 Greetings friends! This is Survival Doc. Today we're going to take a look at my chicken tractor. I've heard it called by several names. It is basically a mobile chicken run, which allows you to give your chickens access to your full yard so that they can pick up bugs and grass and ticks. So let's take a look at it. Now my chicken tractor, which is what I like to call it, is four feet wide by nine feet long. You pick it up by this handle here and you can move the chickens to a different part of the yard or move it over a little bit. And you have to supply the chickens with water when they're going to be out here all day. And the best way I've found to do that is with this type of waterer, which has a little nipple down there. This is just an all-gain bottle that added a little chicken watering nipple down there. Some wheels back here that I took off of an old cart. You want to keep it low enough to the ground to where chickens can't get under it and predators can't get under it. Here I have a gate to get to put them in and out. This part right here used a stiff 1 inch by 2 inch wire that I had left over from making my chicken, not chicken rabbit hutches. The top I put chicken wire four foot across. I wanted to keep it light weight. All treated lumber. These pieces here are just the lumber that you use for fencing wood fences. This part here is these are just treated two by fours that I just cut in half on my table saw. Just sliced them right down the middle. Same thing here, same thing here. That is a eight foot treated two by four that I cut in half. So one board would make two pieces of PVC pipe here. One inch inside diameter. The heavier duty stuff and I put a screw through it to hold it in place. I painted it right now just how primer on it painted to protect it from UV light because being in the sun will deteriorate in time if it's not painted. I have about 13 chickens in here right now. These are spring chicks. They're a couple of months old so they're not fully grown chickens. Use J clips to put this together. Use my nail gun to staple these in and they really enjoy it. They enjoy getting outside the coop. Out here 80% of a chicken's diet can be grass. So if you move them around they're not too destructive to one spot in your yard and they can find like that when they're found a bug or something the rest of them are going after it. Takes them a little while to figure out how to drink from this thing but pretty soon one of them will figure it out and when one on figures out the other ones chickens are big imitators. Once one on figures it out the other ones will soon drink it from it. Most of these are barred rocks. I got barred rocks because they're very cold hardy. I don't want to have to heat the coop in the winter time. They're cold hardy and they're also a good breed for both meat chickens and egg chickens and I got chickens for both reasons for meat and for eggs. There's a red right there maybe Rhode Island red I think. That little nipple there is made specially for watering chickens. I bought it at the hardware store where they sell chickens. So in the morning I just backed this thing up to the door of the chicken coop or to the gate and opened this thing up and heard them in there and they quickly learn what this is all about. They love getting out in the yard and spending all day outside. Now you always have to provide them with some shade so if you have them out where there's nothing but sun you have to throw a little piece of a tarp or something over part of the top of it in order to provide them some shade they should be able to get in the sun if they want the sun or get in the shade if they want to get out of the sun around and throughout the day these chickens will be out here all day long and what I'll do is put it throughout the day every now and then when I think about it I'll come out here and move this over just lift this part up just move it it's nine feet long so generally I'll move it like nine feet at a time. I left about four inches here the reason I did that is because they like to reach through and I feed these chickens by hand and so that's the reason they're always interested in my hand because they think I've got food for them and we didn't with this allows them to reach outside and at the same time adds structural stability I have this stapled on the other side adds structural stability so that they can't our predator or dog or something can't get under there of course I wouldn't leave this out here at night because some predator could dig underneath there but during the daytime when you kind of keep an eye on of course I'll leave them out here during the daytime when I leave because it's some pretty secure I'm not worried about anything getting them in the daytime so there it is They're ready to go in. They're ready for their regular chicken food. Just open this door. These guys don't come out. Okay, Rio has come to help me and when the chickens get loose, Rio does help me. Round them up. Okay, I'm going to he's a shepherd. Sometimes he gets some little enthusiastic. I think I can move Rio. Move, move. Okay, close this. And with a stoking this up and they're ready to go in there and everyone I'm going to sit in there. Okay, we pull this back out of the way. Okay, watch it. Okay, go ahead. And Rio's going to watch here. Make sure nobody gets out. We turn on the better light in here. Here are my bigger chickens eating their food. Here are the smaller ones. Over here is the water. I built this water tray. Chickens have a tendency to make a mess. I built this water tray so that when they spill excess water, I can drain it out over there and keep my wood here dry. Very important to keep your wood dry. Very important to keep it dry. Okay, these are my smaller chickens that we added to our other flock. And there's Rio being a good dog. He's a good, he's a German shepherd. And as the name implies, they were shepherds and you just have to make sure he understands what you want. All right, so when we introduced the smaller chickens in here, I kept them separate in this cage here. And what I have here is an opening that allowed the smaller chickens, what are they getting freaked out about? They're just freaking themselves out. They're still picking on them some and that's the reason they have this escape here. When they get tired of getting picked on, they'll go through here and they have their own area in here. And this is too small for their larger chickens to fit through. So the smaller chicks... And so we keep these smaller ones separated until a few weeks then the other chickens will accept them and after they see them around after a couple of weeks they finally let them in. Here's their sandbox where they do their dusting. Here's the roost I built for them back here. These are their pans for egg laying. Egg laying pans over here. With their ramp they can walk up and down and over here to the ramp. They can walk up here to their boxes. And here we had heat lamp, infrared lamp on the babies. Went back when it was cold. We haven't been using that in a while all along. Put that and hang that back up higher. Get it out of the way and we'll take this temporary pin here out once the babies are fully accepted by the larger chickens. There's a three week difference in their ages. All of these are spring chicks from this year. And just three weeks difference. So how old are the smaller ones now? They're about nine and six weeks. The smaller ones? Six weeks. The smaller ones are about six weeks now. The larger ones are about nine weeks now. And Rio knows he's not allowed to go inside the chicken coop. And actually he's kind of pushing it there putting his paws across the line. He's never hurt a chicken and he does shepherd them. When a chicken gets loose, Rio will bring the chicken back to us. So drive it. Rio will drive the chicken back to us if he can. And if he can't drive the chicken back to us, twice he has held the chicken down without hurting it. And I have been able to get the chicken that he was holding down. So he's a good shepherd. He's a black German shepherd. Well he doesn't just have to get used to it. These are the six week old barred rock chicks. These are the nine week old barred rock. The darker ones are the pullets. The lighter ones are the roosters to be the cockroaches. And there's a red over there. The smaller barred rocks. And I think Rio's getting bored with the situation. He's crossing the line. He's actually not allowed to be beyond that line. But sometimes he pushes the envelope. And sometimes we feed these chickens by hand. So when I get down like this, they come up to see if I have any food. Here's my dusting chickens. They dust themselves. I just have playground sand in there. But they dust themselves to clean themselves, get mites off of them. They're hungry aren't they? They didn't find a whole lot of food when they were tracking around the yard all day. And so when I bring them in here, they're kind of catching up. This is Survival Doc. Reminding you to be prepared or be prepared to be fleeced.