My wife said that she wanted some chickens and wanted me to build a chicken tractor. I looked at a few designs on the internet and came up with the following that I designed in Sketchup. What are some of the considerations that I need to take with my design? I live in Austin, TX and so the summers are pretty harsh, but the winters are fairly mild. I figured the tin would make it light weight and provide good ventilation. Suggestions? Ideas? Click on the image to download the Sketchup Model. Troy
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.
Instead of tin, I decided to go with PVC roofing. Cuts down on the oven effect and is lighter weight. I also made a smaller door on the chicken run. Much easier for the kids to get in to play with the chickens. We are keeping it in the shade under or biggest tree right now. The chickens seem fine and are a little young to start laying. Kids sure love them though.
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
