We have been enjoying our family coops so much, some for reasons we envisioned, and some for reasons we never thought of when we designed them!
We love so much how easy it is for the farmer to tend the coops morning and evening. One just stands in one place to feed, water, check for eggs, and open or close the pop door. All that we hoped and expected to love, and we do!
We also love how easy (and clean) things remain for the farmer. In closed coops, things get dusty. It’s unavoidable. And, when it’s been rainy for days, things also get stuffy and closed in. (In poorly tended coops, you also get bad ammonia/poop smells, but we don’t normally deal with that in our closed coops, since we tend them properly and use deep litter methods.) Family coops do not require humans to enter where the birds live! Their litter falls under the coop, and in our case, our birds scratch and hang out under there, so it’s not even that dirty. There’s no dust in the air. The farmer tending one of our coops walks on lawn and breathes fresh air!
We love how we are saving on feed. The design of the feeding station means that the chickens cannot scratch at all. They can spread a little feed by flinging with their beaks, but it’s not much, and it generally falls on the feed stand. We take up the feed bowls each night (read below to see why) and each morning, hungry hens tend to peck up all the feed they scattered the day before while waiting for us to come outside each morning.
We love that we seem to be foiling rodents! Each night, we take in these small bowls and dump any remaining feed into our metal storage cans. We stack the bowls and put them in with the feed. In the morning, we take out the feed bowls, fill them, and return them to the feeding stations. Rodents come out at night and find little, if any, feed waiting for them!
Best of all, we love how easy it is for our small grandchildren to do morning chores with us! These are pictures of 2-year-old Torri helping her grandpa to open pop doors, check for eggs, feed, and water the chickens in four coops. We used to be very careful to ask grands to wear special shoes, wash hands, etc. before tending chickens inside coops. With our family coops, the children never enter the chickens’ domains. They are outside, on the lawn, handling only a hose and a feed dish. They still wash their hands, but we are far less concerned with any dangers of salmonella.
Our family coops have been nothing but delight to us. We’re building more each week; we’ve gotten down to the ability to build one in an easy 2-day period. If you would like detailed plans, we sell them HERE.