If one of your corner building measures 8x8, that's 64 sq ft, and what would (per the typical rule of thumb) be considered adequate house for 16 birds (assuming it also had 16 linear feet of roost (likely as two 8' bars, ad slightly differing height), at least 16 sq ft of all season free ventilation, and four nesting boxes.
By the same thumb rules, a hoop coop "run" 8' wide and 20' long would be 160 sq ft, or 10 sq ft of run/bird would check off that box. Longer is just more run space, and "social lubricant".
I suspect, for reasons of garden space, that you will have more run than you "need", based on the size of your corner buildings - but that will make it easy to segregate flocks at need. Its a very flexible design you are working on, and while the flock remains small, you could even rotate them thru runs, reseeding behind you, to give the grasses, etc a chance to recover periodically.
Oh, I'm glad you posted this... I was mis-mathing my coops.
The beautiful thing about this setup is that the corner buildings can be extended either 'in' or 'out' to balance with run size. If you do it in 4 ft increments (panel width) you can fairly easily calculate chicken count based on desired garden size and how much run you prefer per chicken (10 is standard, but I do 16, which means 2 chickens per 4 foot cattle panel of run.
If keeping each coop 8 feet wide, you can replace one cattle panel 'run' with 4 feet of coop... (you can also build outward as much as you want, obviously, but I like the square).
Each 4x8 segment is 32sq ft, thus supports 8 chickens as coop, and 3 chickens as run (at 10sq, 2 if you prefer 16 sq... I actually use 2).
Attached a diagram to make this easier... you also need to add doors to the coops for cleaning, but also for releasing chickens into garden at end of season, etc.
And to through in a huge wrench for me, my wife and kids just chimed in.
I was planning on making my 'flex' corner an exterior facing covered area for alpaca with a secondary human/small tractor entrance into the garden... but my family now is asking me to make one run for rabbits. This will reduce the size of coop 2's run... which is okay. The smaller coop can be used for problem chickens, or maybe breeding chickens?
The only issue is I've never raised rabbits so now I need to figure out how to keep them from burrowing into the garden, keep them happy, and design a suitable hutch. Unless I can talk them out of it.
Anyway... point is, this design is extremely flexible. Easy to modify size of buildings and run to need, as long as you do the math before you start. Also, you don't need to build it all at once. Coop and 1 run first, then add a shed, add another run, etc.
Having never seen this design before, am I allowed to dub it a Chicken Moop? Too corny?
OK, I don't pity them even a little. Chicken Protein!
