The chicken tractor
A bottomless coop you drag a few feet a day. The birds get fresh ground, the ground gets fertilized, and nobody shovels anything.
What it is
A light, floorless pen on skids or wheels, moved onto fresh grass daily. The birds scratch, eat bugs and greens, and leave manure spread exactly as thin as it ought to be.
The numbers
- Common working density for broilers: around 1.5 sq ft per bird, moved once or twice daily.
- Supplemental feed intake drops meaningfully on good pasture — but not to zero, and anybody who tells you otherwise has never weighed the feed bag.
- Manure gets distributed at a rate the pasture can actually use, instead of concentrating into the thing you later have to haul.
Why it's here
It solves the two worst parts of keeping birds — cleaning the coop and the dead zone of bare dirt around it — by turning both into pasture improvement. The labor doesn't disappear, but it changes from a shovel to a two-minute drag.
The automation angle
The move itself is the one thing you shouldn't automate (the daily look at the birds is the point). Do automate the water — a float valve off a carried tank — and put a camera on the pen if you have predator pressure.
The catch
It must be moved, every day, including the day it's raining and the day you're sick. A tractor left in place for three days is worse than a coop: the birds are standing on ruined ground with no bedding. And a light pen is a light pen — in wind it flips, and it offers far less protection from a determined predator than a solid coop does. Weight it, pin it, and close the birds in at night.