Portable Chicken Coops are Easy and Great Fun to Make
Portable chicken coops, sometimes called chicken tractors, are lightweight hen houses that can be moved easily around the garden. A chicken tractor has a number of advantages:
- Very cheap and easy to make
- Easy to clean
- Ideal if you don’t have much space in your yard
- Free fertilizing for your garden (the hens do it bit by bit for you as you move the chicken tractor around)
- Constant source of bugs and new vegetation for the chickens (good for tasty eggs)
- Able to move poultry into shelter or shade quickly in changing weather conditions
- Unsettling and confusing for predators (they do not like constantly-shifting structures)
- 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.
Chicken tractors often have an A frame design of about 12 to 16 square feet footprint. Usually they do not have a floor. Wheels or skids can be fitted for easy movement. 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! A DIY portable coop will cost much less than a ready-made item, 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 most important. It is very easy to make portable chicken coops, but it is more than nailing a few bits of wood and wire together. Your coop design will need to be planned around a number of vital considerations, such as the breed of hen and the layout of the garden. These and other factors will determine your choice of materials, size of wire mesh and so on.
Please do not be misled by offers of ‘free’ chicken tractor plans on the internet – these are usually garbage and could lead to an unsound hen house. It is absolutely essential to use good chicken tractor plans and get expert instructions from designers with experience in breeding and keeping chickens. These should include a complete materials list, which will save you much time, effort and money by getting things right from the start.
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.
