Many people make it a pastime to raise chickens in their backyard. Baby chickens are available from the local pet store or ‘expo center’. It is full of fun and thrill to feed them and watch them grow.

It is an enjoyable sight to see a batch of chicks move around tweeting. After a few weeks, when they grow to their full-size, it is no longer possible to keep them inside the house in empty cartons or boxes. This is the time when it becomes necessary to construct a chicken coop.

However, people planning to build a chicken coop are sometimes faced with a peculiar situation, especially those who have toiled to develop an attractive landscaped backyard garden. Their dilemma is if they construct a permanent structure as a chicken coop, it will not only spoil the aesthetics of the home and garden but also damage the lawn.

However, at the same time, as the groups of chickens that are being raised are too big to confine them at home and some sort of fondness would have already been developed towards the small chickens by now, it would be distressing to dispose them off. Nevertheless, these difficulties can be easily overcome by having a moveable chicken coop.

Moveable Chicken Coop

Moveable chicken coops are similar to mobile chicken coops that are chicken coops on wheels. However, this option is not so popular with people around the world who are enthusiastic about raising chickens on a mass scale. These people would like to construct huge chicken coops for large number of poultry and very strong egg-layers.

Sometimes, it becomes necessary to shift the coop elsewhere, especially when there is a storm or strong winds lashing the town. As it is virtually impossible to lift up a heavy weight chicken coop and shift elsewhere, the idea of fixing wheels at the bottom emerged, making it a moveable chicken coop.

This ingenious concept caught the attention of people maintaining a chicken coop and now they are popular with most chicken raisers. With a chicken coop that can be moved, one need not be concerned about having a permanent construction in the backyard.

One of the major advantages of having a moveable chicken coop is in winter, it can be shifted near the portico facilitating proper feeding and cleaning. A moveable chicken coop will not come in the way of maintaining the garden and lawns as it can be shifted anytime to a suitable location in the backyard so that fully-grown chickens will not damage the garden.

In case a severe hurricane threatens the town, a chicken coop can be rolled on to another safer location such a s garage if there is space or even inside a shelter, in case the person lives in a farm house. Chicken coops are not merely attaching a pair of wheels to a coop house. What is important is to design a well-thought out and useful chicken coop.

A well designed chicken coop will take care of quality and ensure safety of chickens. It will help in weed and bug control. As the chickens move around daily in the garden, under close supervision so that they do not spoil the garden, they will eat grubs, grasshoppers, beetle or any other insects that come in their way and at the same time, contribute to providing fertilizer to the plants.

The house owner can get fresh eggs as well. The best part of such a well-conceived mobile chicken coop is that it will recover its cost of investment in just a few years.

People rear chickens in the backyard of their homes for variety of reasons. Besides taking us closer to nature, maintaining a chicken farm at home gives us as much sense of achievement as growing vegetables in the garden. It is also entertaining to watch chickens moving around in the garden. It will give a lot of satisfaction and happiness, if one visualizes that it is chickens that give fresh eggs for breakfast all through the year.

However, in order to ensure sound health for chickens and optimize production of eggs, certain conditions such as quality of poultry feed and weight of the hens need to be fulfilled. In addition, the output of eggs also depends considerably on the duration of sunlight that is available daily. Chickens will, normally, start laying eggs anytime from twentieth to twenty-first weeks and keep on laying eggs for a little more than a year.

The quantity of eggs and their sizes will be optimum during this period. One can ensure the health of egg-laying hens and the number of eggs that they lay by providing requisite quantum of light. Sunshine speeds up the production of eggs. In other words, as the daytime increases so also the yield of eggs.

This explains why there is a natural rise in production of eggs between December 21 and June 21 and thereafter, shows a gradual decline from June21 till December 21, when production of eggs picks up again.

In order to ensure that hens get enough light even during the months when there is less sunshine, it is necessary to provide electrical connection to the ‘coop house’ that one constructs for the chickens. This way, there will not be any dearth for eggs anytime during the year.

One can switch on the light in the coop house as the daylight wears out, thereby ensuring that the light is provided to chickens ranging from 16 to 17 hours daily. It is ideal to adopt this method progressively, compensating for the fading natural sunlight during reduced daytime. This method may boost up the production of eggs by 20 to 30 percent as compared to the production when additional lighting is not provided in the coop house.

The general principle is not to provide bright light on growing birds and not reduce light on adult egg-laying hens. Some of the tips on a good lighting arrangement include:

1. Provision of lighting for appropriate duration daily;

2.ensuring minimum intensity of light; and

3. usage of recommended color.

For best results, the egg-laying hens should have adequate light ranging from 16 to 17 hours every day. The lighting should be sufficiently bright so that it is possible to see clearly the level of feeds while standing over the feeder. The ideal color of light is either yellow or orange tint. These shades can be easily obtained if incandescent bulbs are used.

Another option is to use either ‘warm-white’ fluorescent tube light or a halogen light that emits a yellowish tinge of light. A well planned chicken coop house will make it simpler to create a favorable atmosphere for hens to be comfortable and healthy. Lighting is one of the most important factors to get eggs from the hens regularly.

Another critical factor is to ensure good health for chickens. A properly designed coop house will safeguard hens from numerous hazards such as ‘predation’, theft, direct sunlight, rain, wind, heat, cold, extreme dust and abrupt changes in temperature.

In order to derive maximum pleasure, the inside of the chicken coop house should be planned in such a way that feeding and looking after chickens are simple and secured. A well planned and easy to maintain chicken coop house will give immense satisfaction of maintaining chickens in the backyard of the house.

People who raise chickens know that one of the most important things about raising chickens is the design of the chicken coops. Building a chicken house should not be done without taking the design of the chicken coops into account. It is important for numerous reasons.

First, in order for a chicken to grow properly, its home needs to meet certain standards. Building a chicken coop that is only favorable to the chicken owner will be less successful than one that is favorable to both the chicken and the owner. There are many factors that can affect not only a chicken’s growth rate, but also the chicken’s ability to lay eggs.

One example of a condition that will negatively affect both factors is a coop that is not dry. If a hen is wet it will not only be unhappy, but it will be stressed, and lay less eggs. One way to avoid a wet coop is to make sure that your chicken house includes windows.

Along with reducing the moisture in the coop, windows also provide good ventilation for the chickens. Screens should be installed on the windows of the chicken house to ensure that the chickens do not get out. There should also be a type of screen on your coops to prevent rodents or wild birds from harming your chickens. A good material to use would be wire netting or mesh.

Other important factors are ensuring that the coop is noise free, safe, and away from distractions. When designing your chicken coops, one thing to keep in mind is the amount of time you will be able to spend making sure that the chicken always has access to fresh water.

If this seems to be an issue, a design that may be more logical is one that includes an automatic watering system. If that isn’t an option, ensure that your design has enough space to accommodate water feeders that can hold gallons of water at a time.

Another thing to keep in mind is the affect of light on your hens. Light encourages hens to lay more eggs, so having an additional source of light through an electric source will be more effective than daylight alone. Another factor to take into consideration is the method you will use to feed your chickens.

If you don’t have the time to constantly make sure your chickens have an access to fresh water, and have decided to use an automated watering system in your design, it also might be a good idea to use an automatic feed dispenser. This is important because since chickens have extremely quick metabolisms they must be well fed. When chickens feel hunger they also feel weak, which could cause them to catch a disease.

Chicken houses and coops must be able to withstand changes in weather. It is important that a chicken house can provide both shade for the chickens during the summertime, as well as windbreaks in case of a strong wind. The house should also be large enough for you to enter that way you can walk around the inside of the chicken house with ease, and thus take better care of the chickens.

Designing a chicken coop is much more than something that is aesthetically pleasing, and all of these factors should be taken into consideration before building.

DIY Chicken Coop Building Guide

If you are looking for a DIY chicken coop building guide, make sure to check out the Building A Chicken Coop ebook by Bill Keene.

Keene has been a chicken farmer for a few decades and he knows the ins and outs of raising chicken. Click on the link below to visit his web site right now.

==> Click here to visit Bill Keene’s web site!