On July 4, 2011, I unveiled my designs for the Pico Farm, a tiny chicken coop and garden that fit into a 4′ by 8′ footprint. It was a cool little thing that fit into just about any backyard and laid the foundation for my decades long love of raising chickens. We even got an award for the goofy little video we made about the project.
We were at bleeding edge of the backyard chicken movement and I ended up building half-a-dozen Pico Farms for friends in the area. The original coop survived several hurricanes and was eventually moved to a friend’s yard when we left North Carolina. It is still standing, today.
The Squatters Den was my first coop. It would not be my last.
There were a couple of problems with the Den. The most glaring was that there was no easy egg access. When we move to our farm in Virginia, we pushed out the back and added proper nest boxes. This was a temporary/backup coop, designed for temporary housing while I finished my magnum opus, so it didn’t have all the bells and whistles of a permanent chick coop. Even still, it served as a great little house for our growing flock and as a place to isolate feisty birds who weren’t playing well with the other hens.
Then we built the Prairie Schooner. This massive 20 bird enclosure was built to evoke the feeling of a covered wagon. It drifted slowly across our 3 acre farm on antique wagon wheels, offering fresh grazing every few days.
It was a great coop. But holy heck was it heavy and hard to move.
When we finally moved from the farm to the Maryland Eastern Shore, we had to leave the coop behind.
It wasn’t exactly a coop, but during that era, we also raised turkeys. The turkey tractor was good for 30 birds and designed to protect them from overhead threats. We moved it to a new square every two days, keeping the birds safe while getting them to fresh graze.
They were delicious.
And that brings up up to the current era, and the next step in our chicken adventure. It’s the Big Red Coop.
Big Red is the culmination of a decade of lessons learned building chicken coops. It is a giant version of the Pico Farm, with a 6′ by 12′ footprint, an accessible nest box, and giant side doors for cleanout. We built a dry closet right into the side, to store all the chicken supplies. Railroad ties line the bottom to deter burrowing predators.
Nothing is going to replace the Chicken Prairie Schooner, but Big Red has a style all its own.
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