Product Description: A chicken tractor is a bottomless, portable pen that fits over your garden beds. Just set it wherever you need help in your garden. The chickens peck and scratch the soil to clean your beds, eat pest bugs and weed seeds. Best of all, they provide eggs and meat with that old-fashioned flavor. Chicken tractors have helped thousands of gardeners have better gardens and taken chickens out of factory farms and put them in the garden where they are your personal helpers.
could be helped by editing Bottom line: This could have been a great book, but it reads like a first draft -- almost as rough as raw notes from the authors' field notebook. It is useful reading to get ideas about how to put this system to work for you.
My family is going to get a handful of egg layers and I heard about the chicken tractor concept and wanted to get the authoritative guide. I was hoping for (a) building instructions and rough plans, (b) how the system is best used, and (c) basic care of the animals. I didn't expect a comprehensive guide to animal care, I'll get a separate book for that.
The book covers all three of the above areas.
Chapter 8, "How to Build Your Custom Chicken Tractor" has a sequence of instructions, a bill of materials, and a couple of diagrams. The diagrams could be better, and there could be more. A third of a page is devoted to a picture of how to square two boards using the 3-4-5 rule, but the next page of seven construction steps has no pictures at all. There is no (nearby) photograph of the finished product, only some sketches with cartoon chickens. Chapter 4 focuses on straw bale construction techniques (though you can't build a tractor out of bales) with more and somewhat better diagrams but does not have a set of specific construction steps (and I'm not sure it needs one).
Chapter 3, "Chicken Tractor Systems", discusses seven different systems in which the tractor may be used. Not all of the systems are covered evenly: the rotational garden system gets four paragraphs in contrast to the dozen or so pages for the deep mulch system. One "system" is a brief mention of four different hen houses on wheels without any mention of how wheels might be deployed in contrast to the simple tractor he describes later in Chapter 8.
Basic care is scattered throughout the book. Chapter 6, "Keeping Hens in the Chicken Tractor" has some tips about keeping hens happy but doesn't go into much depth. It could be better integrated with the rest of the book: the section on nesting boxes should include details or cross reference to construction techniques for integrating nesting boxes into the Chapter 8 tractor. In 300 pages about "happy hens and healthy soil", there are only two or three pages devoted to nesting boxes, and then there are no diagrams -- just a couple of silly cartoons.
Some info on breed selection would have been nice. Chapter 11, "Give Me That Old-Time Chicken", discusses the fact that some heritage breeds are in danger of extinction. But other than positing that they taste better, they don't give much for hints in selecting a breed that is appropriate for your farm.
Some miscellaneous criticisms:
* Selective use of science makes me suspicious. There are places where the authors cite scientific studies in support of their opinions. There are places where the authors make vague mention of science in support of their opinions. And there are places where the authors mention scientific studies and then dismiss the science based on their opinions.
* The photography is poor -- generally too dark and not well composed.
* Organization is inconsistent. This is a minor point, but some chapters have numbered sections, some have lettered sections, some have no sequence marks -- just section titles, and some chapters are mix and match. Example: Chapter six has sections A, B, C, D, 5. Only A and B show up in the table of contents. Sloppy organization makes it unlikely that this book will be useful as a reference.
* Hordes of typographical/copy errors. Again, a minor point but distracting nonetheless. Example: Page 38 has a diagram/cartoon at the top of the page, titled in large print "Products and Behviors (sic) of a Chicken".
* Poor indexing. Example: the index for "killing cone" references only page 202. But the chapter on processing has multiple references to killing cone. There's a diagram/cartoon on page 209, description of its use on page 216, and thoughts on different types of killing cones including some thoughts on homemade versus commercial on page 217.
* The authors are very repetitive. They could shave 100 pages with better organization and judicious use of cross-references. Example: Chapter 5, "Soil Building with Chicken Tractors" is part rant against the destruction of soil by monoculture farming and part repetition of information mostly found in other parts of the book about the use of tractor systems for improving garden soil.
Best option for residential chickens! This book was my first real introduction to permiculture. It really helps the beginner get a taste of sustainable living and is a really great companion guide to gardening! I would encourage everyone to have a copy as this method can also be applied to goats, turkey, cows, ducks.
Poor choice for title I liked the information related to chickens but the title should almost have been "Gardening With Chickens, How to use chickens to build up your garden soil."
I didn't like the whole how to compost part of the book I bought it looking for ideas and plans on how to build chicken tractors for both layers and fryers. What I found didn't have the plans I was looking for while the book has much good information it does not stay on topic as far I am concerned.
If the title had been different I would have given the book 4 or 5 stars.
Some good ideas for the beginner but needs some major improvement. This book has some really good, practical ideas for the beginniner.
If you are into chicken production for meat there is a fair amount of information on that topic. If you are into chickens primarily for egg production (which is most of us) you'll need to figure out how to adapt the use for that purpose. This will involve implementing a nesting area and exterior access door into the design to collect the eggs. This is not a huge deal for the creative, mechanical types but might be an issue for some.
The book is extremely redundant and reads like a babbling person talking in circles. Cloudy, the information is sometimes conflicting and lacking in sufficient detail. The author would have done well to hire true professionals to organize/edit the content and draw the diagrams.
I have built and currently use 5 chicken tractors. The author suggests that you can build these things for less than the cost of lunch by using scrap materials. In my experience most folks would very hardpressed to find the materials needed for free. If you buy all of the materials needed they cost around $100 each.
Two people can build 2 of these in about 7 hours if they have only a smidgen of experience with tools/carpentry. Building one takes about 4-5 hours.
A few notes from my experiences working with chicken tractors:
1. I have used 3' tall chicken tractors for piglets (up to 4 months of age) with excellent results by wrapping the chicken tractor with a stronger gauge wire than typical chicken wire. The pigs root a large hole every day. When I move the "pig tractor" I rake their poop into the hole then rake the soil back into the hole covering the poop. This eliminates 95% of the odor and, of course, fertilizes my garden.
2. This method does not work well for waterfowl unless you have sandy or other soil that drains very quickly. On my farm in the NC mountains, confined ducks and geese immediately create a muddy mess unless there is a drainage system in place under the waterer. Drainage systems are not practical for chicken tractoring.
3. Chicken tractors work great for chickens, turkeys, and guineas. Birds raised in a chicken tractor will produce more eggs and be much more content living in this type of environment than those accustomed to ranging.
4. The author states that the chicken tractor protects poultry from predators. In reality this structure offers little protection from anything other than birds of prey and dogs. I have lost plenty of chicken tractored poultry to fox, oppossums and raccoons. Keep a baited live trap next to your birds or plan to camp out with them every night.
Hope this helps...
Good luck and good farming!
buy or borrow -- lots of good information Because of the reviews I read here, I didn't buy this book when I bought Salatin's Pastured Poutry Profits, now I wish I had. It has a lot of good information and is entertaining to read. I borrowed from the library and am considering buying one for our home library in the future. Andy Lee gives you some good examples in both the NE and NC of how he has raised chickens, for meat and eggs. He has a good background with lots of hand-on experience. He does this for his own food and for some money, these are not just pet "no kill" animals. I found the most interesting part to be his ideas on using a greenhouse to start chicks on the ground in hay under the benches in the spring, then after moving the birds out to tractors, making your greenhouse into a naturally fertized and mulched bed for summer vegetables followed by a fall brooder for another crop of egg laying hens that can overwinter there. He moves his greenhouses and tractors, leaving behind beautifully fertilzed mulched garden beds, that's the most exciting thing for me -- my wrists and arms hurt when I dig with a shovel! He also gives a good idea of costs, of course you may need to adjust for the year and place you live, but it does give a good basic plan to follow. If you want to know how exactly how to build a chicken tractor, follow the basic plans and get some wood and nails and tools and try to do it! They are good enough if you have common sense and want to use what you have on hand or can scrounge up! I gave this only 4 stars (it would be 4-1/2 if I could) just because everyone needs room for improvement, but that's the highest rating I usually ever give. Best of luck to everyone with their farming enterprises, we need to step away from Walmart and the rest!
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