Coop Size and Insulation?

[brookwoodpat]

Thanks, Elderoo, that's helpful.

Like mylilchix, I am trying to decide what coop/run to get. My yard is an acre and half, and about an acre or so of it is fully fenced, partly with 2x4 welded wire, five feet high and part with 6 foot privacy fence. It is well shrubbed. The fenced part where the chickens are is probably 100 feet wide by 330 feet long. I also have a German Shepherd in the same yard who keeps the yard (so far) ground predator free.

For now, for summer, I've just been letting the chickens -- 10 seven-eight week old chickens -- free range. The teenagers' coop ( a chick-n-barn for now) has about 24 square feet of "pen" space attached, but they are let out in the morning and penned up at night, so they only use the "pen" from the time they wake up until I let them out into the yard. Come fall, when there's not so much leaf cover, I am sure I will have to build a large covered yard for them, but right now, I just haven't seen the need. The most difficult part of their free ranging is that (in spite of all the talk about how chickens need so much space), they all hang out in a tight gang, and spend too much of their time hanging out around my porch. OR whereever I am. They follow me around. I have a 12 X 25 foot screen porch on posts and a 12 X 25 foot deck, and they hang out under that, as well as a ton of rose and berry bushes and other shrubs and tree cover and they spend all their time mostly under cover and usually close by. Shooing them out of the porch (and occasionally they come in the house) has been the biggest annoyance. I also have five 2 week old chickens that are outside in a 4 X 3 wire cage during the day and inside at night. So, unless I sell some or lose any to predators, I'll have 15 total.

I live in MD, so the winters aren't usually bad. Though we usually get a few weeks of bitterly cold temps (below 20 F) most of the time it is above freezing and often mild. Some winters we do have snow cover all winter, but it is rare.

I'm trying to decide what coop and run I need for these conditions and if I keep all 15 pullets. I am not handy, so I will have to buy a coop, or have one built for me. Since you let your chickens out to free range most of the time, and you have similar numbers and yard size to me, and are much more experienced with chickens, what do you recommend? What size is your shelter, for example?

pat

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
As much insulation as is feasible; but then also build as much VENTILATION as you can. You can close down whatever you don't need. It is ventilation, not lack of insulation, that takes care of warm humid air

Pat

 

[Davaroo]

Pat and I often sing the same song, each in our own way (I dont know if that's 'great minds think alike' or 'share the same delusions'

)

And shes right about the ventilation. For the record call me Mr. Ventilation. Even in the dead of winter you cannot have too much fresh air in the coop. Perhaps more so, then, when our natural inclination is to shut everything up tight.

 

[mylilchix]

For ventilation I was planning on doing 2 triangles at the peak of the roof on the south and north sides. I'd hinge the triangles, so they could be closed and use hardware cloth as the screen. Does that sound about right?

Should I insulate all 4 walls or just do the ones that get the most wind? We live in Denver's Front Range foothills. Winter temps are usually in the 20s, but we can have huge temp swings. I'm more concerned about the snow.

Sonja

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
I'd put lots more. On all 4 walls. Better to have and not need, than to need and not have and thus be in the position of hauling out the Sawzall in the middle of January and hacking great jaggedy holes in your nicely finished coop

Consider leaving a gap under the eaves on the other 2 sides (design permitting) that is hardwarecloth-screened and has a hinged, weatherrstripped panel that you can hook up to close it.

Having vents in all 4 walls not only gives you more ventilation capacity, total, it also allows you the great convenience of being able to shut off the upwind vents in a snowstorm, thereby reducing the amount of cold air and snow (aka 'dampness') swirling into the coop.

Should I insulate all 4 walls or just do the ones that get the most wind? We live in Denver's Front Range foothills. Winter temps are usually in the 20s, but we can have huge temp swings. I'm more concerned about the snow.

Insulate all 4 walls. Heck, if temperature really concerns you, insulate the ceiling too (floor is probably not needed as long as you have ample bedding). The insulation retards OVERALL heat loss, which will happen across ALL of the coop not just the upwind side. The less heat loss, the more you can afford to lose chicken-generated heat thru open ventilation slots, which will mean a drier, more fresh-aired and healthier coop.

JMO,

Pat​

 

[mylilchix]

Thank you all for helping a newbie out!

This seems like it should be easier than I'm making it, just want to make sure our hens will be safe and sound next winter. Where we live we could have 70s in January or 4 feet snows.

Sonja

 

[thepone]

that's funny, the space requirement conversation. I know it's legit but it makes me laugh every night when I go to shut the girls into their nice big coop and all 12 of those knuckleheads are piled into one 15"x15" nesting box. At least in our chicken land, .005 square inches per bird seems to be doing the trick.

oh, I should mention that they're not full grown knuckleheads (but getting darn near). I think they're about 10 weeks old now.

 

[Davaroo]

In a private message, I suggeted to our OP that the space requirements we swear by originated with commercial methods, over half a century ago. It doesn't mean that they are absolute, nor that they cannot be circumvented.

What happens, though, is that people use the idea to cram as many birds into the available space at hand, justifying it with these, or other numbers.
Invariably, they end up with a management problem on some level by doing so.
I learned this through luck or "the hard way," if you prefer. Since then, I've maintained that we do ourselves, and the birds, a dis-service by sticking so rigidily to these numbers. At the end of the day, it boils down to "Fewer Birds Are More."

The fact that the knuckleheads choose to cram together has nothing to do with our stewardship of them. By their very nature as knuckleheads, they dont know what is good for them. It has always been so with knuckleheads and other fools.
It falls to us, then, to make things right.

 

[patandchickens]

Exactly what Elderoo says.

I would add that the fact that the 'knuckleheads' may choose to smash themselves together does not mean they don't need more space available. First, because two important factors determining the need for space are sanitation and ventilation, and whether snuggled together or spread out they create the same amount of poo, ammonia fumes and water vapor. And second, because just as they sometimes want togetherness they sometimes also need space. Like for instance when two of them are not getting along at the moment.

I mean, *people* often choose to squish tightly together at times. Consider a concert, or a family sittin' on the sofa watching tv. Heck, consider how much bed space a married couple who're on friendly terms with each other at the moment will occupy, if you know what I mean

Does that mean there's no market for apartments of more than 300 sq ft and bed sizes larger than twin-sized?

I find it Highly Suspicious and Suggestive that the numbers widely quoted in books (and therefore by people who've read those books) seem to map pretty exactly onto three figures FROM COMMERCIAL CHICKEN FARMING:

10 sq ft per hen was the minimum space found to work in the early part of the 1900s during the fad for tightly-closed poorly-ventilated coops.

3-4 sq ft per hen is the minimum space found to work, historically, in more-open coops with good ventilation.

1.5-2 sq ft per hen is the modern minimum space recommendation, with forced-air ventilation and improved sanitation and cage design.

I have never had the ambition or time to try to track down the appearance of these numbers in the literature to see on what EXACTLY they were based, but it sounds from the way they are described in slightly-older (not Old) books etc like they're based primarily on air quality issues - ammonia, dampness - and propensity for disease to develop. I do not know to what extent behavioral problems like picking/cannibalism shaped these numbers. But for DARN sure they do not seem to come from any significant emphasis on what makes chickens *happy*, insofar as we can tell how happy a chicken is.

(Hey David, do you know more about this, i.e. the development of those three types of #s for stocking density recommendations? You have clearly read more old books than I have)

It just makes me go Hmmm and tend to believe my own eyes and judgement more than some number in some book.

JMHO,

Pat

 

[Davaroo]

(Hey David, do you know more about this, i.e. the development of those three types of #s for stocking density recommendations? You have clearly read more old books than I have

10 sq ft per hen was the minimum space found to work in the early part of the 1900s during the fad for tightly-closed poorly-ventilated coops.

3-4 sq ft per hen is the minimum space found to work, historically, in more-open coops with good ventilation.

1.5-2 sq ft per hen is the modern minimum space recommendation, with forced-air ventilation and improved sanitation and cage design.)

I don’t know precise details for this Pat, but a little history "off the top of my head" might help enlighten those interested in this. Forgive me if I am not long on hard numbers here, but I have dutifully avoided too much of that in my studies. I'm a student of the KISS Principle, after all.

The declining numbers you cite came as a result of the shift to indoor intensive rearing, as you mention, which went roughly as follows.

Large commercial concerns in 1900 were based on range rearing. Robinson, Kains, Hastings, Botsford and others of the time all talk about this at length. In those times, 500 birds per acre was considered a gross maximum. That’s 87 sq ft/bird. Fewer birds were seen as better, as even these numbers were very intensive and hard on the land itself.

Cooping methods like the Philo plan and others were fads, a response to a desire to do away with modern ways and bring the country to the urban world. These small scale cooping plans were less concerned with overcrowding as they were with making close confinement work for the small scale keeper. They ultimately faded as the need for "sunshine, fresh air and green feeds" were re-discovered in the 1920's.

Indoor rearing was thought to be a failure primarily because of confinement and the resulting respiratory and vector born diseases in poultry. There was no real way to intervene with these things then, on a large enough scale. Even if you could, markets were still closely tied to the producers. The overall effort wasn’t towards increasing the size of the operation, but rather the quality of the bird and poultry products.

So, everyone was invited to have a few chickens in the backyard, kept simply and well. I have a few small coop designs from the period, designed for 5 chickens. Each one has the advantage of openness, mobility and much fresh air space for just a few small birds.

These "fresh air" methods were the standard until the commercial rearing methods we now despise got going after WWII. Then, technology became the God of Poultry. We found we could do more with less space - if we only did it for a little while. Transportation also pitched in after the war. Roads and rail, trucking and a displaced nation on the move all played their part. Markets hungry for poultry products could now be hundreds, even thousands of miles away from the producer. It suddenly behooved the producer to get bigger, fast.

Genetic mutants that grew to huge size in 8 weeks were the norm for the meat market. Hens that laid an egg a day in a cage the size of a small TV were the norm in the egg market.
Mixed in to this were several experiments with chemistry enhancements, most notably antibiotics and hormone treatments, designed to enhance the efficiency of production. Thankfully, modern food purity laws have all but done away with these things.

This was all based on efficiency of the individual bird and, of course, efficiency of scale. That is the "buzzword" that best personifies the modern age - efficiency. Thousands, even tens of thousands of birds, all raised in controlled indoor housing complexes were seen as not only a need, but the wave of the future. These methods were soon developed and refined by the end of the 1960's and are still predominant today.

It is inevitable that the space for chickens decreases, as the need for more and more poultry goods increases. The downside for us is that so much of this commercial “efficiency lore” has filtered down to our level. And there is the paradox:

A chicken should have unlimited space to roam and feed at will. However, if they are to serve us, we must control them, often closely. Somewhere a balance must be struck. I prefer it be on the side of fewer birds in the most space possible.​