Yes, it's possible to keep chickens in your backyard without the mess, smell and noise usually associated with chickens!
A portable, bottomless henhouse, also known as a "chicken tractor" or an "ark," is the key to producing your own eggs while keeping industrious hens out of your garden or your neighbor's yard. An enclosed house with constant access to fresh lawn or pasture, a dry area for feed, as well as a roost for perching and nest boxes for laying keeps the chickens safe from harm, as well as keeping your garden safe from the chickens. No bottom means that they are always on grass, while their droppings fertilize your lawn and eliminate the chore of cleanup that is necessary with a traditional henhouse.
In this age where it's now easy to clone and delete parts of photographs,
and some farmers and webmasters are doing this to published photos of their livestock,
please note that all photos on this website are unaltered in any way!
Colors, conformation, etc are exactly as depicted.
For those living where the neighbors might object to the crowing of a rooster, keeping a few hens in an ark such as this will solve the problem nicely. Hens make less noise than most wild birds that visit bird feeders, and the constant rotation of the ark prevents any odor build-up, while fertilizing and "de-bugging" your yard at the same time.
We have been utilizing chicken tractors on our farm for 8 years; our newest edition is shown here. Click on Housing below to view our earlier efforts and gain ideas for purchasing or building a portable house for your own flock of hens.
In the photo below, the area at left keeps the feeder dry, while the housing is at the far right, through the pop-hole. Close inspection shows the handles on the outside that lift up a door to access the two nest boxes for egg collection. The "man-door" is large enough for an adult to access to add feed and fresh water.
Above: close-up of the nestbox access.
Below: Happy chickens!
If you are handy with a screw gun and saw, some version of a portable pen will be easy for you to build. If you are not, many different versions can be purchased.
Buyers of our chicks or pullets are offered a tour of our henhouse and chicken tractors, descriptions of how they have been built, as well as any useful tips that come to mind.
For those new to chicks, you don't need housing like this right away; a couple cardboard boxes will get you started, and give you a couple weeks to prepare their permanent housing. Click the photo below for more information on how to begin!
This version was framed with cedar, fir and hemlock. The siding is cedar, and rather than the traditional flimsy chicken wire, we used a sturdier 1/2 inch wire mesh commonly used for rabbitries. The dimensions at the base are 4 feet by 12 feet. The A-Frame style eliminates a lot of weight that a square style would have, making it very easy to move to fresh grass every day or two.
Just about any book on chickens will give you the basic information you need to know to get started. Most of them refer to keeping chickens "conventionally" (the generic term for using non-organic feed and all the shots, drugs and dusts you can buy) but if you ignore that part, you will have a good handle on the life stages of a chicken. Once you know these things, the best books to own and always have on hand for reference are:
The Chicken Health Handbook
by Gail Damerow
Very useful for identifying problems.
The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable
by Juliette de Bäiracli Levy
Very useful for treating any problems!
A couple good books about natural or organic management that you might want to purchase (or borrow from the library) are:
