Worst chicken tractor ever!
This old picture of our very first chicken
tractor makes me cringe today.
Even though it's twice the
square footage per bird that Joel Salatin and other sources on the
internet use, it feels too crowded and I would only put 2 full sized birds in it
today.
See that white plastic I used
for a covering? It was filtering enough light to make the chickens stop
laying eggs. It took us weeks to figure that out.
The nest boxes really needed
an easy access hatch and that ancient, old fashioned, gravity waterer
was exasperating.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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The way I figured it out one day I just happened to read the back of one of the feed bags and it clearly said if you want your hens to keep laying during the winter you need to give them this much light.....and that's when it hit me.....We got our first generation of hens already grown up and laying......but now they hardly ever lay, which could be the result of that white plastic I used for a cover because my mom gave us a roll of it and it was handy.
Once I stopped filtering their light with that plastic they started laying almost every day.