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Mobile Poultry Coops for Homesteaders: Solving 3 Key Problems
If you’re a new homesteader raising pastured poultry without access to electricity—or struggling with brooder space and mobility—you’re not alone. When I started, I faced those same issues. That’s why the Prairie Schooner, a mobile poultry structure, changed everything. In this post, I’ll share how it solved three major challenges for my flock and helped inspire a movement in portable chicken coops.
3 Problems Solved by the Prairie Schooner
1. Lack of Portability in Chicken Housing
I was 100% committed to grassfed and pasture rotations but I’d given away the 8 Salatin pens I made because I couldn’t transport them the short distance between Grandma’s farm and a new place of my own. One Prairie Schooner could hold almost as many birds as my eight 10 x 12 pens.
2. Replacing a Burned-Out Brooder
My brooder burned – a huge disaster – and a new brooder was needed.
3. Raising Chickens Without Electricity
No electricity. The new farm was bought from an Amishman and had no electricity. So heat lamps – the cause of the fire – were a double no go. A Prairie Schooner out in a field with a propane tank could do the job.
A New Kind of Mobile Poultry Coop
Joel Salatin’s neighbor and friend Tim Shell, who had a sister near me in Jamesport, had come up with a PVC structure for his laying hens. I talked to him about it and set out to copy it exactly. But use it for broilers.
It was a huge success as both a brooder and a home base for a daisy petal type rotation around the hub. But I dreaded moving it.
Scaling the Solution: Moving the Prairie Schooner
We finally figured out how to move them after Grazeland Farms hired me to help with their pasture design and multi-species operation. We used a team of Belgians, Bill and Bruce, and an evener bar and chained two Schooners together in their 8000 hen, 22-Schooner operation.
Tim called it a PVC eggmobile. I wanted a meaningful name. I envisioned these dotting the countryside, their white hoops looking like the intrepid pioneer covered wagons known as prairie schooners. There was the obvious shared optimism and determination between old time and modern homesteaders. I have always felt a manifest destiny about pastured poultry similar to the popular – but flawed – manifest destiny of American expansion in the 1800s from sea to sea.
Why the Name ‘Prairie Schooner’?
Prairie Schooner was the obvious name. Movement across the prairies was implied; indeed, schooners would help create modern prairies. A crate or two of chickens was a must on each covered wagon. Ours – full of chickens – mimicked the density and positive environmental impact of the Prairie Chicken.
Lessons Learned and Design Evolution
Although that prototype solved a lot of problems at once it was not without flaws of its own. One big one actually. PVC gets very brittle in the cold. The lifespan was too short.
At the time a brilliant young man in Arkansas had a vision of a cooperative pastured poultry growers association. Impressed when we met Cody Hopkins at a Southern Sustainable Ag Working Group conference, I later visited and filmed his operation. He was a super star of home processing and asked us to build a rotisserie kill station the same week Joel Salatin did.
Cody teamed with Heifer Project International (my Christmas go-to gift for years) on funding his Grass Roots Co-op. Learn more about Grass Roots Co-op here →
We contacted an Amish (of course) greenhouse builder in Missouri and asked him to narrow the uprights from 6’ apart to 5’ and design skids and bottom bracing to drag the thing around.
The Legacy of the Prairie Schooner
The Prairie Schooner was the first commercially available mobile poultry structure. Fifteen years later you can find dozens of mobile coops for sale, most pulled by hand, some with self-moving robotics, some by truck or tractor like the schooner. There was indeed a manifest destiny for these Prairie Schooners!