Height of poop boards in order to hang feeders below

[idahoannie]

My chicks are too little to measure them and work this backwards. We are building their coop now and want to hang the feeder and waterer under the poop board /counter which goes under their roost. I am trying to figure out how high the poop boards need to be to allow adequate space below for the feeders. This may be a dumb question because I know the feeders will vary in size etc. but I'm hoping someone can give me an approximate height? The chicks are Wyandottes. Lots of height in the coop but I also don't know if you can get your roosts too high for the birds to like it. This is my first batch of chickens!

 

[Howard E]

I've got some headroom and my roost are now about 4' off the deck. The birds, including SLW, can make that jump easy enough. Maybe not when they are older, but they can now. If not, you can add an intermediate rung later on. So it could be that high, with droppings board about 6" to 8" below that, and then hang your feeder below that. If you put in an eye hook, you can vary the height of the feeder by using a short piece of line to hang it with. Just raise it up and down as needed. Low to the ground when they are little and still pretty low to the ground as they get older. Size of the feeder will also matter, and that would be dictated by the number of birds you have. If you use a round hanging feeder, do get the type with cone shaped lid or get the optional lid. Keeps the birds, and their droppings, off the feeder.

 

[RobertPlamondon]

I've had Wyandottes roost in rafters 10-12 feet above the floor, so you can probably cross the concept of "roosts that are too high for the chickens" off your list of worries.

There's a tendency for roosts to get hugely in the way of chicken management, because they tend to block off a big percentage of the coop, and people are rightly reluctant to put stuff under the roosts. Without droppings boards, anything under the roosts gets bombed with manure; with droppings boards, you have to deal with droppings boards. Either way, access to the stuff under the roosts is compromised.

Probably, by now, every conceivable solution has been tried! I recently came across a picture of a feed trough that pulled out like a drawer for refilling, so it was tucked under the droppings board while in use, but out in the open for filling.

Another method is to partition the coop into two parts: the chicken room and the human room, with access to the nests and feed hoppers on both sides of the partition. Both ideas solve the problem that the roosts overhang the equipment and make access difficult for humans. A halfway version of this solution is to provide access to the feeders and nests from outside the coop,which sounds great when you imagine a pleasant fall afternoon, but probably not so much with wind-driven sleet.

On the whole, I'd recommend roosts at 4-5 feet off the ground if you need to put things under them. That lets you duck under them if you need to, without making them so high you can't get at the hens when you need to. But I'd arrange it so ducking under them isn't something you have to do routinely, but only if there's an egg or a sick chicken in the corner. You might consider putting a slanted roof over any equipment that's under the roosts, rather than droppings boards stretching across the whole area. There's two schools of thought about droppings boards. See my droppings board FAQ.

 

[aart]

Height of roost can depend on foot print(width and length) of coop,
they need room to spread their wings to fly/jump down from a high roost without crashing into something.

My poop boards are about 36" off floor, for ease of use for me the keeper, and I use a 5 gal bucket feeder hanging underneath.
But I have a ramp down from boards for the big fatties that don't like to fly/jump...my coop is only 6' wide.