• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Growing Organic Food in Your Backyard

Grow Better Food!
  • Home
  • Start Here
  • Seed Starting
  • Hoop House
    • Grow Tomatoes in a Hoop House
    • Grow Cucumbers in a Hoop House
    • How to Grow Carrots in Winter
    • Winter Sowing Made Better
  • Sponsor
  • Search
  • Subscribe

Chicken Tillers Do The Work

by Bill Brikiatis

Updated: April 15, 2020

What are chicken tillers? No they are not a new brand of tiller.

Chicken tillers are smart people who use their chickens to get ready for planting by having them clear the area of vegetation and cover crop. As an added bonus, chickens fertilize the garden, too.

And you know what? They like doing it.

Let’s take a sec to get the legal words out of the way. This article may contain affiliate links. That means if you click and buy from my partners, I will make a tiny amount of money. This in no way affects my recommendations.

Let chicken tillers do the hard work

When it comes to growing food, I really like the idea of having your animals or the microorganisms do the hard work for you.

I was first favorably exposed to this idea when reading about Joe Salatin and his Polyface Farm.

Since then, I’ve written a related article about encouraging beneficial insects to combat your insect pests and improve pollination. Plus, I wrote about using microorganisms to make kefir.

This is all in the spirit of aligning yourself with natural processes so you don’t have to fight nature.

Another article in this vein is growing cover crop, which discusses a very inexpensive way to improve the soil.

When it comes to cover crop, I’ve always thought that turning it by shovel or power tiller damaged the soil structure and adversely affected the beneficial organisms in the dirt. But I didn’t know a better way to prepare my backyard beds for planting.

The rapid increase in [soil] quality is an order of magnitude beyond anything you can do with a power tiller.

— Harvey Ussery

So it’s no wonder that I was interested when I read about using chickens to “till” cover crop in Harvey Ussery’s The Small-Scale Poultry Flock.

Ussery suggests that chickens are a better way to prepare your beds.

He says that “if you leave [chickens] in one place long enough, they will kill the sod. Ah, but if you leave them in one place long enough, they WILL kill the sod.”

The result of chicken tilling is ground that has:

  • Been stripped of cover crop or other vegetation.
  • A top inch or so of loose dirt.
  • Cover crop roots left in place to provide organic matter for microorganisms and water retention.
  • Been fertilized with high nitrogen chicken manure.

How to till with chickens

You could save a lot of work by:

Step One: Use chicken tillers to prepare a bed of weeds for planting.

Step Two: Plant cover crop after chicken tilling and letting it grow.

Step Three: Shred the cover crop using chicken tillers.

Step Four: Plant your vegetables.

Chicken Tillers
Chickens tillers can take the work out of turning cover crop. (photo credit: Jessica Reeder, Margie Burks)

How Many Chickens?

The big questions are how many chickens will it take and how long before you can plant?

Obviously, the more chickens you use, the less time it will take. The good news is if you have a small garden a few chickens can take care of the task pretty quickly.

My estimate, based on Ussery’s figures, is two birds could easily scratch up 100 square feet in about two to three weeks. It could be more or less depending on the chickens and the ground conditions.

Another thought is that chicken tillers can do more than just live vegetation. They can do any organic matter, for example, compost, horse manure or grass clippings.

Gardening Tips

How to Improve Soil

All the ways I know to improve your soil.

Better than a power tiller

Of course, the downside is it takes weeks for chickens to do what a power tiller can do in a day or two.

But it turns out that a man armed with fossil fuels and heavy machinery can’t do it as well as tiller chickens. Ussery reports that “the rapid increase in [soil] quality is an order of magnitude beyond anything you can do with a power tiller.” In other words, you get the benefits of no till farming, but with slightly turned ground.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the natural way of growing food has turned out to be better than the man-made way.

Related articles you might enjoy:

  1. What is “Deep Litter” in a Chicken Coop?
  2. How Many Chickens Do You Need?
  3. Making Soil – Chop and Drop

Suburban Hobby Farmer is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Pin
Share
Tweet

Filed Under: 3. Expert -- Somewhat Difficult to Complete Tagged With: Chickens, cover crop, featured, soil

Primary Sidebar

Meet the Blogger

Bill Brikiatis

Hello! I’m Bill Brikiatis. I started this website in 2010 to help you get better at growing organic food in your backyard.

I’ve been growing fruits and vegetables for nearly all my life. And I'm over 60.

That’s not to say that I don’t make mistakes. I make plenty, then I write about them so both you and I get better at growing great things to eat.

You can read more about me and Suburban Hobby Farmer on my about page.

Most Popular on SHF

  1. How to Get Free Seeds from the U.S. Government. It's Easy If You Know How
  2. How to Use Chicken Manure Pellets in the Vegetable Garden
  3. Which Seed Starting Mix is Best? I Tested Them
  4. What Are the Benefits of Pruning Tomato Plants?
  5. I've Used a Rain Barrel Downspout Diverter for 10 years. Here's What I Know.
  6. Grow Millions of Cucumbers in a Hoop House
  7. I Shopped for Hoop House Kits. A Review of the One I Bought.
  8. Do Tumbling Compost Bins Work?
  9. Can you plant potatoes in the fall? Absolutely!
  10. What are the Best Potting Benches for Vegetable Growers?

Search This Site for Articles

Growing Tomatoes

Growing Tomatoes

Learn Everything I Know About Growing Tomatoes

Extending the Growing Season

  1. A Hoop House is a Tomato Growing Machine
  2. Coldframe Kits Make It Easy to Extend the Growing Season
  3. Grow a Million Cucumbers in a Hoop House
  4. I Shopped for Hoop House Kits. A Review of the Three I Considered
  5. Growing Salad Greens in Winter. Here's How to Do It
  6. Better Tomatoes with Walls O Water
  7. How to Grow Carrots in Winter
  8. Winter Sowing Made Better

Improving Soil

  1. How to Use Chicken Manure Pellets
  2. Three Important Soil Building Techniques
  3. Grasscycling and Composting Grass Clippings
  4. What is "Deep Litter" in a Chicken Coop?
  5. Why Grow Cover Crop and Which Ones?
  6. Mulching Raised Garden Beds
  7. Five Gardening Ideas from Building Soils Naturally
  8. Should You Use Neptune's Harvest Liquid Fertilizer?
  9. How to Use Aquarium Fish Water to Fertilize Plants
  10. Using Chop & Drop to Improve Your Soil
  11. How to Improve Your Soil
  12. What is OMRI? Why Should Organic Gardners Care?
  13. Winter Ground Covers for Vegetable Gardens

Collecting Water with Rain Barrels & Downspout Diverters

  1. My Automatic Downspout Diverter
  2. Rain Barrel Downspout Diverters
  3. Fixing an Overflowing Rain Barrel
  4. Oatey Mystic Rainwater Collection System / Downspout Diverter

Composting Articles

  1. Do Tumbling Compost Bins Work?
  2. How to Compost Faster
  3. Worm Composting Not So Easy
  4. Worm Composting Not So Easy, Part II
  5. Worm Composting Not So Easy, Part II
  6. Free, 77-page Worm Composting Guide
  7. Grasscycling and Composting Grass Clippings
  8. The Best Worm Food
  9. Making Compost in a Chicken Coop

Footer

My Recommendations

  • Start Here
  • Subscribe
  • Things I Like

SHF Info

  • Advertising Info
  • Affiliate Policy
  • Article Sponsorship
  • Privacy

Blogger

  • About
  • Contact

© Suburban Hobby Farmer 2020