Our New Chicken Tractor is Complete!

What’s a chicken tractor? A chicken tractor is basically a moveable coop with an outdoor run. We decided to build a chicken tractor this year to use in raising our meat chickens. This enables us to raise them on pasture. Since the tractor has a set of wheels, we can move the tractor every couple of days to a new batch of grass for the chickens to work on. I have also discovered that meat chickens are pretty messy, so moving the tractor keeps their coop and run area clean and the droppings left behind fertilize the grass.

Our last set of meat chickens for the year are growing quickly. They reach butcher weight by 8 or 9 weeks. Raising them on pasture will reduce the feed cost slightly and provide them with a more varied diet. Since we don’t use chemicals on our property, we don’t worry about any impact to the quality of the meat.

Here are some pictures of the new chicken tractor. In designing the tractor, we wanted to make sure it was very sturdy and would provide the chickens a safe environment from predators while allowing them to scratch for bugs and eat lots of greenery. The tractor needed to withstand our weather which includes heavy thunderstorms at times and high winds. We won’t be using the tractor during the winter months, but it will be stored outside until next spring and a new batch of chicks arrive.

Here's our St. Bernard checking on the chickens.  All of the dogs are VERY interested in what's going on in there!

As summer comes to a close

In these last few days of summer and as we prepare for the winter months here in Wisconsin, I really love seeing my chickens out in the gardens. The vegetables are pretty much finished (except for the pumpkins) and the chickens take advantage of the bugs that remain… at least until the first frost.

Here’s a picture of one of our Production Reds on the front porch. She seems at home amongst the flowers and thankfully she wasn't interested in eating them!  I keep a couple extra bowls of water for the chickens out near the porch and shed. It takes a lot of water to create an egg each day!


Our weather is much cooler now, with daytime highs in the 60s and 70s. But in the "heat" of the afternoon, the chickens take advantage of the shade under the lilac bushes. There are a lot of good bugs to be found under bushes!

Tonight while doing chicken chores and getting the brooders ready, Jillian sang a song to our younger hens while collecting eggs. They seemed interested in kindergarten music. She picked up her first chicken (one of the 6-week old hens) on her own and did a great job, holding it correctly without any explanation on my part. The hen didn’t even seem to mind too much.

Tomorrow I’ll be picking up our last set of chicks for the year from Sunnyside Hatchery in Beaver Dam. We have used them for our meat chickens (their broilers are wonderful), but this time I also ordered 5 laying chicks. They won’t hatch until tomorrow and will only be a few hours old when we get them home. I set up a separate brooder for the laying chicks, since they eat a starter feed different from broiler chicks. Once they get settled in, I’ll post some pictures.

Full Circle

I started gardening when I was young. I don’t remember the exact age, but I have vivid memories of my mom’s small vegetable garden when I was growing up in the city. She grew the standards: tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini and brussel sprouts. It was hardly “farming”. When I moved out on my own (now as a young mother myself) I was able to talk the landlord at my apartment to let me have a garden. As long as it didn’t grow into the parking lot and wasn’t unsightly, he was fine with it. I dug out the grass of my new 3ft X 7ft garden by hand and “beefed-up” the soil by adding potting soil. This was by far the most well-tended garden I have ever owned. Weeding a garden this small was a piece of cake!
I planted tomatoes, sunflowers, peppers and even cantaloupe! This garden was the only one to actually produce a cantaloupe in all of my gardening years… and was by far the most tasty I’ve ever eaten. I had been officially bitten by the gardening bug… the only bug bite that I will remember fondly.

Fast forward to today. Our garden space now totals about 500 square feet. This is just for growing food. ( I’m not counting all of the flower beds.) When growing food on a larger scale, one of the questions that come to mind is “how do I fertilize a garden this large?” Enter our chickens. Not only do our chickens provide us with eggs and meat, but we get plenty of manure, too. During the summer, I leave one of my garden beds unplanted. As we clean out the chicken coop, straw and manure gets piled in this bed which works as a “holding bin” until the fall. Once the gardens are done for the year and plants removed, we pile the chicken manure and straw onto the rest of the beds. The final big “cleanout” of the coop in fall provides us with one last layer of manure.

We leave the manure and straw on the beds to compost through the winter. The top layer of straw on the beds doesn’t really break down, but acts more like a mulch. By the time spring comes and the temperatures are warm enough to work the soil, we can either till these beds or plant directly into the composted manure. The soil underneath the straw is black and full of nutrients for our garden plants. This year our sweet corn grew fantastic and even in a small space (4 – 5 rows about 5 feet long) provided enough for several meals. Our tomatoes, peas, pumpkins, popcorn and zucchini did quite well, too.

As our chickens free range into our gardens, they snack on bugs (their preferred outside snack) and weeds. They do eat a small amount of my garden plants, but with as much space as the chickens have to roam, the impact is minimal. While they’re out eating, they “drop” extra fertilizer in the garden which breaks down the next time it rains and adds more nitrogen to the plants.

The extra nutrients from the bugs and green plants eaten by the chickens help produce a better tasting (and healthier) egg…. Bringing the cycle full circle.

Commentary on the recent Salmonella outbreak in eggs

I would be remiss as one with laying hens if I didn’t post something about the recent Salmonella outbreak in two factory egg farms in Iowa.

When we decided to raise our own laying hens several years ago, one of our motivations was that we wanted to be more involved in producing some of the food we eat, know where it came from and how it was raised. Raising our own chickens has been some of the most enjoyable work I’ve ever done. There’s nothing quite like eating scrambled eggs that were laid only a few hours before hitting the frying pan.

One of our other motivations in raising laying hens was that I no longer wanted to support factory farming practices as they exist on farms like those involved in the Salmonella outbreak in Iowa. There is a lot of information on the internet about factory farming practices for beef, pork, chicken, eggs, etc. At its basic premise, animals raised to produce (or become) food today are done so in a very different manner than they were raised even 50 years ago.

In order to produce inexpensive food, farms moved animals from the barnyard and pasture into more concentrated pens. In these pens, more animals can be raised in less space. At the same time, the food these animals ate changed, too. Corn and grains replaced pasture grass as the animals primary (and in many cases, only) source of feed. Many of these animals are raised in buildings and never even step foot on grass.

Outbreaks of disease (such as what happened in Iowa) and other problems can happen to ANY producer, large or small, but when they happen on such a large scale, it impacts many, many people.

In one of the most extreme factory farming practices – egg-layers – when hens begin their laying cycle around 5 months of age, they are placed in battery cages which provides each bird with about as much space as an 8.5” X 11” piece of paper. Their beaks are often cut (so they can’t peck at other hens) which removes a hen’s ability to groom herself. A battery cage doesn’t provide enough room for a hen to stand up fully, spread its wings or walk around. Hens in this environment never touch grass or dirt and never scratch around for bugs or flop in the dirt for a dust bath (a healthy activity that naturally prevents mites and other parasites). These are conditions I don’t feel are acceptable for any creature. At around 18 months of age (when a laying hen’s peak egg production begins to drop), factory farm hens are culled – sent to slaughter. However, those laying hens could continue laying for their whole lives, which can be as long as seven or more years! But after 18 months of age, they don’t lay as frequently – maybe laying an egg a few times a week instead of nearly every day.

I believe God gives man stewardship over all creatures here on earth and I don’t consider factory farming “good stewardship”. Even if we choose to eat these animals, I believe they should be treated in a humane manner for the time they are in our care. Now… I don’t consider my chickens pets and I don’t give them names. I do; however, strive to provide them with an environment that allows them to do the things that chickens do – scratch in the dirt, flap their wings, run in the yard, dig for bugs, eat weeds and nap in the shade under a tree.

Given everything I’ve written here, I have no illusions that small-scale farming such as we do is the answer for the world. I do; however, believe that there is a “happy medium” somewhere that can provide fairly-priced food to the masses that are produced in a way that also provides good stewardship to these creatures. I hope that more people seek to learn about where their food comes from and how its produced… and choose to support food producers in their own community.

The awkward teenager phase...

The new pullets are growing so fast and have now reached what I call the "awkward teenager phase".  They still have some of their fuzzy feathers, but most of their adult feathers have grown in.  They will be a real pretty dark caramel color.  (the red hue in the picture is from the heat lamp in the brooder)

This picture shows how some of their feathers are in, but the necks are still fuzzy.  They're standing about 8 inches tall right now.  They sure seem curious about the camera!

This weekend they will move into the "big girl coop" and begin their introductions to the rest of the flock.  While they won't be able to mingle with the other laying hens or get outside yet, they will have a lot more space than the brooder provides.

Even now, they're already attempting to eat bugs (mostly spiders) that crawl on the walls of the brooder. 

Our New Additions

We picked up our next set of laying chicks from one of our favorite hatcheries, Abendroth Hatchery (we've gotten all of our layers from them). I picked them up on August 4th, just a few hours after they hatched.

They're doing very well and everyone is healthy. Their wing feathers are coming in and they've already doubled in size! They're the Gold Star breed and are said to be a very proficient laying hen with a good temperament.

They're in the brooder until they get the rest of their feathers and get a bit bigger, which will take a few more weeks. After that, they'll move to the "big girl coop" and begin their transition into the rest of the flock. They will remain separated from the rest of the hens until they are nearly the same size as the rest of the birds. I hope to have them out free-ranging just after Halloween, although they won't start laying eggs until the end of the year (at about 5 - 6 months old). Welcome little ladies!

First Post...

We have been raising chickens on our nano-farm since 2007. What's a nano-farm, you ask? The dictionary definition for "nano" is "a combining form with the meaning very small, minute".

Since we live on a small acreage, it didn't seem right to even refer to our place as a "farm", per se. But adding the term "nano" seemed appropriate when comparing our place to farms in our area.

We started our flock with the Production Red breed. In 2009, we expanded to include Barred Rocks. This summer we expanded further with Gold Stars and our first set of meat chickens that will be ready to butcher in about 3 weeks.