how many chickens in this coop

[sugarbush]

Quote:
As a kid I had a job emptying the cages on an egg farm and refilling them with point of lay pullets. It was a 12000 bird farm, but felt like millions.

4 birds per 1 ft x 2 ft cage.

I also collected eggs there a few times when the auto collector broke down. My brother would take one row and I the next and we would race to see who could collect each 300 ft row fastest.

 

[Ridgerunner]

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I don't know where you are located and whether you can free range them all year long or will they be cooped up in the camper in the winter. I'm guessing you have full sized chickens, not banties.

If you are far enough north or at high enough elevation where it cools off at night, you can probably get away with 8" of roost length per chicken. If you are on the Gulf Coast or where the nights are pretty hot and sticky, you might want to give them 12" per length. Roosts need to be 12" from the wall and separated horizontally by 12". The chickens bunch up to stay warm or spread out to cool off. You can do the math with your 29 birds.

If you feed and water outside the coop, you save space in the coop plus reduce the amount of poop in the coop that you have to manage. You don't want them roosting over feed or water as they tend to poop a lot when they sleep. Same for nesting boxes, though you can cover the boxes and may be OK. The rule of thumb is 1 nesting box for every 4 hens. You'll probably find that they prefer 1 or 2 of the nests and this may seem like too many nesting boxes, but if they are free ranging, you want to encourage them to use the nests and not have to go hunt for nests. Some will probably not want to use the nesting boxes anyway, but I wouldn't give them any excuse.

The rule of thumb is 4 square feet per chicken in a coop. This assumes a run with at least 10 square feet per chicken which they often have access to. If you are free-ranging them, they obviously have plenty of room outside. The 4 square feet also assumes that there will be times they are not able to go outside due to snow and ice, but for only a couple of days at a time, not weeks. If they are stuck inside for weeks, the area required goes up a lot. If all you are using the coop for is a safe roosting area, you can get by with a lot less room.

If you are locking the chickens up at night to protect them from predators, you need to make sure they have plenty of ventilation. Wet chicken poo gives off a lot of ammonia and this can cause respiratory problems in chickens. Chickens and poo also give off a lot of water vapor. Chickens can take a lot of cold weather as long as they are out of drafts and the relative humidity is low. If the humidity is high, chickens can get frostbite at 20 or maybe 25 degrees F. If the humidity is low and there are no drafts, I would not worry about them in single digits or even colder for short spells. I'll include a link that talks about this in detail.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/web/viewblog.php?id=1642-VENTILATION

 

[Chickenaddict]

Quote:
As a kid I had a job emptying the cages on an egg farm and refilling them with point of lay pullets. It was a 12000 bird farm, but felt like millions.

4 birds per 1 ft x 2 ft cage.

I also collected eggs there a few times when the auto collector broke down. My brother would take one row and I the next and we would race to see who could collect each 300 ft row fastest.

Keep in mind they clip the beaks of those battery caged hens (which is really inhumane imo) and they suffer bigtime from being locked up in such close quarters. For the birds to be happy and healthy they need the recomended space per bird or you will have major picking going on which will result in injuries.