Bob’s Super Coop Chicken Tractor
The first chicken tractor at Oso Lago. Sort of tight there.
You may remember the post about our first chicken tractor made for Oso Lago. It served it’s purpose well for the bantam’s that it was made for, but even then, they were too crowded. We decide to move them to the chicken coop in the back yard that had been a shed, that was a chicken coop before that. The chicken coop, too, served it’s purpose, for a time. We put turkey’s in with the chickens (some folks/books recommend against this due to the possibility of disease, but we’ve not had any problems in the past) and the turkey’s grew so quickly and were so aggressive for food that they actually crushed and killed some of the chickens.
The girls, in the small tractor, not laying yet.
The turkeys were Broad Breasted White’s, a meat turkey. Good for quick growth and feed to weight ratios but dumb as door nail. The turkeys, due to their size and weight, quickly turned the exercise yard into a muddy, poop-filled messed. I won’t even go into what they did INSIDE the coop. So, when I butchered the turkeys I let the remaining chickens free-range. My ultimate goal was to build the perfect chicken tractor.
I am sad to say that out of THOSE remaining chickens, we had a neighborhood dog attack. (After the attrition of the attacks, we had a single rooster survive. He’s still here and he’s our only rooster.) It was this spring that I began to plan my chicken tractor. I did research on several designs and found things I liked about most of them. I put together a list of things that were important to me and were important for my location.
If you choose to build a chicken tractor, I’d recommend you do the same thing. Write down what is important to you for YOUR location. I’ll post my list momentarily, but to illustrate what I mean by this, I will relay a question that I received. I had someone on a forum ask me if there was enough room in the roost for 12 chickens. I related to them that I’ve built at least 5 different coops/tractors and in every one of them the chickens crowd together on the roost no matter how much space they have so they didn’t have any issues with the 15 or so square feet of roost space they had. She was concerned with them overheating. I commented that I didn’t have problems with it. She lives in Texas. I live in NW Pa., in the snow belt, in the foothills of the Alleghenies. The chickens being warm EVEN IN THE SUMMER here, is more important to me (and them).
Bob's Super Coop Chicken Tractor Plans
So, all that to say, it’s ok to me if you look at my design and say… “That won’t work for me.” I am just relating to you what has worked for me and why. So the 10 things I came up with that I wanted to take into consideration were:
- Mobile – Need to be able to move it fairly easily.
- Durable – Needs to stand up to the snow belt environment. Treated wood, sheds snow, etc.
- Strong – Needs to be able to stand up to coyotes, evil neighbor’s dogs, coons, possums, a CASUAL encounter with a bear, etc.
- Low Maintenance – I want chickens… not repair jobs.
- Little-to-no-cleaning – Again, I want chickens… not clean-up jobs.
- Easy to feed and water.
- Easy to collect eggs.
- Easy to access the hens.
- Ability to catch the hens easily (working door to trap them when I want to)
- Enough room for the hens to get plenty of greens – I can’t free-range them without putting them in mortal danger, but they don’t need to know the difference.
So with those items in mind I set forth to build Bob’s Super Coop Chicken Tractor! (drum roll and fanfare withstanding).
Simple A Frame up... then off to Montreal.
My design is a basic triangle design. It’s a fairly common design as far as chicken tractors go, but in order to fulfill item #8 on my list of Easy access to the hens, I wanted to be able to walk into it. I’m 6′ 5″ so I wanted it at least 6 foot tall. I also wanted at least 4 sq. ft. of grass per chicken, so I went with a bigger 6′ x 8′ ft. base. Now, if you’ll notice, my list doesn’t say anything about “light weight”. I did keep weight in the back of my mind, but I knew this was going to be heavier than many of the chicken tractors that people build… especially those pvc things. Those things wouldn’t stand up to 4 foot of snow, so they weren’t important on my list.
So with my 10 Important Items, I put together a parts list, which honestly needed amended several times during the build. I will post it in a minute, but I have to take a second to talk about the build. I’d like to say I knocked this thing out in a day, but I didn’t. Could I have? Probably, if I had everything I needed right here, when I needed it… AND… if I spent the straight time working on it. But I didn’t on either account. When I am working on a project, I like to marinate in it a bit. I try to think of better ways to build it, design it and implement it, so I would build a little, think a little, hammer here and there, change up the plan a little. Think of something else I needed to do and the order I needed to do it in.
So it was about 3 weekends later. I remember the first weekend that I started building I was planning on accomplishing more, but I got a last minute trip to Montreal requested of me by my job. When I left that Sunday afternoon there was just the base and the six uprights with the ridge pole up… it looked and felt a bit flimsy.
Ready to roll!
As promised earlier, I put together a parts list that I will post here ( please note, that I didn’t use all the nails and hardware that I bought, but I take a long-term approach to those. I never regret HAVING a nail here, but I have regretted not having that screw or nail when I needed it):
- 5 lb box of roofing nails.
- 5 lbs of 5/16 washers
- 18 treated 2 x 4 x 8’s
- 2 sheets of 3/8″ CDX (<– x for exterior grade) plywood.
- 1 lb 3″ drywall screws
- 2 small pulleys
- 10′ lawn mower cord (bought off the roll at the hardware store)
- 3 eye screws
- 4 hinges (technically salvaged, but I do have new ones available that I bought on clearance for $1.00 per set of 2 from WalMart a couple years back.
- 30′ of 36″ hardware cloth (bought off the roll at the hardware store)
- 16′ of 48″ hardware cloth (bought off the roll at the hardware store)
- 4 lag bolts (for the wheels)
- 2 – 6″ wheels (erroneously marked 9″ on my drawn up list)
- 2 – 4″ wheels (erroneously marked 6″ on my drawn up list)
- 1 square of #2 cedar shake shingles (not installed yet)
- 1 – 8′ x 8′ blue tarp
- 1 lb 1-1/2″ drywall screws.
- (still searching for) 2 lbs of 1.5″ ring shank nails for the cedar shake shingles.
- 1 – 5/4″ x 6 x 8 decking board used for the gang plank.
My video.
The build is pretty simple and I’ll illustrate it with pictures and comments.
August 17th, 2012 at 6:26 am
Love this design, my only question is about the roosts. Did you put them side to side or front to back in the house? and how long are they, seems like it would be a bit tight for 12 hens to roost in such a small house.