Over the years the Lewis Family Farm has refined the chicken tractors used and has come up with several tips and tricks for useful things to incorporate into your chicken tractor design. One such thing is a raised and enclosed shelf for the feed bowls. The raised shelf will allow the feed bowls to move with the tractor when you move it to its new location. The fence around the feed bowls allows the chickens to stick their head in to get the feed but not their butt. Having an access door on the outside allows you to easily top up the feed. Keeping the chickens out of the feed means less waste and better hygiene.

You can also build a roof over the feeder area protecting it from rain. We don’t worry about a roof over the feeder area on our tractors. For the most part we feed whole grains and if they do get rained on we usually just dump them on the ground and let the chickens clean them up from there.

Two inch by three inch garden fence is used to enclose the feeder in. If you have a rooster with a big comb you will need to clip some of the wire so that you have a bigger opening. One idea for this is to clip every other one. While this works great for adult chickens small chicks can slip through the fence.

We’ve been very happy with this design and we’ve incorporated this into all our chicken tractors, even the small cultivator tractors have a raised feeder area. By incorporating this design you’ll never have to go to the back of the cage to retrieve feed bowls ever again. Your feed bowls will stay cleaner and you’ll have less wasted feed. You can see this, and other tractor design tips in the video below.