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Chicken tractors: bringing fertility to the yard. Results!

Kyle Putnam

Last year, I ran a soil sample on my hay field and, despite having plentiful organic matter, my nutrient levels had largely bottomed out. This had originally been an old growth douglas fir forest. A couple hundred years of nutrients were probably extracted with the trees. Then, to the best of my knowledge, it had been intermittently used as pasture or for hay production. While grazing would have returned some nutrients, repeated haying is a form of extraction. The lack of available nutrients became even more obvious when I rotated chickens through it in a tractor and everywhere they went turned bright green while everywhere else....didn't.

A photo of a hay field, showing green strips where chickens had been moved through with a chicken tractor, surrounded by yellowish grass.
A clear path where the chickens did their magic.

Because my soil has high levels of organic matter, one of the recommendations with my soil test was to add compost to improve microbial activity. In theory, increased microbial activity would result in a breakdown of the organic matter into plant-available nutrients. So, each day, I poured a five-gallon bucket of mostly-finished composted horse manure and bedding where the tractor was going to go and moved our four hens onto it. They gleefully scratched it into the soil. The compost provided some fertility and then the chickens added to it with their own droppings. Because they were moved daily, the nutrients were evenly distributed rather than concetrated in one place where they could leach away. Meanwhile the microbes in the compost hopefully stimulated overall microbial activity, resulting in additional plant-available nutrients from the soil organic matter. To me, the results speak for themselves. Green. Not green.


Even with just four hens, moving animals through the landscape boosted our soil fertility, while avoiding soil erosion or nutrient runoff. Four hens aren't enough to fertilize a large hay field but could easily be part of a fertility management plant for a large garden or micro-agroforestry system. I can envision moving hens through a bed in the fall, then planting a cover crop to take up the nutrients while the area with fresh manure become safe to plant (90-120 days, depending on the following crop), then planting a main crop in the spring. You would get the benefit of fertility from the chickens as well as organic matter additions from a cover crop all while feeding soil microbes.


Our climate is too wet in the winter to leave the girls out year round, so they are safely ensconced in their coop and run, leaving me to dream about ways to put them to work next year!

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