Categories
chicken tractor chickens farming meat birds poultry round bales soil

Tractoring Chickens Will Harm Your Pasture…

You see it advocated by nearly every regenerative farmer or back to the land hippie. Pasture your chickens. Make a chicken tractor and move your chickens. Put those meat birds out on the pasture. If you do this, you may mine the biomass out of your soil and destroy the future prosperity of your pastures.

We’ve all seen the coop and run setup. The chickens are left to the same space without getting moved around and, over time, they eat everything, and nothing grows. The ground is as hard as cement. The chickens then get moved, and the ground will stay bare and hard for a long period of time after they are gone.

The reason this occurs is that the microbes in the soil require a carbon to nitrogen ratio of around 25:1 to break down material into the soil. If you have too much carbon, the microbes will scavenge nitrogen from the surrounding soil areas and compete with the plants for nitrogen. If you have too much nitrogen, the microbes will scavenge the biomass out of your soil and use that — this is mining the future potential of your soil.

If having too much carbon is not good, and too much nitrogen is not good – how do we fix the problem? The better problem to have is too much carbon. Too much nitrogen is harmful long term because it takes a significant amount of time to build and restore biomass. Biomass provides the ability to withstand drought, retain water and nutrients, and maintain the overall health of the soil. Too much carbon will be undesirable near term, but beneficial long term, as it is processed into the soil as biomass and the nitrogen supply will be replenished by the lifecycle of the microbial activity in the soil.

We tractor our chickens around our pasture. We move our layer hens weekly using poultry netting. When we have meat birds, we move them daily or twice daily, using a Salatin style chicken tractor. We solve the problem of too much nitrogen by unrolling round bales over the tracks from the chicken tractor and then letting the cows into that section of pasture for a day or two. This adds sufficient carbon to the soil so that there is an excess and we don’t lose biomass out of the pasture from the great excess of nitrogen that the chicken manure creates. We also make sure to add lots of wood chips to any areas where the laying hens will be for an extended period of time.

If you tractor your chickens and don’t see your pastures improving after a year or two, you may be mining your biomass and killing your soil.

The featured image at the top of this post shows a section of pasture where a chicken tractor had been moved through, with 2 moves each day, with 50 cornish cross birds in the tractor. The picture is 30 days after the chickens were removed from the pasture. Within 1 week after removing the chickens, a round bale was unrolled on the area to leave dry hay 1-2″ thick. It’s incredible how quickly the hay has decomposed and the grass has started sprouting up — especially considering the extreme drought that we’ve had in western Washington this year.

Categories
chicken tractor chickens meat birds poultry welding

Chicken Tractor Dolly Build

This is our second year of raising meat birds in a Salatin style chicken tractor. We’ve been using a standard moving dolly to help move the tractor so far, and that has been painful as it doesn’t hold the side of the chicken tractor up very well or very evenly.

I recently bought a stick welder and as part of learning how to weld, built a Joel Salatin style chicken tractor dolly.

You can see the standard dolly on the right that it is replacing. The project was a good learning experience as the 1″ tube was tough to weld without blowing through and required a lot of fixing and grinding for a beginner.

I tested it out by standing on top of it and bouncing around, picking it up and dropping it on the cement floor of the shop.

I added corner bracing at the bottom to help prevent twisting and breakage.

There is a 2″ peg near the bottom to keep the chicken tractor from backing up the handle. It could also be used to help push the chicken tractor, vs pull, if necessary.

Categories
butcher chicken tractor meat birds poultry slaughter

Butchering the Meat Birds

We butchered our 39 Cornish Cross meat birds the weekend of August 8th. I don’t remember if it was Saturday or Sunday. It was great. It took us all day, since it was the first mass butcher we’ve done and we had to get all the kinks worked out of the process.

The killing cones are terrible — we won’t use those again, and I am selling 4 big ones ASAP. It’s much easier to chop the heads off or use a gallows system like what we started to use.

Next time we need a better system to transport the chickens to the butcher location. We started the tractor right about where we needed it to end, so transporting the chickens in a large dog crate took a lot of time and energy. Perhaps we’ll use a trailer next time like Pete from Just a Few Acres Farms (find him on Youtube).

The chicken tractor didn’t go as far as we thought it would! This is not a bad thing. 5 weeks of moving the cornish cross chickens at least once each day, and sometimes twice, resulted in a long stretch of ground covered, but we thought it would be twice as long. I guess math works, so we could have used that.

Getting setup with the scalder, plucker, and cooling bins.
Turn that water on – let’s get the scalding pot filled up!
Killing cones – what a joke. They are far more trouble than they are worth. Sending these bad boys to someone else.
Luke learning the ropes. Doing a great job too!

Overall, it was a good experience. We have a lot of meat in the freezer and chicken feed left over. We will do this again next year and do more so we can sell more. Contact us using the contact form from the top menu to get on the list for next year.

Categories
brooder chicken tractor meat birds poultry

Poultry out to Pasture

We put our first batch of meat birds out on pasture in our new tractor today. These birds are 3 weeks old.

First, a couple of pictures of the birds in the brooder. Here are two custom brooder boxes, each is 3’x4′. The boxes have guillotine doors that are both open to allow them access to both boxes at the same time.

Here are a few pictures of the birds in the tractor on grass.

Categories
chicken tractor chickens construction farming meat birds poultry

Pastured Poultry

We just finished building a “Joel Salatin” style chicken tractor to tractor our meat birds around the pasture. We’ve built and tried a lot of different chicken tractors, but this one is sanctioned by the master of pastured poultry profits, so it should be great!

I tried to match the original design fairly exactly. I did use 2×4 lumber for the base with some re-enforcements to ensure it will be solid.

We’ll start using this on Wednesday with a batch of meat birds.