Can Using a Chicken Tractor Help Reduce Flock Expenses?

If you aren’t familiar with the term chicken tractor, it may conjure up some pretty funny or interesting pictures in your mind. Now that you’ve let your imagination run wild and had a good laugh, it’s simply a moveable or portable pen for poultry, often chickens. You can make them simple or fancy and modify them to suit your various birds’ needs. The question is, can using a chicken tractor save you money?  The answer is yes.

If you want to keep chickens, the cost of a tractor can be much less than a coop. If you have some basic building skills, scraps from other projects, and time, you can probably build one with very little expense. If you don’t have those things, you can buy one or have one built in a wide array of price ranges to fit flocks of various sizes and types of birds. Some are short, and some are tall enough for you to walk into. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination, budget, supplies, and skills.

So, how else can a chicken tractor save you money? Bedding and feed are first and foremost. If your birds are tractored and moved to fresh ground daily, it will save you on feed because they can graze on fresh pasture and bugs from the area under the tractor. If the tractor is secured in an area with a fence, they get the benefit of grazing the entire area during the day, and you get the bonus benefit of pest control for the full area. 

Tractors are easily moved, so you will save time, labor, and money on cleaning and bedding. Simply adjust the number of times you move the tractor daily based on the age, size, and number of birds. Generally, the more birds you have, the more frequently you will move the tractor. Younger birds may not need to be moved as frequently as adult birds, and meat birds will need to be moved more frequently than the same number of layers. The goal is to keep the birds on fresh, clean pasture, but know that as they dirty the area, they will also be fertilizing it, giving you another money- and time-saving bonus.

If you compare tractoring to free-ranging, you will save money simply by having less loss from predation. Tractoring can keep your birds protected around the clock when done correctly. Correct use of a tractor can allow you to put your birds to work in places you want work done. They can help mow and till areas. Considering the savings of your time and fuel to operate a tiller or mower, those savings can add up.