2. Chicken Tractors

Mobile Chicken Tractors With Enclosed Run:

This method is my personal favorite for the area where I live. There are many predators where I live, both four-legged and flying. Hawks can do serious damage to your flock if the poultry are allowed to forage in the open. But I couldn’t ever bring myself to harm these majestic birds of prey, so my solution is to enclose my poultry on all sides except the ground.

These lightweight mobile coops are designed to be moved daily on wheels or skids, allowing fresh, clean, nutritious pasture and forage, and using your pasture space to maximum efficiency. This prevents the spread of diseases and concentrates the manure in one spot.

This concentration of manure can be an amazing help when you are prepping to plant your garden. Simply place the chicken tractor over last year’s row beds and the chickens will go to work, weeding, tilling, removing pests, and conditioning and fertilizing the soil.

When the soil appears well worked by the chickens, move the tractor one length down your row bed and plant into the prepared soil. This can dramatically reduce the time and effort you put into preparing your garden beds.

Mobile Chicken Tractors With Moveable Electric Fencing:

This relatively new method of free-ranging uses lightweight electric fence netting to allow your chicken to be moved to larger areas of fresh pasture regularly with little effort.

It doesn’t always provide protection from predators as strongly or as surely as the former methods, but it does allow for a much larger flock to be housed in one area.

The coops attached to the netting can be small and house just a few birds… or large, wheeled (or even on axels), and able to accommodate hundreds of birds at a time. Some are so large they can only be dragged by machinery.

You will probably need to source a portable solar electrical fence generator to power the fence (available from the same places you purchase the electric netting).