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Manufacturing Your Own Hen Houses has a Lot of Rewards

26 10:36:25

Poultry can be kept in transportable (portable) chicken arks, stationary hen houses, or permitted to exist outdoors with no housing whatsoever. All forms of living arrangements have distinct advantages, but previous to deciding on what type is ideal for you it is best to think about a few things first. It is crucial to make a good decision or you can end up with unhealthy birds that lay a very small amount of eggs.

The easiest approach is clearly to construct no hen house at all. Allowing your chickens to run around in the backyard will usually save you lots of cash because they will be able to obtain all of their own food which will do away with your feed bill completely. Additionally, you won't have to go to the expense or trouble to make a chicken coop for them. If this all sounds too simple, it is. There are several issues with allowing your poultry to run wild.

First of all, if your birds are permitted to forage for all of their own meals entirely they will eat too many accessible grasses in place of necessary protein and calcium. Not getting enough protein will result in inferior egg production. They also must have a liberal amount of calcium to create hard egg shells, but they will not get it eating plants and grasses. The answer to this problem is to simply give them an additional supplemental feed that contains liberal amounts of protein and calcium.

A second potential problem with letting your chickens free range is the risk of predators. Neighborhood pets and wild animals will see your chickens as their next meal. Because of this hazard it's critical to provide your flock some sort of sanctuary where they can remain protected from predators. This is where transportable chicken arks or permanent hen houses come in.

If you plan on keeping just a small number of pullets you can put together a diminutive movable chicken ark, also known as a chicken tractor. These movable coops will hold up to 5 or 6 birds, but no more. If you want to keep more hens than this you should construct a larger hen house to shelter your birds.

Hen houses, also known as chicken coops, have a few advantages over portable chicken pens, the most evident being that you are capable of raising more hens. The minimum space required per bird will be approximately 3 square feet. This means that a 50 square foot chicken house (5 feet wide by 10 feet long) can hold about 16 pullets. With good strains of white leghorns you will be collecting about 14 eggs every day. This should be sufficient for a small backyard chicken grower.

The larger size of a hen house provides another advantage. Your hens will have more room which is very important. Overly crowded pullets have a penchant for pecking each other, also recognized as cannibalism, which can in time lead to death. Providing your flock some extra room can inhibit this problem.

An ideal chicken coop will have two separate parts; a framed wood house and an exterior area enclosed by chicken wire. The inside area is where the feeders, water fountains, and nesting boxes are located. Watering your flock in a stationary hen house can be automatically controlled because the water fountains can get their water from a normal faucet. This eliminates the job of having to change the water each day as would be required with a portable ark.