Chicken Tractors

We don’t have cable TV by choice, so when a red Netflix envelope shows up in the mailbox, it’s a happy moment. A particular DVD snuck into the queue a while ago that’s pretty obscure even for Netflix. Poly-Phase Farming – definitely five stars if you’re looking to make the most of your hogs, cattle, rabbits, and yes chickens.
The basic concept is that all your livestock does double duty on their way to whatever consumable they become (burger, cutlets, pork chops, split breast fryers). I’ll focus on chickens as an example as I’ve formed a somewhat intimate love/hate relationship with this bevy of Barred Rock cluckers.
The entertainment value of our chickens has become the only reason we have them around any longer. The eggs they lay are truly wonderful, and nothing like the perfectly antiseptic white units with anemic pale yokes and silk screened date stamps available at most grocery stores. But they’ve long since stopped producing enough daily eggs to make a decent omelet, even though we’ve learned all the tricks to fool them into increased production. And while I’ve thought about pinning a picture of a stew pot full of chicken cacciatore to the wall of their hen house as incentive to lay, I have no intention of butchering them. So forget about Return On Investment–organic feed & corn is expensive, but the wild birds and rats seem to love it, so why not feed the chickens too. No, they fall into the category of pets, but the fun of it is dwindling. It’s a matter of containment.
Free Range sounds so healthy and well, freeing. I can see them clucking away a la Julie Andrews to the tune of The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music. And on a “range” this would be fine, but around the house, the patio, the patio furniture, the porch you’ll find chicken shit everywhere and on everything. Not to mention their draconian way of clawing through garden and flower bed with devastating results. There’s so much chicken wire surrounding our planted areas it looks like the front line at the battle of Normandy.
Flash back to the movie. I was just beginning to doze off watching a very industrious farmer mucking about in his hog pen, when I heard the words chicken & tractor used in the same sentence – as if they belonged together! Given the poultry plagued picture I just drew, you can imagine how ears perked up, eyes re-focused, and I started paying attention to this wacko idea, or so it seemed.
Get this. Build yourself (OK not you, me) a low, moderately sized, bottomless chicken coop. Slap some bicycle wheels on one end, and Bingo was his name O, you have yourself a Chicken Tractor. Drag that thing out into your pasture, wrestle your chickens into it, and after they’ve grazed for a couple of days on a salad bar of sweet grass and clover, you lift up one end and wheel them to the next patch of grass. The chickens get fed, you cut down on feed costs, and the field gets fertilized. Brilliant!
There’s a delicate balance of labor to value in getting entertainment and omelets, but if this contraption works without too much maintenance, it could be the answer to our, and our chicken’s prayers.