I am sure most of you have heard the famous chicken or the egg story but ironically for us, it was 75 little chicks from Keggfarms that came before any kind of housing for them! We could not find any resources online for how an Indian Chicken coop should be designed so we decided to make our own with two principles in mind - we would not buy anything new and would simply use junk lying around the farm.
We used two wooden boxes which had lids, and nailed the lids at an angle to act as awnings/ shade for the boxes. We used the planks from a temporary bridge we had built in 2011 to make ramps for the chicken to access these boxes.
The boxes were placed on bricks to keep them about 18 inches off the ground. We hammered some metal angles into the ground and pulled wire mesh around them into a circle, making sure that 3 trees fell within this periphery so that the chicken yard would have ample shade.
We covered half of this circle with a torn tarpaulin, supported on a bamboo stick with some coir padding, and the other half with a green netting cloth, to keep out wild cats and other predators. We left a 3 foot entrance to access the chicken yard.
Old painting stretchers which we mounted on bricks made for ideal perches inside the boxes.
The boxes were lined with hay, and during winters we used old blankets and jute sacks over the fencing to keep the cold out, rolling them up during the day and watering them when it got too hot. We ran a wire from the outhouse to get 2 bulbs into the coop, which we kept on through the night.
And that's how we built a zero budget DIY chicken coop, located right in our chicken yard.
