An autonomous chicken tractor that houses one thousand pasture-raised birds. Each morning it rolls forward the length of itself — onto a fresh patch of grass — opens the doors at sunrise, closes them at dusk, and pages the rancher only when something's wrong.
The premise
The Roost is the first piece of physical hardware in the L1fe AI program. It is a 1,000-bird tractor on continuous tracks with a vision system on every corner, a hydraulic floor that rotates the litter into the field as fertilizer, and a charging coil under the pasture that tops up the battery every night. The handler interacts with it through the same radio app the cowboys use for HerdWatch — nothing new to learn.
In the field
The wheels live inside the chassis, so The Roost sits low to the ground. At first light, it rolls forward the length of itself — quiet, deliberate, no hurry. The flock walks onto fresh forage. Yesterday's litter feeds the grass behind them.
01 · Vision
Six cameras stitched into a continuous view of the flock. The model tracks each bird as an individual — flagging bullying, pecking-order shifts, and the rare sick layer before she'd ever show clinical signs. The handler sees a ranked alert list, never a wall of footage.
02 · Litter
A hydraulic belt cycles the litter through a filtered drop onto whichever stretch of grass The Roost is rolling over. The pasture gets fertilized as the flock eats. The handler never picks up a muck rake.
03 · Egg lift
Each nesting box drops onto a microfiber belt that walks the eggs to a chilled holding tray at the rear. The handler picks up a single tray per Roost per day — typically 850 graded eggs in five minutes flat.
By the numbers
Doors open at first light. The flock walks onto fresh forage every morning.
Auto-close at sundown. Perimeter strobe on. Predator guard armed until first light.
Why we built it
Every pastured-egg operation we admire is bottlenecked by the same labor wall: someone has to drag a coop, fix a fence, scrape a litter pan, find the bird that didn't come in at dusk. The Roost is our answer. It does the parts a rancher should never have had to do — the cold-morning parts, the bent-back parts — and leaves the flock-keeping to the human who knows the birds.
“We do not want robots that replace ranchers. We want tools that make ranchers the right answer for the next hundred years.”— Founder · L1fe Farms · L1fe AI board
Fall 2026 · East Texas pilot
We're not taking orders yet. The first build cohort runs on our own East Texas pasture through summer 2026. Leave your email and you'll be the first to hear when the wait-list opens — no marketing, just one note when reservations go live.