A Moving Fertilizer Factory

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A little house 4' x 8' in floor area and 4' high in front and 3' high in back weighs less than 100 pounds—chickens and all—and can be rigged on wheels or sled runners to be pulled around by hand or a small lawn tractor. To house more than a dozen birds at a time, it is better to build two or more of these than a heavier, more elaborate shed that needs a large machine or team to pull it.

The mobile "tiller-shed" can be made from #3, 4' x 8' sheets of 1/4" ply, a couple of 2 x 4 x 12s, eight or a dozen 2 x 2 x 12s, and 24 running feet or so of 48" poultry netting...for about $50 or $60 for allnew materials.

One or more can be left in the center of a well-fenced pasture and kept stocked with water. The birds can be closed in at night and released in the morning to forage all day. To promote growth and give them good finish, scatter 1/8 to 1/4 cup per bird of high-protein, vitamin-and-mineral-supplemented broiler ration inside or at the front porch area of the house as scratch feed at each day's end. The ground inside the house and outside where you scatter the scratch will be quickly cleaned of living plants, seeds, and bugs by the flock.

It is this propensity of chickens to scratch that lets your mobile house serve as a chicken-powered tiller. The birds come equipped with a pair of most efficient tiller tines: the three sharp and powerful claws on each foot. The jungle fowl's natural feeding behavior is to scratch at the soil, move backward a few steps, and peck at the grubs, small bugs, and buried seeds it has turned up with each little tilling. As they stir the upper soil layer, droppings are mixed in, and over several days or a week, the birds will turn a small patch of meadow into a patch of nicely cultivated, debugged, weed-and weed-seed-free, prefertilized garden sod.

All you need do is pull the house to the adjacent plot of meadow and plant the just-tilled section to garden crops or add a green manure to be tilled in later. If you don't plant the chicken-tilled ground, perennial roots and windblown weed seeds will establish a super-meadow on the fertilized ground in no time.

You'll have to fence the chickens out of the strip of new garden running along the house's path of travel. Easiest is to surround it with yard-high poultry netting supported on lengths of sapling stuck into the ground every few feet. Two rolls of netting—one on each side of the new garden plot—can be unrolled as the house is moved and hooked to nails on the house's rear corners with every move.

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