The Poultry Schooner

Well, in addition to marauding pigs, spring soccer season, and Girl Scouts, the other thing making me crazy lately is chickens.

Now, I am forced to admit that I do know better than to order chicks before I have their housing squared away.

But I did it anyway.

So naturally it took three times longer to get their post-brooder housing built than I anticipated which turned it into a do-or-die undertaking because sooner or later I was going to run out of management tricks and they were going to start eating each other in the brooder for being overcrowded.

It's done now though so I am back on track. The permanent henyard is good and does its job well, but it doesn't advance the overall soil fertility of the homestead which is one of the major reasons I keep birds (the other reason being the food they produce). It works well if I clean out the henhouse and transport the litter to some place like the vegetable garden, but the rest of the place doesn't benefit. It is also not an easy task to mix grown birds with young birds in a confined space without casualties so if you can it's better to give each group their own space.

Thus the chicken tractor. It's not the first one I've built, more like the third, but it is the first of this particular design.

The original design comes from Robert Plamondon which can be found on his site herehttp://www.plamondon.com/hoop-coop.html. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you'll find a link to a .pdf file which is what I used.

But Robert uses his for turkeys and I wanted to use mine for laying hens so I modified the design as necessary to suit my needs.

Photo_01 shows the basic frame. Only the two runners are in actual ground contact. The two cross pieces are off the ground by about an inch and a half. This makes for less drag when the tractor is being moved. I made a mistake right off in putting it together in that I had the front oriented the wrong way as Robert did in his original plans. He mentioned changing the orientation so that he could see in the door as he was moving the thing which is what I wanted to do only to forget all about it as I was putting it together. I did it anyway but it left a gap between the panels as you'll see later. Future tractors will be correctly oriented.

Photo_02 shows the way I reinforced the corners to keep the frame from racking itself to pieces as it is being moved. Plamondon used cross members, but I chose to experiments with using short 4"x4" blocks on the inside of the corners. I drilled pilot holes then used three inch screws made for use with pressure treated wood. When I can I prefer to use screws like this rather than driving nails. I find they hold better under stress.







In Photo_03 I am bending the cattle panels. They're the standard 52 inch high by sixteen feet long panels available from farm supplies here in the States just about everywhere so far as I know. Tie a rope around one end, stand on the panel and walk towards the other end causing it to bend as you do. Tie the rope to the other end when it is bowed enough to suit you. In the photo I've got the panel situated outside the frame, but when the time came to nail it on I pulled the rope tighter so that I could have both ends on the inside of the frame as you'll see in the following photos. Do be sure you have the knots tight when you have the panel under tension like this as you don't want the thing to do a sudden impression of a spring as you're nailing it to the frame.



In Photo_04 here the front and back ends are being framed. The front end has the door so it is higher than the hoops so I can make the door as tall as possible. The back end is cut lower so as to stay within the hoops. All of the framing is pressure treated 1x4s. The bottom frame is pressure treated 2x4s. If this were a permanent structure I'd have built it heavier, but as this one is to be portable it needed to be kept as light as possible.

Plamondon uses a simple hatch to get inside, but I hung a proper door. To keep it from binding I left about an inch of clearance between the top and bottom of the door. The hardware cloth wire wraps around the top and bottom of the door to discourage anything trying to widen the gap by chewing to get inside.


Photo_05 shows how I tied the lumber to the cattle panels. Properly tightened they make a very secure bond. The wire is fourteen gauge electric fence wire. Any similar gauge galvanized wire should work. Tying the wood to the cattle panel like this gives the panel more rigidity which will come in useful later when it comes time to hang the interior furniture.










Photo_06 shows all of the wood framing front and back and the nest box already hung. With all of the wood in place I'm now ready to mount the hardware cloth wire.

But first I'll elaborate a bit on the nest box.






Photo_07 shows the nest box being hung. I planned on four nests which is actually more than I need, three would have sufficed. Each nest is 14" wide by that much deep by about ten inches deep. The bottom is half-inch hardware cloth. Sides were scrap plywood, the back was scrap 1x10s, framed with 2x2s. The front of the nest box is one 1x4 to make the box rigid which itself sits on top of one of the 1x4s of the framing then the whole thing is screwed together. This gives it a fair degree of rigidity. A hinged lid made of 2x2s and roofing tin will go over the top later.





Photo_08 shows the front of the nest box so you can see how I hung it on the frame. The interior partitions are whatever piece of scrap wood was laying around that would fit. The rope is tied to the hooks screwed into the box then tied to the framing so as to support the box while I was securing it to the frame.

Photo_09 shows the wire secured across the front. It's screwed to the wood using broad headed lath screws. Where it reaches the metal cattle panel I laced it on using seventeen gauge electric fence wire. A good deal of the whole tractor is sewn together like this. It's very secure - so long as old Brer Coon doesn't come up with wire cutters! {laughing}







Photo_10 shows the backside after the nest box lid has been mounted. The wire is laced to the cattle panel the same as with the front. The band of tin across the backside is for a bit of shade and rain protection for the nest box below. All of the tin is very much used. I'm big on salvaging everything I can.





Photo_11 shows the backside again after it's been moved to the corn patch. You can now see the latch holding the nest box lid closed and get a better view of how I laced the tin to the cattle panels and to the hardware cloth along the sides. I just sewed the whole thing together which is a good part of the reason it took so long to finish!

I used tin instead of a tarp such as what Robert Plamondon used because I wanted something raccoon proof and weather proof. He's in Oregon. Down here in Florida I'd have to replace that tarp several times a year (more if we had a lot of storms) for the sun rotting it out. I'd also have to run wire over the top of the cattle panels then put the tarp over it to make it coon proof.

I've suffered a lot with coons over the years so I tend to think of everything in terms of how resistant to the dang things I can make stuff.

The down side is that the tin significantly adds to the weight. Part of this is because it's old tin, from when the thicker gauge stuff was still common. If I had to use new tin of the thinner gauge that they pass off in places like Lowes and other "home improvement centers" now it would weigh somewhat less, but still not as little as a simple tarp would make it.

Photo_12 shows the interior furniture made from saplings cut out of a brushy area on the property. The support limbs holding the roosts up are wired to the panel where they meet. On the other end each line coming down from overhead is a twisted pair of fourteen gauge electric fence wire, one on each end and the one in the middle. I believe it'll hold at least twenty grown birds. The waterer and feeder are hanging from some old pieces of braided nylon rope I had laying around.

I didn't get a good photo of the tin going onto the panels. On the ends and at the bottom where it reaches the hardware cloth on each side I laced it all together with seventeen gauge wire. Where each piece of tin overlaps another I drilled holes then secured the two pieces together using steel pop rivets with pop rivet washers on the inside. So far they've held quite tight. I was concerned about the tin coming loose in a storm.



Photo_13 shows the tractor full of chicks!










Those are purebreds though so much too valuable to risk on an as yet unproven design so I swapped them out for the birds in Photo_14

Now, what isn't shown is how to keep old Brer Coon from coming in under the bottom of the tractor. That design changed in mid-stream so I haven't taken photos yet.

The design I'm trying at the moment is using plastic-coated 2"x4" steel garden fencing that I've laid on the ground around all four sides. The edge touching the tractor frame is stapled in place. The corners will be laced together to keep them from coming part. The wire just lays flat on the ground extending the two feet out from the sides.

The idea is that animals will go to the bottom of the fence or wall to start digging which of course is not possible since they'll be standing on top of the wire when they do.

The question is whether Brer Coon is smart enough to back off the two feet to go under the wire to get to the bottom of the tractor wall? So far, so good.

I've got a total of thirty four to go into the tractor, but for the first week or so I'm only risking a dozen. If nothing manages to breach the defenses to eat them I'll move the rest this coming weekend.

Eight of the birds are for the father of a friend of mine which will leave me twenty six. In a month or two I'll take what I've learned with this prototype to build a second tractor then split the birds thirteen each between them.

So, why do I call it a "Poultry Schooner?"

Because as I was putting the thing together it occurred to me that the tractor looked somewhat like one of the old "Prairie Schooners" of the American westward expansion of the nineteenth century without the running gear underneath. The Poultry Schooner will be pulled across the Dun Hagan prairie by a dumb ox (that would be me) just as the original Prairie Schooners were. Alternatively I've considered calling it the Cracker Schooner, but then Florida Cracker might think I was poking at him or something. {laughing}


Come this winter I hope to start hatching my own chicks.

We'll see.

Wish me luck!

.....Alan.