Why do they call it a chicken tractor...

[theoldchick]

Can I borrow your tractor?

 

[Ahab]

Actually, the name "chicken tractor" was popularized (and for some reason morphed into an Ark) in the UK back during the 1970s homesteading binge and emerged, according to John Seymour in The Self-Sufficient Gardener (1980), at the Santa Barbara (CA) Urban Farm Project. The idea was, you'd have a garden filled with 5x20 foot beds, and one of your crop rotations would be chickens in a lightweight frame that would live on a bed, fertilize, weed, till, and otherwise ready it for planting. The chickens were doing the work of a Tractor. Hence . . .

Other garden beds might be protected with similar frames wearing plastic, for mini-greenhouses, or shade cloth, for non-bitter salads in the hot sun. The chickens (they figured eight per tractor as optimal) were the little engines that made it all work.

A local junior-high here in Maine follows a similar scheme quite successfully. The chickens do all the rototilling.