Homestead Chicken Management
Homestead Chicken Management

Homestead Chicken Management

story & photos by Jim Strickland of Gloversville, NY

This article originally appeared in the mid-summer 2007 issue of ‘Organic Farms, Folks & Foods’, a quarterly publisher of the NE Organic Farming Assoc. of NY.

Several years ago I wrote an article in Farm, Folks and Food describing the acquisition of our first flock of chickens here at the homestead. We were inspired first by the thought of our own fresh eggs, but also by the “Chicken Tractor” book (Chicken Tractor: The Permaculture Guide to Happy Hens and Healthy Soil by Andy Lee and Pat Foreman), which promised that the chickens could also help work the soil and thus become productive members of the homestead garden economy. For those not familiar with the Chicken Tractor book, its basic premise is this: Properly controlled and managed, chickens can contribute to improved soil tilth in several ways. They eat weed seeds and most herbaceous greenery as well as garden pests like Japanese beetles and slugs. They love to scratch and will pulverize organic matter and work it into the soil. And whatever they eat they convert to high-quality fertilizer. Turned loose on a cover-crop of rye or buckwheat, the chickens will eat, scratch and trample it until within a few weeks it is totally integrated into the soil. We’ve had a good bit of time to work with the basic ideas we gleaned from the Chicken Tractor book, and we’ve had time to learn many lessons from the chickens themselves. From this experience I’d like to describe some of the details and refinements of evolving aviculture here at the homestead.

Our chicken management system consists of three basic components: The Chicken McMansion, the Chicken Tractor and Chicken Tunnels. I’ll describe them in that order.

Homestead Chicken Management

Chicken McMansion

The chicken McMansion is no ordinary chicken coop. It has a copper-clad sub-floor, hardware cloth lining in the walls and metal roofing to prevent varmints from chewing through. Two large Andersen thermal pane windows in the front wall provide ample light as well as solar gain and protection from the elements in winter. Generous window area in the McMansion means a bright interior, which discourages egg laying on the floor and encourages the chickens to use the cozy, curtained nest boxes. Front and side entrances allow for flexibility in docking with the chicken tractor while two five-foot long roosts and four curtained nest boxes with outside access for egg-gathering top the list of creature comforts. The roof is hinged and the back can be removed completely for easy cleaning. Most important from the management standpoint is that the chicken McMansion is portable. We modified two bicycle frames, removing their front forks and leaving just the rear tires, so that they easily attach to the chicken house. Once the wheels are in place, two people can move the house effortlessly from one spot to another. The wheels are then removed and stored until the next move. (Lest anyone think we’ve over-indulged in luxury here, rest assured that all the materials, from the copper-clad bottom, Andersen windows, metal roofing and including the twin Huffy bicycles, were salvaged from dumpsters and local discard piles or from our own construction left-overs.)

Homestead Chicken Management

We now have two chicken McMansions, the second built originally to accommodate the need to add to the flock periodically to make up for inevitable losses. We found it helpful to be able to isolate youngsters from the main flock until they were mature enough to hold their own among the old-timers. Recently, because of some unexpected donations, our flock has expanded to 17 and, while theoretically they might all squeeze into one house, in practice we found that, given the opportunity, they readily split themselves more or less evenly between the two. Incidentally, having two chicken houses, we made one right-handed and one left-handed. This way they can be placed side by side with their side entrances aligned to make a single connected shelter for a larger flock while the nest boxes at opposite ends are still easily accessed from the outside.

Homestead Chicken Management

Chicken Tractor

The chicken tractor (again we have two) is constructed very much on the lines laid out in the Chicken Tractor book. It consists of a chicken wire cage five feet wide and eight feet long and about three and a half feet high with no bottom. It has a metal roof and an access door large enough for me to get through for feeding and watering. The framing of ours is galvanized metal conduit (salvaged, of course), but a light wood frame as described in the book would work as well. There is an opening at each end which, when the tractor is docked to the chicken house, lines up with the front (or side) door of the house. The tractors also come in right- and left-handed models. Our first chicken tractor had a hinged roof but we found no practical advantage to the feature so we did a fixed roof on the second one. (In fact the hinged roof has been something of a nuisance since it will sometimes blow open in a strong wind even with a large weight holding it down.) The tractor is very light and easily moved by two people. We attached rope loops to the bottom chord of the framing on the long sides and by this means lift the tractor and move it from place to place.

You could easily get by with just those two components if you garden the way we do. We use a method called biostrip gardening which we learned from Steve Gillman at Ruckytucks Farm in Stillwater. We plant in tilled beds that are fifty-two inches wide separated by thirty-two inch wide paths of untilled sod. (We currently have nineteen of these beds ranging from 60 feet to 110 feet long.) This setup is ideal for a low-tech operation that relies primarily on handwork. We can reach to the center of the bed from either side and the sod paths are a firm working surface, which means we practically never tread on the growing areas. Important for this discussion, the paths make it easy to move the chicken operation throughout the garden. The above-dimensions may convey a false sense of precision. In the real world the border between growing bed and path is often fuzzy. The important dimension is the seven-foot one, the width of one bed and one path together. When we are laying out a new growing area this is the dimension we work from, and it is the one that determines the sizing of the components of the chicken management system. At six feet wide the McMansion spans from path to path. Its base and, when installed, its wheels are on firm ground for easy moving. The five-foot wide tractor also spans the bed encouraging the chickens to work all the way to the edges while preventing them from obliterating the pathways.

As I said, one could get by with just two pieces of equipment, moving the tractor and chicken coop along the beds in eight-foot increments. There is a great deal of information on this and its variations in the Chicken Tractor book so I will not elaborate on it. (There is also a large amount of info on the internet. Just search for “chicken tractor.”) However, there are some drawbacks. First, the chickens need to be moved frequently, at least once or twice a week. Second, if you’re on sloping ground, running the McMansion and tractor out over the beds can sometimes be problematic. While about a third of our growing area is fairly level the rest is sloped. Tilling beds into the sloped ground has created a series of terraces with sometimes as much as twelve inches of drop from one bed to the next. We learned quickly that the McMansion did not like to roll or sit on such terrain. Thus the idea of chicken tunnels was born.

Homestead Chicken Management

Chicken Tunnels

The idea behind chicken tunnels was a simple one. Find a way to give the chickens access to the full length of the growing bed while keeping them from running rampant throughout the garden. We had experimented with plastic-covered mobile hoop structures as season extenders for early spring greens and to cover the kale once the snow started flying. Inspired by these, the first chicken tunnels were hoop houses covered with chicken wire. The base consisted of two wooden runners (whatever scrap came off the saw mill, but generally 1×4 or a little bigger). These were connected at the ends with five-foot long pieces of half-inch metal conduit. I drilled angled holes into the runners about every four feet and drove wooden pegs into them (these were pegs left over from our timber framing adventures). The hoops were 6-foot long pieces of 1 ¼” ABS plastic water pipe. Just previous to this time my mother had had to replace the foot valve in her 250-foot deep drilled well. As the men pulled the old valve they proceeded to cut the pipes into 20-foot pieces telling my mother the old pipe was no longer useable and would have to be replaced. (Once they started cutting this was basically true. The fact was they didn’t want to have to wrestle with two 250-foot lengths of pipe coming out of the hole. It was easier to charge Mom for new pipe. In any case 25 pieces of plastic pipe made their way into our pile of treasures and, from there, into the chicken tunnels.) The 6-foot lengths of pipe were bent to shape and pushed onto the pegs in the bottom boards. Chicken wire stapled to the bottom boards and wired to the hoops held the whole thing together. We made various sizes ranging from 8 feet long to 14 feet long depending on the scrap boards we found. The ends were left open so that, butted to each other and to the end of the chicken tractor, they formed one long tunnel into which the chickens could venture at their leisure.

The tunnel sections were fairly light and, although their size made them awkward to handle, I was able to move them about by myself, sort of like carrying an extra-large sheet of plywood. They had their drawbacks. Their rigidity often meshed poorly with the uneven terrain and chickens would escape under the edges or through gaps between units. Each move meant a few days of vigilance to find the weak spots. I never was able to make enough to go a full hundred feet of bed so the ends of the beds were often neglected. Because they were in constant contact with the ground, the scrap wood used for the frames began to rot and the tunnels slowly lost their integrity. As winter snows crushed the weakest ones, each spring found us with fewer usable tunnels.

Homestead Chicken Management

One day as I was salvaging the parts of one of these destroyed tunnels a thought struck me. I noticed that the plastic hoops, held in place for years by pegs and chicken wire, had permanently assumed their hoop-shape. What if, I surmised, instead of putting pegs into wood I simply put them right into the ground at the edges of the bed? Hoops mounted on the pegs would follow the terrain. Tunnels made like this could be any length at all and parts could be disassembled and stored when not in use. The components could serve multiple uses; under plastic for season extension, remay for insect control or wire for chickens. From this idea evolved our current chicken tunnels.

I experimented with several different coverings from chicken wire to window screen to deer netting looking for something that both kept the chickens confined and was easy to take up and move. I finally settled on plastic snow fence, which is what is pictured in the illustrations. Also pictured are the other parts. The stakes are made of ½ inch galvanized metal conduit cut in 1-foot lengths. They are squashed at one end to keep them from filling with dirt and to make a chisel tip for easy driving. At the beginning and end of a hoop-run I use a single 2-foot long stake, which sticks out of the ground further and gives added bracing to the hoop. This keeps them from sagging toward the middle. Ordinary clothespins are great for holding pieces of snow fence together and the fencing is attached to the hoops using clips made from 1-inch pieces of the same ABS plastic pipe. The 1-inch piece is split and makes an excellent “C” clip with great holding power when forced onto the pipe.

Homestead Chicken Management

The last piece of the puzzle is wire staples, large wire staples. These are needed to hold down the netting or snow fence in the spaces between the hoops. This is to prevent the chickens from simply pushing under the fencing and getting out, which they will do, especially when the grass starts looking greener on the other side. We were fortunate to inherit a large roll of heavy, multi-strand aluminum cable of the type that the electric company uses for its grounded conductor (sometimes called “neutral”) going from pole to pole. This cable is made up of strands of aluminum, to conduct electricity, wound around a steel core for strength. Once unwound from the cable the aluminum strands are strong, bendable wire that is easy to cut and shape. They also don’t rust which makes them ideal for sticking into the ground. We make the staples 6 to 8 inches long, which holds well in our soil. With all these pieces and two 100-foot rolls of plastic snow fence we can cover any bed in the garden giving the flock plenty of room and plenty to work on.

All this talk of effectively confining chickens reminds me that it’s hard to resist the temptation to let them out once in a while. Their exuberance upon being set free is infectious. They run first here, then there, grabbing a beak full of grass, chasing down a bug or all of them racing together, convinced that the one in front holds in her beak the Treasure of Solomon. They remind me of nothing more than of butterflies flitting from flower to flower. Interestingly, the Welsh for butterfly is “iär fach ar haf,” which in literal translation means “little hen of summer.” The Welsh must have noticed early on this happy comparison between two beautiful creatures.


With their beautiful flock of hard-working chickens, Jim and his partner, Laurie Freeman, always have something to crow about on their homestead in Meco, NY.