Building a Chicken Tractor

The tractor-in-progress, as we left it today.

Today we began building our first chicken tractor. That would be Me and my right-hand helpers, Myself and I. Since we've been thinking on the topic frequently of late, we stopped at Home Depot yesterday to scout out materials. We had not planned to buy because we had left the little farm truck at home; however, the opportunity presented itself.

Our way of joining pieces was crude, but effective.

When we wandered into the chain-link fence section of the store, we stopped to consider the already-fashioned gates. Lo and behold, there we encountered two small gates on clearance, marked down from around $54.00 to $13.50 each. Thus, we determined that these would supply the run's end sides. Even though we thought the rest of the materials would not actually fit in the car, we went ahead and purchased four of the 10'6" connecting poles for chain-link fencing hoping that we could manage it with the long ends hanging out a window. (That worked.) After finding an assortment of hardware we checked out and headed home.

Poultry netting wired onto the frame provides stability.

Today we worked at connecting the pieces. Making the frame was no easy task. Even though we had our work-crew of three, with only one physical body we found balancing the pieces difficult. Once the frame had been fashioned, I found some chicken wire, pardon me, some poultry netting with which to wrap the outside. Although we did not finish the tractor today, we were able to install two courses of netting--enough to stabilize the structure, and a couple of roosting poles for the birds. Hopefully we will finish the project tomorrow. If not, then sometime in the near future. I would really like to get those chickens out of the kennel and onto fresh ground soon.

One conclusion we reached through this exercise was that perhaps the prices of ready-made chicken tractors are more reasonable than we had at first thought. I'll be surfing the web later on to see if our second tractor will be purchased as a complete unit at the outset.