Chicken Tractor Idea - Thoughts?

Hey there Permies,
I am located in Northern California and I have been running chickens and turkeys for meat for the past three years. Out here in CA we flood irrigate our pasture that we run the birds in, and I have several complications that make standard chicken tractors a problem:
*berms in the middle of the pasture used to guide and hold water as it seeps into the ground. These berms make standard tractors very hard to get up and over when moving birds from one section of the pasture to the other.
*pasture has several deeply rutted areas from me being an inexperienced tractor operator and the ground being too wet when running it in late '23. The ruts capture chicken tractor wheels and allow birds the opportunity to slip under the tractor and get out...or predators to sneak in. Our pasture was 30yrs old and terrible quality, so I reseeded and disced 1.5yrs ago.
*Grass and foliage grows so high in the summer that moving tractors over thick clumps of grass is incredibly hard.

I have tried normal tractors: the A-frame, Salatin's box,
Some not so normal: a low to the ground "sled" tractor that I designed that did okay, and a fortress on wheels that weighed approx. a baby elephant.

I came up with this idea recently and before just going and building it (like I did with the other ones), I thought I would see what other people with experience raising birds thought.

We let the birds roam in an electric fence during the day hours, and then we feed them at dusk to get them to go back into the tractor on their own without chasing them all over the place. The birds would not be in the tractor when I roll it.

Thank you for your time!

Neat!


Is chicken wire tightly woven  enough for the predators you have?
Most people recommend hardware cloth so racoons can't reach in and grab a handful of chicken.

I think this will work more like a chickshaw than a chicken tractor, in that it's just for night time protection.
A chicken tractor is usually  a structure they live in 24/7 .

Hardware cloth is definitely a better option because we do have raccoons in the area. So far we keep getting hit by coyotes and foxes, this year more than any of the past ones.

I need something big enough for both chickens and turkeys to be moved with (not at the same time, but used for both animals), but that also will go over a berm or grass bunch with relative ease.

It would be nice on processing day also to be able to put the tunnel on some kind of sled and drag the chickens to the processing area instead of capturing them and hand loading them into cages.

Thank you for your input William!

i know this does not answer your question but I made something very similar for my small rabbits, when I first got them and I was worried about predators. It actually worked quite well, but the whole mess would have been so much easier to use if I had used something stiffer (pig wire would have been ideal, but I used a chickenwire weight instead, money was a factor...)-- your design looks much better thought out than mine!!
Also it was not as easy to get them out as I had hoped, but that may be a rabbit problem rather than a poultry problem.

In your case, I would consider having some sort of shade cloth to bungee on top of it.

You could make the cylinder half as long and twice the diameter.
I think a bigger "wheel" like this would roll even more easily.
Since the birds won't be inside, once the cylinder has been moved, we can lay it on one of the circular sides.
A 62" diameter x 4 foot long cylinder would provide almost 21 square feet of flat enclosed space, with plenty of headroom for turkeys.

Tereza Okava wrote:i know this does not answer your question but I made something very similar for my small rabbits, when I first got them and I was worried about predators. It actually worked quite well, but the whole mess would have been so much easier to use if I had used something stiffer (pig wire would have been ideal, but I used a chickenwire weight instead, money was a factor...)-- your design looks much better thought out than mine!!
Also it was not as easy to get them out as I had hoped, but that may be a rabbit problem rather than a poultry problem.

In your case, I would consider having some sort of shade cloth to bungee on top of it.

Hog panel is exactly what I plan on using due to its stiffness and strength. I didn't include the tarp in the design, but it would absolutely be something I would have over top of them, it gets pretty warm out here in the Valley.

The key difference this year vs the other years has been feeding at night. The turkeys reach their enclosure before I do because they know it is dinner time lol.

Thank you for your input, I much appreciate it!

William Bronson wrote:

You could make the cylinder half as long and twice the diameter.
I think a bigger "wheel" like this would roll even more easily.
Since the birds won't be inside, once the cylinder has been moved, we can lay it on one of the circular sides.
A 62" diameter x 4 foot long cylinder would provide almost 21 square feet of flat enclosed space, with plenty of headroom for turkeys.

I am picking up what you are putting down. A single hog panel is 16' long by 4' wide. rolling the hog panel tip to tip and then securing rebar in the design of spokes on a bicycle would make for a much more simple design where I don't have to bend the hog panels into a half circle along their length.

one side of the "wheel" could be open and that is the side that lies on the grass, and the other could have plywood or plastic panels to act as a roof when the wheel is laid down.

I do think a large wheel would make it easier to go over the obstacles I described too.

I appreciate the suggestion and think that I will probably pursue this option over my original design.

Whatever you end up building, I hope you'll be back with pictures and a lessons-learned or analysis of it in use.