The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Tips for building a chicken tractor for under $20

Our best chicken tractor.


We can talk your ear off about chicken tractors.  In fact, we already have written at length about the importance of chicken tractors in the garden permaculture system.  We're still working on building the best possible tractor, though.

Of course, you can shell out hundreds of dollars and get a ready-made tractor, but Mark has had great luck with making our own for under $20 apiece.  You can see several posts about his most recent tractor construction project on our chickens page.  But I thought I'd sum up our findings here:

Of course, you need to add in all of the usual components --- a perch as well as a spot for chickens to get out of the sun and rain.  Otherwise, it's pretty hard to go wrong with tractor construction.  Give it a shot --- surely you can build something serviceable for less than a few hundred bucks!

This post is part of our Chicken Trivia lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries:


We invented our homemade chicken waterer specifically for tractors.  Check it out to prevent spilling of water on uneven terrain.



Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.


With really light chicken tractors, how do you keep animals like foxes and dogs from getting under them? Have you lost any chickens like this yet? What about raccoons reaching through the mesh?
Comment by Everett Tue Jul 7 15:39:46 2009
We're lucky that Lucy keeps all predators at bay, so we don't have to worry about them. She's only so-so about deer, but dogs, foxes, raccoons, opossums, and even snakes are on her list of the enemy. We haven't lost a single chicken to predators --- good dog! :-)
Comment by anna Tue Jul 7 18:44:27 2009





profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.