Day range vs. chicken tractors

One intriguing chapter in Raising Poultry on Pasture reported on a side by side comparison of the two main ways of raising poultry on pasture --- the chicken tractor versus day range.  The chicken tractor system was popularized by Joel Salatin and consists of keeping chickens in portable chicken coop/run combos that are moved to a new patch of ground every day.  Andy Lee is the father of the day range model, which traditionally houses chickens in normal coops but rotates the birds through pastures radiating out from the coop like daisy petals, usually taking advantage of electrified poultry netting to make paddocks that can hold the birds for a few days or weeks at a time.

Kip Glass chose to raise half of his broilers in chicken tractors and half on day range and kept careful notes of the weight gain of the birds and the time spent tending to his flocks.  In terms of management time, both systems clocked in together, although chicken tractor care takes a few minutes every day while rotating day range paddocks and cleaning out the deep bedding takes a bit more time a bit less often.  Manure management was very different for the two systems since the day range birds concentrated over half of their feces in the deep bedding of their coop while the tractored birds spread their manure more evenly over the pasture --- which system is better in this regard will depend on your land management goals.

When it comes to the bottom line, most large-scale chicken producers are probably interested in how efficiently the broilers put on weight, and here the tractored birds won 50% of the time, the day range birds 25% of the time, and the two systems tied 25% of the time.  The tendency of tractored birds to weigh more in Glass's study is probably due to the location of the feed troughs --- right in front of their noses for the tractored birds versus out in the sun for the day range birds.  I suspect that moving the feed trough inside for the day range birds might have evened out those differences.

For smaller chicken keepers like us, the bottom line is less important than the health of the birds, so I was interested to see that Kip Glass noted some health differences between the two systems.  His day range birds were cleaner and drier since they had the shelter of the coop to fall back on, which made the chickens healthier.  We've noticed the same effect when we changed our flock over from tractors to pasture --- our birds can now decide whether they want to brave the snow or mud or whether they'd rather spend the day napping in the coop.  Everyone who comes to visit remarks on how happy our chickens appear in our day range setup, and I have to say that I agree.