Chicken Newbie - Chicken Tractor Design

Looks like a pretty good plan to me. There is a coop design section that you can browse through if you'd like but what you have designed is a pretty standard chicken tractor that is widely used.

Oh and

 

If that tractor is in the sun for any part of the day, the tin roof will turn the enclosed part into an oven. It will probably still be way too hot for chickens to go in there by the time the sun goes down.

For Texas summers, you need to think about shade, shade, and more shade, plus open sided coops/runs. One problem I have with the typical chicken tractor design is that there's no place high for a chicken to roost in there, as is their natural desire. I have chicken tractors that I use in the daytime, but my birds go into a stationary coop/run where they can roost up high. For our North Texas summers, I have an open sided coop/run (there's a picture of it on my BYC page).

Try to choose heat tolerant breeds of chickens, too. Every year people have chickens die of the heat. It's actually far more dangerous to them than cold weather.

p.s. be sure not to use chicken wire for your run, either.

 

There was a post somewhere (who knows where, I spend way too much time on this discussion board) that a guy had used a flat top for a tractor like that one (a chicken ark). It widened out the ceiling and gave the girls more headroom. I'd give you a link, but I have no idea where I saw it. The finished product looked just like yours, but instead of coming to a point, he had used maybe a 1x10 or 1x8 and tied the sides into that. Iknow it was on his coop page