I've been where you are. A coyote was eating a free chicken breakfast every other morning for a while from whatever chicken flew down from the trees about 8 years ago. My suggestion.......forget about free-range. Coop at night in Fort Knox, chicken style and let out by day under your supervision or under a covered run. Free-range is good for what it is good for, but if your chickens keep disappearing, you are raising birds for the local wildlife.
My coop is 20 X 40 ft and the covered run is also 20 X 40 and thats for 59 birds at present. So I allow them to run by day in either the garden or the goat pen which are both 90 X 100 ft. Some would say that is a lot of room, but I have to plan well, because they will eat every blade of grass. I don't consider them to be free-range, but perhaps a lot of people would. But I feel I need to confine them. Why??? Because I have spent enough hours of my life on Easter egg hunts. Because I have lost 7 times more birds to preditors than I now possess. Because I have killed enough roosters for chasing children and even jumping on a child and I don't need to have that happen again.
Free-range......I've been there and done that and it has its good points, but there are drawbacks too. And preditors, like coyotes, are way up there on the list of drawbacks. Don't get me wrong.....I wouldn't raise them in cages either. There has got to be a happy medium.
My coop is 20 X 40 ft and the covered run is also 20 X 40 and thats for 59 birds at present. So I allow them to run by day in either the garden or the goat pen which are both 90 X 100 ft. Some would say that is a lot of room, but I have to plan well, because they will eat every blade of grass. I don't consider them to be free-range, but perhaps a lot of people would. But I feel I need to confine them. Why??? Because I have spent enough hours of my life on Easter egg hunts. Because I have lost 7 times more birds to preditors than I now possess. Because I have killed enough roosters for chasing children and even jumping on a child and I don't need to have that happen again.
Free-range......I've been there and done that and it has its good points, but there are drawbacks too. And preditors, like coyotes, are way up there on the list of drawbacks. Don't get me wrong.....I wouldn't raise them in cages either. There has got to be a happy medium.
