3 Essential Things to Consider When Building a Chicken Coop
Thinking of building (or buying) a fancy chicken coop? Go for it, but be sure to consider these 3 essential elements first…
There are hundreds of fancy chicken coops and chicken coop designs available to today’s homesteader, but let’s face it – your chickens don’t really care about all that! In fact, there are just 3 main considerations that, for the most part, will determine whether your chickens are happy and healthy.
Before you decide whether your chicken coop will have a pergola or turrets, solar-powered window vents, or Victorian lace scalloping, you might want to spend a little time considering these 3 important aspects that will keep your chickens happy and safe…
1.) Right-Sizing Your Coop
As Marjory Wildcraft tells us in her Grow Your Own Groceries video series, you will need about four square feet of space per chicken in the coop if they will be allowed to forage outdoors most of the day.
If your chickens will be confined full-time, then you need to add an additional 10 square feet to that number. If you have an 8-foot-by-8-foot coop, or 64 square feet of chicken space, you can protect 16 chickens for overnight lodging and only 4 chickens for full-time living quarters.
But as Marjory also points out in her video, a suburban backyard may be best suited for about two or three hens if you intend to allow your chickens unfettered access to your landscape.
2.) Predator Protection
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Suburban development has placed pressure on wildlife to seek new habitats and find alternate ways of feeding themselves. As a result, suburban areas are sometimes the most predator-prone places of all.
Add to that the number of backyard pets eager to express their genetic history (i.e., dogs descended from wolves, house cats from jungle cats), and you’ve got lots of incentive to place priority on building a rock-solid coop.
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Planning All-Around Predator Protection
…As you are planning your coop, you will want to consider predator protection overhead, underground, and all around (e.g., windows and eaves).
This includes measures like the following:
- Burying wire mesh (better than chicken wire) underground around the perimeter of your coop or placing it underneath moveable coops, over windows, around eaves, and over any openings otherwise not protected
- Building a floor in a fixed coop or elevating a coop off the ground to deter diggers
- The use of electric fencing, motion-sensing lights, or even a well-trained livestock guardian dog (LGD)
- The use of overhead netting if flying predators (e.g., hawks, owls, magpies) are a big concern—or keeping chickens confined until they are full sized
You may also want to keep separate storage and feeding areas and make egg collection a frequent activity.
Many predators, such as bears, snakes, and opossums, are more interested in your chicken feed or eggs than in eating your chickens. By removing red-carpet invites like a feed trough housed in your coop and by emptying nest boxes daily, you can discourage some predators.
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3.) Poop (Ventilation and Cleaning)
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This stuff doesn’t come out as lovely, garden-friendly manure.
It’s as rank and nasty as our stuff is until the freshness dissipates, which—depending on degree of soppiness and external humidity—can be minutes to hours.
How poop is treated in the collection process also determines whether it is useful manure or nuisance “feces” (as it is often referred to in city ordinances on chicken keeping).
Managing the Smell
Chickens may have just as many olfactory senses as human beings, so managing poop odors is as important for your chickens as it is for you (and your neighbors).
For indoor areas, good ventilation is key.
- You can use wire-mesh covered windows or vents for this purpose and open coop doors during the day. Placing windows on opposite sides of the coop with access to the prevailing winds can be helpful.
- However, keep in mind, ventilation is good, but drafts in extremely cold weather are bad.
- For cold-weather areas, avoid placing ventilation openings directly across from nest boxes or roost bars.
- For warmer climates, feel free to take advantage of cross breezes over roost bars. Or better yet, opt for an open coop, with plenty of fresh air for your chickens’ olfactory pleasure.
Other ways to minimize poop odors include adding a layer of fresh litter to poop-catching surfaces (e.g., straw, wood shavings, or cardboard chips on floors) or using a square head spade to scrape up manure and ladle it into a lidded bucket on a daily basis.
Alternatively, if you use a chicken tractor instead of a coop, you may need to move your chickens once or twice daily to keep them from spending the day standing in their own poop or creating problems in your soil from excessive nitrogen and phosphorous.
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Coop Design With Cleanup in Mind
So, an important consideration related to poop and coop design is easy cleanup.
If considering an elevated coop, it’s a good idea to bring it up to waist height and make sure you can reach all parts of the coop by bending at the waist rather than hunching. This way you can use a hand shovel, dust pan, and brush for easy cleaning. In larger elevated coops, this may require more doors for comfortable cleaning access.
A coop that is tall enough to stand up in with easy-to-sweep floors or pitchfork-accessible areas also works. And the fewer unnecessary horizontal poop-catching surfaces, the better.
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If chicken poop accumulates in outdoor run areas or heavily trafficked chicken hangouts, occasionally adding some kind of mulch material or hosing down the area to dilute and distribute can help.
You can also minimize poop plots by using movable pens or paddocks to direct chicken activity.
Once you’ve established how much space you need for the number of chickens you want to keep and how you want to manage the two chicken biggies of poop and predation, you can move on to choosing the coop style that works best for you.
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