks like this:
Wire is woven onto the frame. Then a door structure is built which covers half of the frame. The door structure has 3 doors and one flat shelf to support the water bucket.:
I cover the other half with a roughly square frame with attached fencing:
The watering system is a length of PVC tube with 6 nipples along it's lenght, a valve on one end and a hose attachment that connects to the bucket above. The chickens learned very quickly that when they peck at the nipples water will flow. The nipples have apiece of metal that when pecked, lifts a ball bearing inside to allow the water to flow past:
We place netting over the buckets so that we can easily add water through the top while keeping bugs and dirt out. I can't tell you how happy we are with this innovation...what a labor saver!
We raised 25 chickens in last years tractor (which provided plenty of room) and have 31 so far this year divided between the two. Each tractor is roughly 12' x 5'.
The nipples can be purchased at QCsupply.com.
This years chickens are Cornish/Rock cross. They are at full size in 8 weeks resulting in a 4 to 5 lb. dressed bird. (We take them to a processer, $2.00/bird, back up to on door where they enter the processing building...15 minutes later the go onto ice in the coolers for the trip home to the freezer. You can figure about 17 lbs of feed/bird over their short lifetimes.