Category: Chickens/Poultry

The Ideal Roof for a Chicken Coop.

I’ve been meditating on the ideal roof for a chicken coop. It ought to have the following properties:

  • Easy to install.
  • Cheap.
  • Lasts forever.
  • Strong.
  • Rainwater doesn’t cause mud in front of the house.
  • Chickens don’t roost on top.

Also, if you live in the suburbs, it should be gorgeous enough to keep your uptight neighbors from deciding that the world is ending.

Galvanized Steel Roofs for Chicken Coops

One of my "low houses" with walls just four feet tall.
One of my “low houses” with walls just four feet tall and a simple galvanized metal roof. There are no rafters. The roof is attached to the three horizontal purlins at front, middle, and back. 

Most of my houses have shed roofs made of galvanized steel roofing. The configuration is a “shed roof,” which just means that it’s higher and the front than at the back, so rainwater pours off at the back of the house where is causes less trouble.

I prefer using the cheapest corrugated roofing, which is readily available from lumber stores like Home Depot, but you can get metal roofing in all the colors of the rainbow, with baked-enamel coatings that last forever, and in shapes that are less industrial than the corrugated ripple.

My roofs are just metal, with no plywood decking underneath, and no insulation. This is appropriate for highly ventilated houses with enough airflow that the inside temperature and humidity are about the same as outside. You don’t have to worry about condensation in such a house.

Nails vs. Screws

In the old days, corrugated metal roofing was held on by nails banged through the high points of the ripple and into purlins. These don’t hold very well, and were replaced by roofing nails with rubber washerss. The nails are hammered through the low points of the ripple and the washers keep them from leaking. These have more holding power.

But all these are going the way of the dodo, because roofing screws have three times the holding power of roofing nails. So use roofing screws and get yourself a good, powerful electric drill or screwdriver for installing them.

Open-Front Houses

Fresh-Air Poultry Houses - chicken coop design
Fresh-Air Poultry Houses

In a tightly closed chicken house, you’d want an insulated roof, but you’d have to be nuts to build a tightly closed house. Ventilation is the magic bullet for chicken health. (You’ll want to read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, one of the classic poultry books I’ve reprinted, for complete information.)

No Rafters

My houses have purlins but no rafters. The sheet metal is nailed directly to the purlins with roofing nails or roofing screws, meaning that they are supported only every four feet. This has worked well for me.

Framing

The purlins should be up on edge for stiffness, not laid flat, and bolted to the studs with ¼-inch carriage bolts, not nailed. (Some of my early houses with nailed-on purlins had their roof torn off by high winds.)

One thing I’ve learned, though, is that if the metal roofing sticks out very far in front of or behind the house, it’ll flap in the wind and work itself loose. So when you have plenty of overhang (which is a good thing), you need to add a 2×4 at the very lip of the roof, under the roofing. Naling the roofing to this 2×4 keeps the sheet metal from flapping  in high winds.

Slope of the Roof

One problem I haven’t solved is that of keeping chickens from roosting on the roof. Chickens like sleeping as high in the air as they can, and that means the roof. My roofs have a shallow slope and they can sleep anywhere on the roof they want without sliding off. A steeper roof is clearly called for! I haven’t yet done any experiments to discover the critical angle where the chickens slide off.

Traditional shed roofs often call for a one-in-four slope. A house eight feet deep would have a roof that slopes down two feet front to back: perhaps with a seven-foot height in front and a five-foot height in back. But even my flattest roofs haven’t collapsed under moderate snow loads, in spite of my lightweight framing.

Other Roofs

Any kind of real roofing will work fine in a chicken coop: asphalt shingles, cedar shakes, roll roofing, built-up roofing, etc. I’ve never built a structure using any of these, so I can’t provide details.

Before galvanized roofing became widely available, most coops seemed to have either fancy shingle roofs or lowly tar-paper roofs. I don’t recommend simple tar-paper roofs because they don’t last long enough to be worth the bother. Roll roofing, which is much heavier, is probably okay.

Lots of people use temporary roofing such as tarps for their chicken coops. This is fine for summer pasture houses, and in fact my wife Karen developed a tarp-covered cattle-panel hoop house for pastured broilers. But the tarps on these hoop-coop roofs tend to develop holes during the course of a single season and are iffy as winter housing even in our mild Oregon climate.

What’s the Difference Between Brown and White Eggs?

In the bad old days, eggs in the big cities mostly came from the Midwest. Farmers would collect eggs and leave them, unrefrigerated, until they felt like going into town. They’d sell the eggs at the general store or the feed store, and the merchant would hold them, unrefrigerated, until he had a large enough lot to ship to an egg wholesaler.

The eggs would work their way towards the city, unrefrigerated, by slow freight. Eventually, they’d arrive in the store, where they would be set out, unrefrigerated, for the consumer.

This method was so horrendous that, in the summer, baby chicks would hatch during shipment! In the South, particularly, many people simply didn’t eat eggs in the summer.

By the way, the traditional American farm breeds all lay brown eggs.

There was a good market for reliably fresh eggs. Such eggs needed a short distribution chain so there wasn’t time for anything bad to happen between farm and consumer. The solution was to raise them on farms close to town. Land close to town is expensive, so the tendency was to crowd the hens and use breeds that tolerated crowding well. This was usually the White Leghorn, which was everybody’s favorite chicken for non-free-range uses, including coops on sailing ships. Leghorns lay white eggs.

So white eggs quickly came to mean “fancy eggs,” while brown eggs meant, “plain old farm eggs.” If you lived in farm country, where it’s easy to obtain fresh eggs because of the short distribution path, you’d eat brown eggs and wonder why anybody ever bothered with those sissy white eggs. If you lived in a big city, it would be just the opposite.

Another advantage of white eggs is that they show stains easily, meaning that snowy white eggs are a reliable sign that you are taking pains to produce a first-class product. On the general farm, it was awfully hard to produce eggs that clean, but brown-shelled eggs could hide the problem pretty well.

It took a long time for refrigeration to level the playing field. A lot of eggs were still moving by unrefrigerated freight in the Fifties. It’s this lack of quality control and freshness, not lower costs, that allowed factory-farmed eggs to take over. The guys with the refrigerators won because they never gave you a hideous surprise.

These days, almost everyone refrigerates their eggs from start to finish, except a few hippie-dippy producers who think that their political correctness shields them from the need to worry about quality. The reasons that white eggs were considered superior no longer apply. But the preference lingers. Let’s face it: eggs don’t have a lot of mindshare with most people, so they buy whatever they were used to growing up.

Chckens vs. Tall Grass

Chickens like short grass and do poorly in tall grass. I can see this as I mow the pasture, because the chickens get excited about the foraging prospects of the newly mown swath, rushing around excitedly looking for bugs and yummy young plants revealed once the tall grass has been cut.

Grass has few calories but lots of vitamins and protein. Chickens can only digest grass if it’s young and it still bright green. Once it starts to fade, they lose interest.

Physically, tall grass is an impediment to them, preventing them from going where they want. It also triggers annoying behaviors like laying eggs in the grass rather than in the nest houses, and encouraging them to hunker down and hide rather than run when frightened, raising the possibility that they’ll allow the tractor to run them down. I’ve only ever killed one chicken with the mower. That was enough.

Back in the good old days, there was some research done along these lines, and mowing the grass down to two inches tested out as being optimum. Six inches was too high.

I’m a big fan of permanent pasture (never plow, never reseed), since it combines the minimum amount of work with the maximum amount of pasture-plant diversity. So I’m not up on which plants would be best if you were starting with a plowed field. In general, at this time of year you should plant a grass or clover that will stay green all summer and do well if mown down to two inches. In the fall, you want a grass that will stay green all winter and do well if equally short.

The Grass is as High as an Extremely Short Elephant’s Eye

It must be spring. The grass is getting way out of hand, but it’s too wet to mow. This happens every year.

Chickens on free range like short grass. Back in the Golden Age of scientific poultrykeeping (roughly 1910-1960), this sort of thing was researched. Chickens did best on grass that was 2″ high. Once it reached 6″ it became a barrier to foraging. If it gets even taller, the chickens are confined to a few paths through the tall grass.

Tall grass also shorts out electric fence and can conceal predators. A field that is kept short has a lot of succulent, green regrowth, and bright green grass is the only kind that provides any nutrition for chickens. This nutrtion, by the way, consists of more vitamins than you can shake a stick at, some protein, but no calories.

Rain, rain, go away!

Feeding Random Stuff to Chickens

Okay, so someone has given you some exotic ingredient you’ve never heard of, like okra tofu, or banana seeds, or worm legs. Should you feed it to the chickens, and, if so, how?

The general rule for feeding miscellaneous stuff to chickens is to feed it in a separate feeder, while continuing to give them all the ordinary chicken feed they want. The chickens are pretty bored with the same old chicken feed and are sure to take an interest in anything new. They’ll eat as much as they want.

The trick is to avoid trying to make them eat more. Chickens are quite good at figuring out whether feed is good or bad, and how much is good for them. In fact, they’re better than you. So never starve them in order to make them finish off their yummy dish of politician’s hearts. Just take away what they don’t eat.

Try to feed them only what they’ll clean up in a short time — 20 minutes is traditional. In particular, don’t let things that are capable of spoiling sit out to grow bacteria and mold, or attract flies and rats. The refrigerator is your friend. Use it to store the excess, rather than setting out too much.

You can also do it the hard way by looking up the foodstuff in question in a poultry nutrition reference. My favorite is Feeding Poultry by F. G. Heuser, which is one of the old poultry books that I brought back into print. It doesn’t have an entry for politician’s hearts, but it does list some pretty bizarre stuff, like whale meal (page 170) or silkworm chrysalis flour (page 173). The mind boggles. But you’ll still want to use the “try it and see” technique with a new ingredient.