Chicken Tractors
Chicken tractors are lightweight, bottomless shelter pens designed to move wherever grass control and soil fertility are required. They appeal to small-scale raisers, and maintaining a chicken tractor in your garden not only enriches your soil but also allows your birds to supplement their diets with yummy greenery and crunchy bugs, worms, and grubs. There’s a place for a chicken tractor (or two) on most every hobby farm!
Chicken tractors are engineered to move around your yard or farm, usually by hand, to areas in need of enrichment. Size can range from 3 × 5 × 2 feet tall for three or four chickens to a whopping 8 × 12 × 3 feet tall. Usually, the sides are crafted of wood-framed wire mesh, and a hinged roof protects inhabitants from the elements and allows easy operator entry. If you build compact tractors to fit the width of spaces between your garden rows, the chickens will neatly weed and fertilize your garden without filling up on produce while they do it (provide water and feed inside the tractor, and move the unit once or twice a day). Larger chicken tractors can be set atop spots needing more thorough cultivation over longer periods of time. Chickens are day laborers; remove them from the tractor at night.
Owls and Weasels and ’Possums, Oh My!
It’s no fun—for you or your birds—when hungry midnight marauders visit the chicken coop. The best way to thwart potential predators is to lock your birds inside a safe, secure chicken coop at night. Another approach, if it’s legal in your state, is to humanely trap and relocate bothersome nighttime marauders.
After sundown, block or screen in every door, window, and any other crack or portal in the outside walls. To be effective, screening must be small-holed and made of strong material. A mink or weasel can easily slip through 1-inch chicken wire, and larger species can simply rip it down. Choose ¾-inch or smaller mesh galvanized hardware cloth for screening windows and building outdoor enclosures to save your chickens’ lives.
To discourage chicken-swiping predators, install concrete block foundations into coop floors, set at least two rows high. In addition, bury outdoor enclosure fencing at least 8–12 inches into the earth. Make sure the buried fencing is toed outward, away from the fence line. If winged predators, such as daytime hawks or nighttime owls, pursue your birds, cover the outdoor enclosure with chicken wire; for this purpose, it works nicely.
If your birds range freely and you live where chicken-thieving hawks wreak havoc, think camouflage. For example, don’t choose a white-feathered breed. Plant ground cover—bushes, hedges, and flower beds—so that your chickens can hole up in the greenery when predators soar above.
If predators are simply getting into your feed, secure container lids using bungee cords. The key word is secure for both your chickens and their feed.
Chow for Your Hobby-Farm Fowl
While your chickens’ nutritional needs vary depending on age, sex, breed, and use, their diets must always include water, protein, vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, and fats in adequate quantities and proper balance. All chicken keepers are in agreement on this point. But when it comes to the question of how best to supply all of those dietary elements, it’s a different story. Ask any fanciers how each feeds his or her chickens, and you’ll find two distinct camps: those who never feed their birds anything except commercial mixes, and those who never feed their birds commercial mixes without supplementing them. Opinion runs high on both sides about which approach is better.
Which one you should take really depends on your primary reason for keeping chickens. If you raise birds strictly for their meat or eggs, commercial feed is the way to go. Commercial bagged rations are formulated to serve up optimal nutrition, thus creating optimal production. Supplementing commercial feed with treats, table scraps, scratch (a whole- or cracked-grain mixture that chickens adore), or anything else will upset that delicate nutritional balance.
However, if, like us, you see your chickens as friends and don’t care if their growth is slightly slower or if they produce fewer eggs, then consider supplementing their diets. They’ll appreciate the variety, and you’ll appreciate the much lower cost of a supplemented diet.
| Waste Less Chickens waste about 30 percent of feed in a trough feeder that’s full. If the same trough is only half full, they waste only 3 percent. Save yourself some time and money by spreading less feed for your chickens in more troughs. |
Water
Consider this: an egg is roughly 65 percent water, a chick 79 percent, and a mature chicken 55– 75 percent. Blood is 90 percent water. Chickens guzzle two to three times as much water as they eat in food, depending on their size, their type (layers require more water than broilers), and the season—up to two or three cups per day. So whether you use a commercial or home-based diet, your chickens require free access to fresh, clean water.
Chickens need water to soften what they eat and carry it through their digestive tracts; many of the digestive and nutrient-absorption processes depend on water. In addition, water cools birds internally during the hot summer months. If you eliminate water from your chickens’ diet, expect problems immediately. Chickens don’t drink a lot at any single time, but they drink often.
Water temperature can affect how much chickens will drink. They don’t like to drink hot or too-cold water, so keep waterers out of the blazing sun. When temperatures soar, plop a handful of ice cubes in the reservoir every few hours. In the winter, replace regular waterers with heated ones or add a bucket-style immersion heater to a standard metal version. You can also swap iced-up waterers for fresh ones containing tepid water every few hours. In subzero climates, heated waterers are a must; even a heated dog bowl is acceptable.
Even if one waterer is enough, choose two. Otherwise, bossy, high-ranking chickens in your flock’s hierarchy may shoo underlings away from the fountain.
As with the feeders, hanging waterers from hooks or rafters with the drinking surface level with your smallest chickens’ backs will give the best results. If you can’t hang a waterer, make certain it is level to avoid leaking.
Whichever type of waterer you use, and wherever you hang your waterers, clean and rinse them every day. Scour them once a week (more often in the summer) using a stiff brush and a solution of about nine parts water to one part chlorine bleach.
Chicken waterers are designed to keep the water clean.
Commercial Feeds
Whether you buy it or mix it yourself, a healthy, happy chicken’s diet should provide the following:
•Sufficient protein based on the age and needs of the bird
•Carbohydrates, a major source of energy
•Thirteen vitamins to support growth, reproduction, and body maintenance: fat-soluble vitamins A, D3, E, and K; and water-soluble vitamins B12, thiamin, riboflavin, nicotinic acid, folic acid, biotin, pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, and choline
•Macrominerals (those needed in larger quantities) and trace or microminerals (those needed in only minute amounts) to build strong bones and healthy blood cells, supporting enzyme activation and muscle function and regulating metabolism; hens require additional minerals, especially calcium, to lay eggs with nice, thick shells
•Fats for energy and proper absorption of fat-soluble vitamins and as sources of fatty acids, necessary for supporting fertility and egg hatchability
Commercial feeds are designed to meet the aforementioned needs precisely. To meet protein requirements, commercial feeds include a variety of high-protein meals