Backyard Chicken Coop
It’s time to start planning your new chicken cage design. Too many floor plans and layouts choices can seem confusing. We’ll look at the different types of chicken coops plus their uses.
Click Here for chicken coop plans and blueprints.
Determining which type of chook pen best fits your needs depends on a few issues. Such as: Does it need to be moveable? How many hens will it hold? How much space is available? All of these things are important. For instance, if you decide to only keep a few chickens and want easy maintenance, you might choose to use a portable chicken coop.
First we’ll examine the small coop. Small coops will hold only a handful of chickens. They hold anywhere from two to six chickens. These small pens are used for keeping chickens as pets. Placing fencing all around the small pen is a customary practice. This keeps the chickens for escaping into your neighbor’s yard.
More details about the pet chicken coop can be found on our website Keeping Chickens with Duke.
Med-sized chicken houses are made about the same as small coops, they of course hold a greater number of chickens. Even though a midium sized chicken coop can hold two times the amount of chickens as the small coop, it is not adequate for raising chickens for gain. Whether from the chickens themselves or their eggs, the number of chickens you can raise in a small or medium pen will not make enough of either to be profitable.
Small and medium sized pens are best if you plan to make them moveable. Large chickens coops are too hard to move, build several small to medium coops if you want to raise many hens.
This brings us to the design for the large chicken cage . Large chicken houses, have no limitations. The building is planned to fit the number of hens you desire to raise. Have at least 6 sq ft per chicken, better still try for 10 sq ft if room is available. This means that for twenty hens, you should be sure that you have 200 sq ft of space outside of the coop’s footage, for run space.
An metropolitan setting lends itself to an enclosed portable chicken ark. By closing in the henhouse area you will protect your pets from getting loose and from neighborhood predators. This is not as big of an issue in the country.
To learn more about keeping chickens visit www.keepingchickenswithduke.com and pick up our How To Chickens Tips and Resources Guide.
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