Chicken Coop

We're building a new movable chicken coop for our pastured laying chickens. It's being built on an old hay rack, which is a flat rack with wheels used in this part of the country for hauling hay bales or might have been for tobacco if you were in MD's tobacco country. The coop frame has turned out to be taller than I had anticipated. Here in our part of Iowa, everything that you build for animal housing that is to be placed in the open field needs to be built with wind in mind. 45mph wind is not that unusual here. If its too high or not heavy enough based on its height, it will blow away and be destroyed. We had 2 Salatin type mobile chicken huts last year. They were both low to the ground and leight. One was lower than the other. It survived. The other is a heap of twisted metal and lumber in a ravine at the back of the farm. The lesson we learned is that all things equal, wind is our dominant design factor. So the mobile chicken coop is a little high, but I'm making it wide and heavy. We'll know by the end of the season if it was too high... I'm concentrating on the layer boxes today. We'll have 12 layer boxes in the mobile chicken coop. We've found that chickens actually seem to prefer to lay in the same boxes along with everyone else. So even though we'll have 12, we know that there will be some boxes that will be seldom used. We hope to have the coop finished this week. The new chicks are getting big and we will be moving them all out to their summer pastures soon.