Making Portable Chicken Coops is Easy and Great Fun!
Portable chicken coops, sometimes called chicken tractors, are lightweight hen houses that can be moved easily around the garden. A chicken tractor has some excellent features:
- Easy and cheap to make, even for diy amateurs
- Easy to clean
- Use very little space in your garden
- Free garden fertilizer (the hens gradually do it for you)
- Constantly changing stock of insects and greens for the hens
- Hens can be moved easily into shade or shelter as required
- Predators are confused by a constantly moving hen house
- Use as temporary housing for the hens while you clean out or repair their fixed coop
Size is the chief drawback. Chicken tractors have to be easy to move and therefore are suitable for only 3 or 4 hens. You should allow about 4 square feet per hen.
Commonly chicken tractors have an A frame shape and a footprint of 12 to 16 square feet. They have no floor. Some portable chicken coops have wheels or even skids fitted to help move them easily around the yard. You can make a chicken tractor in a few hours, using cheap wood and chicken wire – you might have some or all you need already lying around in your backyard! Building one yourself will save you a lot of money, and you will also have the satisfaction of getting exactly what you want.
As your flock of hens grows, you could use your portable coop as an extension of the full-size hen house.
Do not try to build your own without a good set of chicken tractor plans. This is essential before you start. Portable chicken coops are more than just a few pieces of wood nailed together, even though the whole process is very straightforward. The design of the coop will be affected by several criteria which need to be considered carefully, such as the correct environment for specific breeds and the yard area available. There are quite a few factors you need to be aware of when designing your mobile hen coop, which is why you should have proper advice and instructions from experts in chicken rearing.
You will often see ‘free’ plans for chicken tractors advertised on the internet but, in our experience, these are invariably rubbish. It is absolutely essential to use good chicken tractor plans and get expert instructions from designers with experience in breeding and keeping chickens. Check that these include comprehensive lists of materials and tools needed for assembling the portable chicken coop – it is so much easier to get things right before you start to build.
For more information about designing and building really good portable chicken coops – see Build A Chicken Tractor on our website. You will get a wealth of information and data on all aspects of selecting and keeping hens, not just how to build the right sort of houses for them.
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