I was all fired up to report on the tree-house I was planning for the grandkids, when Greg (The Shed editor) emailed asking about chicken coops. I thought about it for a while; we already have adequate housing for our two flocks, and a comet-trail of used coop-age scattered about. Plus, I’m more of an opportunistic upcycler than a new-builder. Then I realised this wasn’t about me; besides, it might be an intellectual challenge. So, I set myself a task: design an urban-scale coop, and run, using common off-the-shelf materials, on as tight a budget as practicable.
Tractors — for chickens on the move
Chickens should be kept in tandem with a food garden. They are comfortably carnivorous, and will turn food scraps into fertiliser in short order. With a fixed-in-place coop, you are limited to scooping/scraping out the poop; how much better to let them drop it straight onto the soil, shift the coop, and plant behind them in rotation?
Movable coops are known as ‘chicken tractors’, and they come in all sizes. Our smallest is a mere 1300x500mm and is used when a hen goes broody, to separate her — and eventually the chicks — from the flock. The biggest one that I’ve been involved with was one we built with some people who had bought a run-down farm. They wanted to regenerate whole paddocks using 50 birds. We started with a Datsun 1600 flat-deck, stripping the cab and motor off. A fellow visitor welded an A-frame for towing. It was a lot of fun — but I digress.
Easy to move
The tractor proposed here won’t need wheels or an A-frame; we’ll just skid it around by hand. I tried to spend as little as possible on the new materials, and triedand a longer sheet of iron. Many building materials have skyrocketed in cost, but there are things that haven’t; waratahs are one such — cheap as chips, considering the energy and resources it must take to make one. I thought — because they last so long — that we could use them as our sledge runners, and as some of our framing. I initially based the whole concept on them but, as you’ll see, I discarded that idea partway through the build.
