A Chicken Tractor To Call Home

[Dino] didn’t want to keep the baby chickens cooped up when he was at work, but he didn’t want them to escape, or become a juicy treat, either. His solution was to build this chicken tractor. It’s a complete chicken ecosystem with wheels, kind of like a double-wide trailer for our feathered friends. On one end is a small coop that contains food, water, and an incandescent light bulb for heat. The other end is a chicken-wire box that lets the young birds stretch their legs and get some fresh air.

It’s easy to see the wheels which flip down when [Dino] needs to move the contraption. Like we said, he puts it out when he goes to work, selecting different parts of the yard so that the grass gets evenly fertilized. It’s a nice solution if you don’t have enough area to dedicate to an automated chicken coop.

We’ve embedded [Dino’s] video after the break. He covers the beginning and end of the build, and fills the middle of the video with a time-lapse recording of the construction process.

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Global Village Construction Set

The Global Village Construction Set is an open hardware initiative aimed at sharing tool-building knowledge. They believe that to build civilization you need forty basic tools, eight of which they’ve already prototyped and made available on their wiki. Included in these is a tractor which reminds us of a beefy bobcat. It has a soil pulverizing attachment which can be used to break down soil and feed it to their soil brick compressor. That machine spits out compressed dirt bricks which are used as building materials. They’re stacked on concrete footings and then limewashed to protect the un-baked bricks from water erosion. Does this remind anyone else of real-life Minecraft?

Above you can see a group of Open Source Ecology developers showing off bricks in front of the machine that made them, with the tractor/soil pulverizer to the right. Take a look at the videos about the construction set and brickmaking after the break. And learn more by perusing their weblog.

If you think an apocalypse is on the way you might want to buddy-up with these folks. They seem to know what they’re doing.

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