As I mentioned in a different thread, we are starting to get serious about designing and building a new chicken coop and yard. Our intention is to have a large coop that is big enough for us to occasionally divide the interior into two sections, so that we can segregate flocks. This will be useful for when we occasionally add new chicks, and when we grow out a flock of meat birds once or twice a year.
As for the yard, I've taken from the rotational grazing method of growing cows. The idea here is to have 2 or 3 separate yards, each attached to the coop, and the chickens only have access to one yard at a time. Then when they have most of the plant life eaten down, they are rotated into the next yard.
Now I am planning to take this a step further and follow them with vegetable gardens. So, they will spend the first season in "Yard 1". Once they've cleared it all out, I start only letting them out in Yard 2 and I plant corn, squash, beans, etc into yard 1.
When yard 1 is harvested, I can let them back into yard 1 to clean up the harvest, and now I start gardening in yard 2.
That's an over simplification of what I'm talking about, but I think it gets the point across.
Here is a diagram of what I'm looking to build:
The total size here is 100' wide by 50' high. The two large pens are each 40'x50' and the coop is 20'x10. As you can imagine, there are chicken-size doors heading into each of the three pens so they can go into whichever one I choose for them.
As for the layout of the interior of the coop, that's still a work in progress.
