I’ve been reading a lot about chickens lately because I expect that chickens will be the first livestock we acquire when we move to the farm. A standard read on chickens and permaculture is Andy Lee’s Chicken Tractor: The Permaculture Guide to Happy Hens and Healthy Soil.
I ordered the “new straw bale edition” from Amazon but there are older copies of this book hanging around most used book stores.
I found the straw bale chapter interesting because we’ve considered building a straw bale house on the farm so it was good to see this construction method being used to house animals–on a smaller, not-permanent sort of way, as compared with housing humans.
Several advantages to straw-bale animal shelters, I think, including their non-permanence, cheapness, recyclability, and comfort (warm in winter, cool in summer). For all these reasons, straw-bale housing has some great advantages, as compared with permanent housing. For one, the structure is meant to come down after a few years–that alone will help with avoiding a nitrogen build up in and erosion of the soil. Since I’ve not yet built a straw-bale shelter, I can’t offer hands-off advice but I will in the future, so I’ll let you know how it goes.
Andy Lee seems to use chicken tractors primarily in his vegetable garden as a means of tilling and fertilizing the soil. The images in the book are all line drawings but I found a picture of a tractor online that would work well in this kind of format. I think we’ll build an A-frame like this to go over our raised beds, putting a couple of hens in to work over a patch after we’ve harvested (or before we plant).
small chicken tractor from Wikipedia article on chicken tractors
Andy Lee talks a little about pastured poultry but if you want the real scoop on raising large numbers of chickens on pasture read Joel Salatin’s Pastured Poultry Profit$.
There is on chapter in Chicken Tractor that I think is prime information for anyone considering keeping chickens: PROCESSING. Yep, even if you are only keeping hens for eggs, there may come a day when you want or need to harvest that chicken. How are you going to do it? Seems like this used to be common knowledge but isn’t anymore. I’ve actually witnessed and helped with a couple of chicken killings but it’s been a while, and I’m not comfortable doing it right now. I need some hands-on experience with this but getting it, under a good mentor, is harder than you’d imagine. So I’m looking to apprentice and volunteer with someone this fall.
Overall, Chicken Tractor is a good general resource on all aspects of raising chickens, primarily for the home, but with a little direction pointing for those who want to scale up and market their birds.
