Chicken Tractor Plans - How to Build a Chicken Tractor

Having chickens in your backyard is a fun and exciting hobby and it is also very rewarding and affordable. Chickens are quite fascinating birds to watch and getting fresh eggs every time is a bonus to it all. Although it is not the easiest thing to raise chickens, it becomes a lot easier if you have proper hen houses, especially if you decide to build a tractor.

You can move your chicken tractor around once in every few days so that your chickens will always have fresh ground and you will not have to deal with the manure problems that standard coops often have.

The most common design of a tractor is A-shape. Standard 6 x 4 feet tractor will fit about 6-7 birds, and it is small enough to be moved around easily by one person. There are many different designs for sale online, and by looking at a few of these, you will get a good idea of different features you can adopt to your own when building it.

The building of the chicken tractor takes place outside and will be situated on the ground.  In order to prevent against insects and decomposing of the wood, it is required to use pressure treated lumber.  The force of the triangle walls will be supplied by 2x4 boards for both ends, and will also need runners that connect between the points for each set.   On the sides, two more boards are used to provide stability for the floor of the tractor.  Not only can the sides provide support of the floor, but if they are lengthened past the ends of the ark, it can also be used as handles.

When building the floor, only one pressure treated lumber is needed; this is the same for building the roof.  A rectangular hole in the middle of the tractor should be removed cautiously and used for a ramp.  Both sides of the tractors need to have hinges attached to them.  For efficiency, if one of the sides of the roof also has a hinge, it can allow the ease of retrieving all the eggs from the tractor.  There is another way to add to the efficiency of accessing eggs; with materials that can be found around your home, one can achieve this by attaching a metal sliding portion on the roof. 

Now, most of the difficult part of building a chicken tractor is complete.  At the bottom of the tractor, adding the chicken wire is the final step.  Of course, it is an option to personalize the tractor with paint, or you can leave it as is.  Congratulations! You now know how to build a chicken tractor – once you build one, the next hen houses are always easier to build!