Learn More About Chicken Coops
Books and resources
Books
Scores of ideas and plans for building your custom coop can be found in Chicken Coops: 45 Building Plans for Housing Your Flock by Judy Pangman (Storey Publishing, 2006). Bring your chickens home to roost in comfort and style! Whether you’re keeping one hen in a small backyard or 1,000 hens in a large free-range pasture, you will find the perfect housing plan in this comprehensive handbook. Author and farmer Judy Pangman combed the country to select these 45 plans for housing both laying hens and meat birds (chickens or turkeys). The coops range from fashionable backyard structures featured in the annual Seattle Tilth City Chickens Tour and the Mad City Chickens Tour in Madison, Wisconsin, to the large-scale, moveable structures Joel Salatin has fashioned for Polyface Farm in Virginia. (from Amazon.com)
Also check out How to Build Animal Housing: 60 Plans for Coops, Hutches, Barns, Sheds, Pens, Nestboxes, Feeders, Stanchions, and Much More by Carol Ekarius (Storey Publishing, 2004). Cows and horses, donkeys and mules, sheep and goats, pigs and fowl, even llamas are living on small farms and in backyard barnyards throughout the United States. But how and where are these critters being housed? Author Carol Ekarius knows. In How to Build Animal Housing, she provides dozens of plans–with illustrated, step-by-step instructions–for species-specific shelters that are well ventilated, safe, appropriate for the animals, appealing, convenient, and a solid value for their owners. (from Amazon.com)
Extension Papers
Everything you wanted to know about chickens is in this document from the Texas Agricultural Extension Service, Poultry Q&A.
An Extension poultry specialist gives tips on layers in The Small Laying Flock.
