Chicken Tractors and Arks
Rather than build a large coop for your flock of chickens, consider the growing trend of building smaller, portable coops – dubbed chicken tractor and chicken ark.
These smaller coops aren’t just for city folk hoping to keep a few contained chickens in their backyard – country folk with acres of land are also using them.
Why? The benefits are numerous. Moving a coop around allows you to keep the yard space a chicken uses (or a flock if you’re raising that many) viable. They won’t be annilating the land, eating all the plant growth and tromping down the soil. There is also less chance for parasitic infestation as they won’t be consuming the wasted worms of each other – when you do worm them, move them 24 hours later for best results.
In the winter you can move the smaller mobile coops closer to the house for added wind protection and access to hydro outlets for heating and extra light (keeps the laying hens in full production).
Chicken tractors or arks are easier to clean and cheaper to build. Move the coop closer to a garden house and spray it out instead of lugging buckets of bleach and water to the coop for every clean out. The same goes for the litter and shavings. You can move the coop to the compost pile or a corner of your lot and dump it – instead of using a wheelbarrow repeatedly.
Due to the smaller size of these coops, they’ll cost you less and you don’t have to overbuild with foresight that you will one day want more chickens. IN the future, should you decide you want another flock, or need to quarantine a hen, or start out some of the chicks your favorite hen laid, you can build another small coop and keep them separate.
Egg collection in the winter months becomes less of a chore. If you’ve moved the coop closer to the house you don’t have to worry about getting up so early on the weekends – before the eggs freeze and trekking down to the coop in knee high snow and blustery winds.
Can’t decide between a few chicken tractors or one big coop? Considering that smaller coops are easier to build and clean they do have a few drawbacks. The constant moving around of these coops make them a short term solution to long term care of chickens. You’ll certainly get a few years out of them, but when weighed against the ten to twenty year tenure of a large, well-built coop, they certainly fall short. With that said, if you’re handy you can always patch together or repair a chicken ark for another few years of use.
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