The Ultimate Chicken Coop | NOT what you Think

It's simple, it's small, perfect for the backyard or side yard. The ultimate chicken coop, a do-it-yourself chicken tractor. It's versatile, it's easy to build, it's easy to use. No doubt this is the ultimate backyard chicken coop, or side yard in this case. Preferably you want your coop on the south side of the house, which is going to be where you get most of your sun. We're about to put 3-week-old chicks out on our yard. That's one of my favorite uses for this thing. It's kind of like this nursery, this in-between the brooder and, uh, the big world. They're so small they can get eaten even by crows from the air, and so being in a tractor is complete protection for them until they can get a little bit bigger. You boys got our stuff? Sam, see that dram there in the dashboard? Put that on it. Little dram shutoff valves, key for on the end of all of our hoses. The chicken tractor's middle perch becomes the prop. We're gonna go— I'll give you a complete tour of that in a little bit. We gotta get these chicken chicks out while it's nice and warm. They're in the brooder. This is their happy place. Let's get them there. Definitely want to see us get these chicks out, but also stay tuned. I'm going to show you how we use this in different types of gardening and how we can use it to fertilize our yard. It's definitely the most versatile. What are y'all doing? Are you ready? Yeah. Well, let's put this feed maybe in the, uh, shade. Think about workflow. Let's put that somewhere by the house. Over here. Here, it's a more recent hack I've thought of. Instead of the feed all in one place, how about feed in a barrel to where we're going to need it? Yeah, maybe put it right here in this— these bushes. It's kind of ugly actually, since it's so ugly. We got a bit of a cover right there. I'm gonna put it right there. So we come out of our house. You want your chickens real close to the house because you visit them at least one time of day. That's good. Bring our hose, please. Yeah, just barely. Water in place, feed in place. You want to make the effort to make it easier day to day. Your future self will thank you. We're just giving our future selves little gifts. Little gifts. This is like kindergarten graduation day. Graduating the brooder, guys! Graduating the brooder. 3 weeks, you got your feathers. You'll be able to weather anything. You're gonna be scared for a moment, but it's worth it. Career One poultry crates for transport. Get one goose. All right, not up, not, not all 3. We could get the water and feed out and stuff. We're using the chicken tractor for a nursery today, but I've also used it on top of my garden raised beds to prepare the bed for gardening. 8 feet long, measured to fit exactly on our raised bed. It's also a good length of a garden bed if you were to use it for that. Notice I covered it 3/4. It only needs to be 2 feet tall. I mean, chickens are only this tall. It does have the optional door. I've put a feed pan upside down to keep this water clean while they till. They're prepping my cover crop. 3 perches, so 12 birds could fit comfortably in there. This is cedar wood, 2x4s ripped in half, so all these are 2x2s. We used half-inch wire mesh, sturdy too. It's not the poultry wire stuff. You also want to make sure you have your lid clipped. We can open this. You don't have to get in there to clean up any poop though. Corrugated roof panels, white. You don't want your chickens to get too hot. We do have eye bolts at every corner so that we can hook our cable and pull this thing. This is a new design. A lot of people wanted the door to this. You don't have to have the door. These, these nest crates are on a brace. We've got a landing bar in there. This has become more simple. We used to have a swivel bar for their landing bar, just so, hey, what if somebody's making a bad habit and they're perching in the nest at night and pooping? But then we realized somebody was like, hey, you know, you could just turn these sideways, and you do that for a couple weeks and they're trained not to go in there. Not an extra thing on it, super easy to build. Plastic decking on the bottom to protect the wood, but also so it will skid nicely on your grass. I will say a note to the wood, this is cedar. Smells so good when it's brand new. You know, to work in the COVID crop, work in the seeds. And then also, when the crop is done, bring the chickens back in to clean up what we didn't get. I actually made this chicken tractor so it could fit perfectly on top of these raised beds. Both of these plans are actually available for free at homesteadbuilds.com. Link in the description. You want to come help put the chicks out? Come on, he's looking for them. Here, look, there they are. See him? It's a stressful day, but it's a happy day. Help him out, he's gonna want to help do this. Perfect Good job for a little kid. You could set it down in there. I want to do it. We got a Little Giant 3-gallon vacuum seal waterer. We have no need for the nest boxes. Y'all start getting them out. Geez, gonna be— the goose gonna be happy. Goose is a guard for these guys. When you put them out to guard, you only want to have one goose for the whole posse, or they'll pile up with other geese and they won't pay the chickens any mind. They won't guard. Get everybody out. Chicken tractor is designed so that They can get sun if they want to, or they can stay over here in the shade. Half the side panels are open— I mean, they have half-inch wire mesh, but the other half are covered for that reason. For the roof though, 3/4 of it is covered with a quarter of it being open. Chickens don't like rain. They really don't like a lot of hot sun. How many chickens are there? Beautiful one went crazy. If you don't know how many chickens you have, you might be a crazy chicken lady. One cool thing about this thing is it can be all in one. You don't need a net around it. It's its roof, it's its wall, it's its fence, it's just everything. It's the next day. Let's evaluate how these chickens— Rebecca, how many chickens do we have?

We only have like 30-something, but Justin doesn't believe it.

30? You had to go look it up and it said 30-something. We forgot. Great, I'll go get a crate and then we can count them, show you guys how to do this if you don't do a fence. Hang tight, we will also show you how to expand it with a fence, which we're gonna have to do sooner than later because we have so many chicks. Now, woman and baby, pull it. A woman and baby, she's a she-woman.

Make sure I'm not running anybody over.

Exactly. Here, you know what, I usually leave this open. I'm rusty, I'm rusty. Little rusty, little rusty. It's been since last summer. Just inch it away. And then if you keep it up, you can make sure you don't run over anybody. Look at the fresh grass. Incidentally, we just cleaned the coop. Don't be handling chicken. You don't have to. That's one thing this chicken tractor can do, is certainly fertilize the yard. There's so many of them. If we're going to keep them in here, we're going to have to move it. Oh yeah, there's twice a day. There's way more than 30, right? We just sort of demoed just moving that now. I mean, if there weren't 87 chicks in here, somebody could just move this every day. If you had hens in here, 3, 4, you could keep it here full-time without a fence, moving it every day. We can either go get the crate, put them in a crate, count them as we get out. I feel like they'd be so much happier if we put them out. Yeah, okay, let's put them out in the net. People saw what that's like to move, move them. They spent a night in here, they're gonna know this is home. Caught one. It's just okay, just lift it up and their legs come undone. We're gonna go back and forth on this hill, so you're always going— you're always pulling the chicken tractor parallel with this hill. Let's get the net up. Gideon, we have a water right here. Set their water a little bit out from it. So would you guys have chickens in your front yard? Move them around every day, twice a day. You're gonna have the greenest, uh, yard in the neighborhood. I like this Premier One shocker knot net. If you can get it, no matter what you do, your nets are going to be a little tangled at the Start of a season after being stored. Look how fine that mesh is. It's like a 1-inch mesh. These 100-foot nets, it's 2 lengths across, 5 lengths down. We're supposed to have like 30-something-odd birds. That's more about right because we want, uh, you know, 24, a couple dozen. It goes into a Chickshaw Mini-Me and can replace our couple dozen old lady hens that are going to retire this fall. You want in there? Yes. Okay, we're gonna sell some of these to neighbors and friends in the community. They've got their feed, water, grit all spread out to encourage them to go around even. Yes, you have to put up. So they're too vulnerable to be out in here, so you've got to do something to protect them. We can't keep them in this chicken tractor all the time because there's too many of them. 30, you could, you could keep in here and move once, twice a day. Go get 2 men hooked up. That gal about to jump out. We need to get them out one at a time-ish so that we can count them. Henry, can you, in a minute, can you open the door? Let's count. That ain't gonna work. It's gonna take forever for them to come out. Okay, can you start handing people out to me? 3, 11, 32, 33. You know, not everybody that likes chickens likes chicken math. I don't like chicken math. 21, 22, 43. Hey Rebecca, you got some explaining to do. There are 80 chicks. No, 80. There are 80. There's 80. I didn't do it. There are 80. Who did it? We're gonna turn this problem into a solution. And sell some of these real quick right now. We have like 50 extra chicks. I mean, we'll count them again tomorrow. It's just a lot of unnecessary chicken and feed. No wonder they're going through it so fast. The beautiful one gets a variety of breed— that breeds that give you an Easter egg basket when you get the eggs. A Biefelder, Americana, Black Australorp, Red Star. Those are my choices. This is the high production. It does give a boring brown egg though.

Buff Orpington, Silver Laced Wyandotte, Golden Wyandotte, Cream Leg Bar, Whiting, Whiting, Whiting, Whiting True Blue, Whiting True Green.

If you—

Black Copper Maran.

If you cannot pronounce the names of your— the breeds of your chickens, you might be a crazy chicken lady. You might just love chickens. If you love chickens—

I do love chickens.

I don't know if I love this many chickens. All right, y'all want to turn on Two Man? Sure. Okay, go ahead, turn on tube man. You're too little. Even crows can get them at this age. Oh yeah, that's too many chickens for this size of yard too. We have a half-acre yard here. You got to control yourself or it's going to be real nasty.

Listen, I did not mean to do this.

It's been a few days since these guys are in here. I want to give you another example of what this chicken tractor can do though. Talked about using it as a nursery, which we're doing here. We've talked about using it on raised beds to till in the garden. An instant chicken garden, absolutely amazing. This is all you got to do: put 3 or 4 hens in this in one spot for about 2 weeks. This is after, this is before. They've tilled, they fertilized where you're going to put a garden area. Simply move that out, then you plant a bulletproof garden, compost, weed barrier, and then mulch. And then all you got to do is plant starts into that. You could actually move this around and do 9 garden plots. And even if you planted pumpkins in the first plot, which are 120 days to mature, by the time you get back around, moving it every 2 weeks, you could put it over your pumpkin plot and they could till and work that in and eat what you didn't get. You may not have suspected just a rectangular 2-foot-tall thing to be the ultimate chicken coop. But do you see how versatile this thing is? Have it as a nursery, have it for egg layers, 3 or 4 leg layers in it full-time. We have nest boxing, you can build nest boxes to put in there. Free plans for this at homesteadbuilds.com, absolutely free step-by-step plans. This door also makes this clutch. You could keep people in here full-time, or you can open this up and do like we've done here and they'd be in an enclosed net. You could have as many as 12 adults spend the night in there if this— if it's just their hotel and this is their run. You might think the ultimate chicken coop was going to be something fancy. This is the opposite of fancy. It's practical. It works if you're serious about growing your own food. I mean, if you're in it for a hobby and for kicks and giggles, that's one thing, build some sort of fancy coop. Do you want to get things done at the minimum cost and get the most out of something? This is a good bet. I'm just going to move it down here. You guys want to see it move sideways? I've opened this so I can see if I run over anybody. And let's just move it downhill sideways. So I'm traversing back and forth. I'm really just never pulling it uphill but once. We're spreading that manure love over the grass. It's getting a bit disturbed right now. But this— you'll have the greenest grass in the neighborhood, guys. It's just 2 feet tall. People don't need coops. Why, why would you make a tall coop to get in? No, you don't want to get in. That's nasty. There's poop, there's chicken fecal dust in there. Don't do it. Just 2 feet, that gives a hen enough room to jump on these perches. Notice there's no floor. No more. Promise me, don't clean out any more chicken coops. Just, just take the floor out, okay? And then when you want to clean it, do like I just did and move it. No more handling chicken doo-doo, guys. Make it holy chicken squat by leaving it in its place. We just fertilized this area mega. Just move it and we're done. We fertilize the grass, y'all. Open ventilation for sun and ventilation. We've got plastic roofing for super light, easy to move. And this thing is super affordable, easy to move. Like I said, I got step-by-step plans for you at Homestead Builds. Builds.com. You guys can do this. Throw out the nonsensical ideas, throw all those out. Let's just get real practical. Let's get growing eggs for our family. You can do it. Homesteadbuilds.com.