No. 28 Spring 1997 Permaculture Drylands Journal 1

Using a Chicken Tractor to “Uppen” Your Soilby Andy Lee

In one of its many manifestations, perma-culture it is about taking back responsi-

bility for feeding and sheltering ourselves,and for our own individual welfare andphysical and mental well being. We can beof service to others only if we first learn howto care for ourselves. If we can use the pre-cepts of permaculture to help us learn to feed,house and employ ourselves, then we canprovide for our families with far less strainon the community and our environment.Then we can begin providing a service toothers in our community by growing foodfor them or by showing them how to growtheir own. We can also teach them how tobuild their own shelter and even how to cre-ate their own at-home cottage industry ormicro-enterprise employment.

Opening permaculture to a wider audi-ence often requires a hook—an attentiongrabber—that will nab their imagination andreel them in for a closer look. Lots of peopleget hooked on permaculture because of somesmall permaculture trick or technique they’velearned or heard about. It was fish traps thatcaught and held Lea Harrison’s attention longenough to let the bigger picture develop andseep into her awareness. Other folks I’vetalked to gravitate toward swales, water har-vesting, gabions, herb spirals and so forth.All of these things hold a fascination for me,too, but the one that stands out clearly in mymind as the brightest example of a success-ful tool for developing permaculture systemsis the chicken tractor.

A “chicken tractor”is some form

of portable pen you useto keep chickens in or nearyour garden where they are

most beneficial.

A “chicken tractor” is some form of por-table pen you use to keep chickens in or nearyour garden where they are most beneficial.The portable pen serves to protect them fromweather and predators, while containingthem in the area you want to improve. Inexchange for your care and feeding, they aremore than happy to provide weed and pestcontrol and fertility for your lawn, garden ororchard. Even without the final product ofmeat or eggs, the chickens have paid for theirkeep.

I first heard the term in 1991 from JeromeOsentowski who reported that he was usinga “chicken tractor” to control weeds aroundhis greenhouse in the central Rocky Moun-tains in Colorado. It is, of course, a term usedfrequently by Australian Bill Mollison in hiswritings and teachings about permaculture.Right away, I began to imagine all the possi-bilities inherent in the very idea of tractoringland with chickens.

The chicken-tractoring concept has littleto do with tractors, really, but more to dowith being “in traction” or being pulled inthe direction of soil health and food self-suf-ficiency. Chicken tractor is a multi-use, multi-

benefit project that is do-able at almost anylevel of skill and knowledge. You can builda simple pen today and start using it tomor-row. Perhaps you have just one or two hensto provide a limited supply of eggs for yourtable. Or, on a larger scale, you might beraising poultry for sale to earn part of yourliving. Either way, and at many levels in be-tween, you can utilize chicken tractors. Evenif you don’t eat eggs or poultry, you can stillenjoy the benefits of the system by growingpullets (young egg layers) for sale to yourfriends who do eat eggs and poultry.

All across the continent—especially indryland areas—chicken tractors can beamazingly useful in helping to create soil.Poultry digestive systems serve as translators,turning grains, weeds and insects into ma-nure that can be used in lots of different waysto fertilize soil for growing crops for peopleand for livestock. It is possible to grow poul-try simply by letting them free range on yourproperty, living off what they can scroungefrom the land. However, to maintain ahealthy, well cared for flock—and to achieve

optimal yields—you will want to supplementtheir forage with grains or mixed poultry ra-tions. You can grow poultry feed in your gar-den or buy it at your local feed store.

Chickens are amazing feed-converters.During good weather, they are able to changetwo pounds of feed into one pound of live-weight. Even during the worst weather—coldwinters and hot, hot summers—they will re-quire less than four pounds of feed to growone pound live-weight or to produce a dozeneggs. What chickens are not good at, how-ever, is extracting the available nutrients fromtheir feed. In fact, they excrete about 75% ofthe nitrogen, 80% of the phosphorous and

85% of the potassium along with about 40%of the organic matter that is in their feed.

In conventional systems of course thisnutrient rich by-product becomes a waste,often toxic and difficult and expensive todispose of. In permaculture though, the ex-crement is highly valued, so much so thatwe build appropriately scaled catchment fa-cilities to preserve it. In a sense you are im-porting fertility in the form of chicken feed,which unfortunately is usually grown some-where else. However, as your land becomesmore fertile and your own food needs arebeing met from your gardens, you can thenturn your attention to growing chicken feedin the soil that is enriched with chicken ma-nure—sort of a perpetual motion scheme ifyou will. Unlike chemical forms of fertility,you are achieving broader yields via eggs andmeat as well as manure for your soil.

While free ranging chickens might appearto be the ultimate in “natural” food produc-tion, you will encounter certain problemsthat make portable pens seem more attrac-tive. For one thing, predators such as foxes,

(illustration from Andy Lee’s Chicken Tractor: The Gardener’s Guide to Happy Hens and Healthy Soil;see book review, page 22).

Hi ho! Hi ho! It’s off to graze we go!

I’m going toenter a tractor

pull contest

2 Permaculture Drylands Journal No. 28 Spring 1997

coyotes, possums, raccoons and dogs are all“free-rangers” too. It’s hard to protect a looseflock from depredations. Additionally, it isdifficult to keep a loose flock from devastat-ing your garden, and it’s all but impossibleto train them to drop their manure right whereyou need it.

It is understandable, then, why a portablepen can be so important to the health andwelfare of your flock and to optimizing yieldsfrom your permaculture system. The portablepen “chicken tractor” serves first of all tohouse and shelter your chickens. The cov-ered lid and sides protect them from rain andsnowfall, from intense sunlight, and fromattacks from airborne predators such aseagles, hawks and owls. The screened sidesof the pen allow ample sunshine to warmthem, and ventilation to carry off heat andmoisture. The screened sides also protect thepoultry from earth-bound predators such asdogs, foxes and possums.

The chicken tractor does not have a bot-tom, so the poultry can walk on soil and for-age grass, weeds and bugs that come in theirpath. As manager of this system, your task isto provide them with fresh water and supple-mental grain on a daily or twice-daily sched-ule. You also provide the motive power toadvance the pen from one position to an-other to accomplish your land-developmentgoals, be they grass, weed and pest control,soil fertility, or enhanced graze for the poul-try. In exchange for your kindness, the birdsare only too happy to graze the grass, ma-nure the garden and give you plenty of rich,flavorful eggs or meat to eat.

My favorite use for the chicken tractor isto build raised garden beds. In my hilly, up-per Piedmont region, the soil is quite thin,often gravely with very little grass for the birdsto eat. I must rely—at least in the beginning—on imported feed and waste hay or straw tobuild soil above the gravel. I simply movethe chicken tractor where I want to create agarden bed and leave it there for whateverlength of time it takes to lay down enoughmanure to fertilize the spot for garden crops.

As you know, putting down too muchchicken manure can be devastating to thesoil. In some cases, leaving the chickens inone place too long will create a hardpan onthe surface and overload the soil with nitro-gen and other nutrients to a point of toxicity.This is the kind of mess you will find in thetypical hen-house yard. We overcome thenutrient-overload challenge by adding strawor hay bedding on a daily basis. As soon asthe chickens have laid down a good dose ofmanure, we add athin layer of carbon-aceous bedding, justenough to cover themanure. Doing thisdaily creates a per-fectly layered shal-low compost pile.

The hay we use forbedding is usuallyfree. It is either tooold and dusty forlivestock feed, or hasgotten wet in thefield making it unsuitable for feed. It has acarbon-to-nitrogen ration of about 60:1,compared to the chicken manure that has acarbon-to-nitrogen ratio of less than 10:1.When we mix the two components togetherwe achieve a nearly perfect carbon to nitro-gen ratio of 30:1, ideal for creating compost.Additionally, the hay or straw acts as asponge, literally, to soak up and hold rainfallor surface runoff.

This “sponge factor” makes the raised bedmethod especially rewarding on slopes thatare otherwise susceptible to erosion, and indrylands areas with low precipitation. It holdsthe surface water on the site long enough forit to percolate downward to replenish theground water.

An added benefit on slopes is that thechickens will automatically scratch andshuffle through the bedding inside their pen,leveling and moving it against the downhillwall. When we remove the pen, we have araised bed mini-terrace. As these raised bedsmature and decompose, we are left withmini-dams that control our run-off. Thesenew mini-terraces are places in which wecan grow abundant crops, all without labo-rious digging, or turning of the soil, or earth-works to build up lower terrace edges.

Earthworms are delighted to hang out be-neath the raised beds at the interface betweenthe soil and the organic matter. As they con-sume bits of hay and manure, they carry itwith them into their burrows for digestion.This opens air pockets in the soil that alsoserve as water reservoirs during rains. Theearthworms leave their castings at the sur-face where they quickly become new nour-ishment for plants. In this system then, the

earthworms, the chickens and the humansare working cooperatively to build soil fer-tility and a water reservoir.

The accepted “conventional” way to buildnew soil today is to rotary till or plow thetopsoil and subsoil, mixing it to create adeeper topsoil. That doesn’t work. We can-not “deepen” soil with mechanical manipu-lation. All we accomplish in that pursuit isto destroy soil tilth and structure; the soil thentends to blow away and wash away. We also

kill off the soil life thathas—up until now—turned organic matterinto humus, enrich-ing the soil and feed-ing the crops thatgrow there.

Instead, use achicken tractor tohelp you “uppen”your soil. A crankyold fencepost in aMontana wheat fieldfirst told me about

“uppening” many years ago. At the fieldedge, I had to step up to reach the fenceline.Seeking to understand this phenomenon I satdown over there and asked the fencepostwhy that was. “Why is the field lower thanthe fence row?” I asked. “Well” grouched oldmister fencepost, “You folks plow this soil somuch that it gets real fine and blows away.And the rains just wash a lot of it away. After50 years of that kind of treatment, all the finetopsoil is gone, the field surface is severalinches below the fencerow, and what yousee mostly in the field is gravely and sandysub-soil. And I don’t mind telling you I’m sickof the whole damn mess!”

“And, that’s only half the story,” the oldfencepost went on to say. “At the same timeyou humans are so busy lowering the field,other natural forces are at work raising thefencerow. What you ought to do is look herein my fencerow and see a better way. Don’tplow the ground. Instead, let the birds andanimals and insects feast on the plants. Theywill thank you by leaving their manure aspayment in kind. When the plants die backfor the winter, the ground-dwelling insectsand worms eat the organic matter and con-vert it to humus. That humus in turn providesnutrition for next years’ plants and builds upthe organic matter in the soil, thereby fur-ther developing your soil moisture reservoir.In this way, soil uppens.”

So, here’s how we can use chicken trac-tors to help uppen soil. Just move the por-table pens along in a rotational pattern thatwill give your chickens fresh graze each day.Or, if you don’t have anything for them tograze, just use the system as a sheet mulcher.Either way, they leave behind their manure

We cannot “deepen” soil withmechanical manipulation.

All we accomplishin that pursuit is to destroy

soil tilth and structure;the soil then tends

to blow away and wash away.

Uh, oh. Too much poop is yukky! (illustration fromChicken Tractor by Andy Lee)

No. 28 Spring 1997 Permaculture Drylands Journal 3

Characteristics

Uses bottomless shelter-pen that you move dailyin the garden.�

Stationary bottomlessshelter-pen. Add freshbedding daily.�

Bottomless cage that stayson garden beds longerthan one day, but shorterthan life of chickens.

Fixed or movable henhouse for rotating grazingin paddocks. Egg mobilesare a good example.

Mixes species (e.g., chick-ens follow cattle in field).Good application for eggmobiles.

The hen house is mountedon wheels for easy mobil-ity around the garden.

Creates ecosystem;balances oxygen fromplants and carbon dioxidefrom chickens.

Comments

Need room to move pensaround the garden.

Creates a raised gardenbed.�

Puts a sheet-mulchon top of beds.�

Must clean hen houseregularly, but still getsmost of the manure ongarden. Good for layers.�

Great parasite control.�

More costly to build;harder to keep cleanand maintained.�

Can protect chickensthrough winter season.����

System�

1. Rotational�Garden

2. Deep Mulch

3. Sheet Mulch

4. IntensiveGrazing inPaddocks

5. Polyface

6. Hens on wheels

7. Greenhouse

Table 1: Chicken Tractor Systems�

and bedding that will, in turn, feed the soilorganisms that can convert the roughage tohumus.

That, really, is the major precept of suc-cessful chicken tractoring. All that remainsis to explore the many different ways to makeit work.

Table 1 summarizes the seven variationson the central theme. Probably the most suc-cessful scheme is the simple garden rotation.Design your garden with half in vegetablebeds and half in chicken tractors, then ro-tate them each year. For example, this year,the chickens (along with the humans and thesoil organisms) will prepare garden beds fornext season. Next year, we put the chickenswhere the garden beds used to be and letthem glean and consume weeds, grasses andbugs. The garden will be clean and well fer-tilized for the following year’s garden crops.

We’ve always referred to these pens aschicken tractors, but with proper designmodifications you can make tractors for tur-keys, pheasants, sheep, pigs, goats and evendairy or beef cattle. With some restrictions itcould even be useful for corralling recalci-trant children. The guiding design precept isthat you want to end up with a pen that is:

• large enough for the livestock,

• small enough to move by yourself orwith limited mechanical help, and

• fitting for the landscape conditionsat your site.

This is high-density, short-duration, rota-tional grazing is somewhat akin to HolisticManagement and Management IntensiveGrazing. You can make it as simple or ascomplex as you need to attain your goals—from a very small pen that you move a fewtimes a month, up to miles of portable elec-tric fencing.

Design your pen size based on the physi-cal strength and production interests of theoperator, and the hoped-for outcome of thechicken-tractor project. For someone who isrelatively small, a chicken tractor that is 8’ x4’ x 2’ high is a good choice. This small penis easy to slide on the ground using ski tipsor “scoots,” or make it even more portablewith a set of wheels from a junked lawn-

mower. If you have a helper and a furnituredolly, it’s no problem to move pens as largeas 10’ x 12’ x 3’ high. That is the largest, suit-ably portable pen I’ve ever built. The smallerpens are ideal for six or eight layers, or up to20 broilers for a short time. We use the largerpens for growing out turkeys.

Pen design relies on using the fewest pos-sible materials, lightweight yet strong, and

able to withstand weather and varmints.Generally, we wrap our pen walls with one-inch galvanized poultry netting. For longev-ity, you can use the more expensive poultrynetting that has a plastic coating to resistweathering. We hinge our pen tops as a lidfor access to the birds and their furniture.When we first started out, we used blue poly-ethylene tarps installed over chicken wire forthe lid of the pen, but the tarp fades, rips andleaks after the first year. Now we use plasticroofing panels that cost a little more but lastindefinitely. They are also easier to install,since we don’t have to put chicken wire onthe roof, and the panels help to stabilize thestructure.

In rougher weather, we can also installplastic roofing panels to the ends and sidesof the pen to shield the birds from wind andrain. Where I live in the foothills of the BlueRidge Mountains, it is possible to keep chick-ens year round in this type of pen. But in

This is high-density, short-duration, rotational grazingis somewhat akin to Holistic Management and

Management Intensive Grazing.You can make it as simple or as complex as you need

to attain your goals—from a very small pen that you move a few times a month,

up to miles of portable electric fencing.

4 Permaculture Drylands Journal No. 28 Spring 1997

colder climates, you’ll want to insulate thepens for winter use. One time, we tried put-ting Styrofoam panels for insulation, but thechickens pecked it to pieces. Another time,we used the radiant barrier material thatbuilders use for reflecting sun heat in atticsand it worked just fine. Another thing thatworks well for insulation and weather pro-tection is to simply stack old hay balesaround the windward side of the pen. Thenin the Spring, just use the hay bales for gar-den mulch.

It was after we used the old hay bales toprotect our pheasants in their pen that wecame up with the idea of winter housing ourhens in a hay-bale house. This hay-balehouse is simple and straightforward. Westacked three bales to a side to form a square,and pegged the bales to the ground and toeach other with wooden rods for stability.We stacked the bales four courses high togive a wall height that allows us go in to col-lect eggs and fill waterer and feeder. On oneside, we left an opening for a simple chicken-wire covered door. The flat roof is a simplesquare made with 2x4 boards that are 12 feet Joel Salatin’s “pasturized poultry” tractors in Swoope, Virginia are moved each day.

They are more fun to watchthan TV, and so far

they’ve kept ticks, fleasand snakes away fromour little homestead.

the yard in the day. They are more fun towatch than TV, and so far they’ve kept ticks,fleas and snakes away from our little home-stead. We’ve added two of our 6’ x 12’chicken tractors as portable runs next to thehouse so they have lots of room to hang out.

We presently have five chicken tractorsmeasuring 6’ x 12’ and 3’ high. This past year,we raised 50 turkeys for sale to our friends,25 pheasants to release on our farm, 30 broil-ers for our freezer, and 10 pullets for ourfriend David—as well as the aforementionedTur-Gu-Chi gang. We didn’t lose any poultryfrom the chicken tractors. From the hay-balehen house, though, we lost three pullets to apossum, one pullet to David’s dog Beau, andone pullet to a hawk. To prevent more losses,we installed an electric poultry-net fencearound the structure and charged it with asolar charger.

There are a whole lot of new techniquesand methods emerging in chicken-tractorparlance. So this Spring, we’re bringing outthe second addition of our book ChickenTractor, The Gardener’s Guide To HappyHens and Healthy Soil. We’re adding fournew chapters, more of the wacky cartoons,and a dozen or so good photographs. If youhave an experience or anecdote you’d liketo share, please send it along, we’ll be de-lighted to mention you in the book. We’reall tinkers, and the ultimate “living machine”has yet to be designed, so feel free to shareyour ideas and questions.

Until then, Happy Hen Tracks!

Andy Lee and his wife Patricia Foreman areslowly developing their 47-acre permaculture farmand cluster community in the foothills of the BlueRidge Mountains near Columbus, North Carolina.Andy is the author of two books, Backyard Mar-ket Gardening ($23.50 ppd.) and Chicken Tractor($19.50 ppd.). These are available from Good EarthPublications, RR2 Box 1875, Columbus NC 28722(704/863-2288).

long. The rafters are two-feet oncenter. We then covered theframe with plastic roofing panelsand set it on the hay-bale struc-ture. The roof is broader than thehay-bale square, which helpskeep rain from falling directly onthe bales. The ground is slopedjust enough so the flat roof shedswater very nicely. To build a“pitched” roof is more expensiveand time consuming and not nec-essary according to our experi-ence.

To hold the roof in place, weset a steel post at each corner andwired the roof to it. The weightof the roof is supported by the haybales, though, and they tend toslump as they decay. Our hay-bale house is now eight monthsold in a climate where we get 65inches of rain per year, and it’sstill doing fine. In a couple ofmonths as gardening seasonnears, we’ll tear the house downand use the hay for garden mulch.Next fall we’ll use the same roofand build a new winter shelter forour hens.

We’ll make our next hay-bale henhouse alittle more stable by laying landscape ties onthe ground under the bales to keep them fromdecomposing and settling so fast. And we’llset 2x4 posts at each corner, set the roof di-rectly on the posts, and fasten it against thewind. This way, the heavy roof won’t bepressing down on the bales and causing pre-mature settling.

In our current hay-bale hen house, wehave five Buff Orpington, five Buff Brahminbantams, five bronze turkeys and two guin-eas. We call them the Tur-Gu-Chi gang. Weshut them up at night to protect them fromcoyotes and dogs, and let them roam around

In this growing season, the chicken tractor will rotate many timesthrough half the garden (illustration from Chicken Tractor).