Building a Chicken Tractor From Scrap Lumber and Metal
2 Days
Medium
You know what’s the best thing about moving to an unfinished, abandoned property? The junk.
Only for us, not all of it is junk. We inherited a few piles of junk with this house, two sheds full of all kinda things, a section in the woods that must have been a dog pen or something like that (a lot of old lumber, fence, old dog houses, a gate…), wood, metal, and a whole lot of miscellaneous things.
There was a lot of cleaning to do. Some things we just didn’t want to mess with, like the hundreds of cans of green beans, corn, and plum jam that we found in the shed. We filled three dump trucks full of trash and hauled it to the dump.
Some stuff we sold to recycling, like odd pieces of aluminum and hundreds of beer cans. We made something like $140 from those.
But some stuff, like lumber, windows, metal, aluminum, and so on, we saved for future projects.
The first one was a chicken coop/tractor.
We set out to build the new tractor with materials we have laying around the property. We also wanted to build something that will be big enough for at last 12 hens and a chicken tractor that we will be able to easily move in the future.
The lumber was all found in the piles of junk that were left here or in the woods. The sheets of metal were covering an old shed’s walls and the chicken fence that we covered the whole thing with was the same one I used for my deer fence (you can find the deer fence on the blog) a couple of years ago on the farm when I tried to grow for market.
We made four nest boxes.
They say you need one nest box for every four hens, but from my experience, the hens, no matter how many you have, will always choose one or two boxes and will take turns laying their eggs in those only.
**To see the finished coop and the finished chicken yard, head over to the blog by clicking the link below!
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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Love the A-Frame style, will definitely keep this in mind for when the time comes.
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Hope the co-op won't get to hit with all that metal on it???