How to Plan your Chicken Coops Right

For beginning farmers, a good rule of thumb to follow is to first plan and then execute your chicken coops before even ordering your flock.  Chicken coops are essential to productive chicken raising, because they shelter your chickens.  When your birds are housed in inadequate chicken coops, they tend to become stressed, which leads to poor weight gain, poor egg-laying, and infighting.  Good chicken coops allow your flock enough space, light and air.  In this post, we discuss how you can plan your chicken coops right.

For every chicken that you plan to stock, you need to allocate at least four square feet of space each.  Putting too many together in a small space will make them more susceptible to diseases.  Plus, cramped quarters tend to encourage fighting, which leads to injury and even deaths.  Bottom line is, if you only have a small space, you shouldn’t get so many poultry.

Before you decide on the design of your chicken coops, you should first find an ideal spot on which to build.  You should choose an area that is level, not sloped; that way, the ground will have good drainage when it rains or snows.  For one thing, chickens get foot fungi when they are constantly exposed to moist ground.  Secondly, a sloped ground will eventually be subject to erosion, since the constant ground scratching will kill off the vegetation.

You also need to strike the perfect balance in terms of distance from your own living quarters,.  You want the chicken coops to be close enough so that you can see to the chickens several times a day.  At night, when predators are likely to attack, you should be able to hear distress and commotion.  At the same time, you don’t want the chickens to be right next door, or the noise and the smell could really bother you.  If you will be keeping a rather large flock, including some roosters, considering placing the coops about 75 to 100 feet away.

If you intend to enclose the coops together with a poultry yard or a chicken run,  your fencing should be at least 6 feet tall, with support posts staked in at a maximum distance of 10 feet from one post to the next.  Do not forget to trim any trees or shrubs that may be enclosed inside the fencing, else your birds can use the branches as a roost for jumping or flying out of the fencing.

Chicken Coops Tips

Chicken coops do not necessarily have to be made of expensive materials.  In fact, you can use just about any materials you have lying around.  Stay clear, however, of materials that have been treated with creosote and other toxic chemicals.  Note that chicken coops made from fibre board, pasteboard and metal will soon succumb to moisture sooner or later.