Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12248 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 166 pages

From the Back Cover
Bring your chickens home to roost in comfort and style! Whether you're keeping one hen in a small backyard or 1,000 hens in a large free-range pasture, you will find the perfect housing plan in this comprehensive handbook.

Author and farmer Judy Pangman combed the country to select these 45 plans for housing both laying hens and meat birds (chickens or turkeys). The coops range from fashionable backyard structures featured in the annual Seattle Tilth City Chickens Tour and the Mad City Chickens Tour in Madison, Wisconsin, to the large-scale, moveable structures Joel Salatin has fashioned for Polyface Farm in Virginia.

You'll also find plans for converting trailer frames, greenhouses, and backyard sheds; low-budget alternatives for working with found and recycled materials; and simple ways to make waterers, feeders, and nestboxes. A gallery of color photographs provides other creative ideas to get you going. With basic building skills, a little elbow grease, and this book of plans, you've got all you need to shelter your flock.

About the Author
Judy Pangman and her husband, Frank Johnson, raise their two sons and grass-fed beef, pork, and eggs on their 200-acre farm in upstate New York. They are committed to sustainable agriculture, raising their animals naturally and cruelty-free and promoting a safe and healthy local food system.

Customer Reviews

Fifteen bucks down the drain...
I'm not usually so critical, but I was utterly disappointed in this book. The title is misleading. The '45 plans' mentioned in the title were not plans at all. They were at best 'general arrangements'. While overall dimensions were given, most 'plans' barely mention materials of construction and certainly didn't include an actual bill of material.
Some of the illustrations were little more than crude, badly proportioned hand sketches.
I guess I expected more from someone who felt they were qualified to write a book. I would have to guess that this is the authors first book. Apparently the publisher wasn't paying any attention during this project.
A synopsis of the book might read "throw some scrap material together and give it a cutsie name...I'll include it in my next book!!

Dissatified - Misleading Title
This book is entitled "Chicken Coops- 45 Building Plans for Housing Your Flock". There were no complete building plans, only drawings with construction "notes". There were no material lists with specs. I cannot build a chicken coop with this book. There are websites listed where I can buy some of the plans - but wouldn't a person expect these plans to be inside a book entitled this way?

Comment from Author
Hi, I'm Judy Pangman, author of Chicken Coops. I want to thank Thomas P. Schoenborn and M. Boettcher for reading my book and posting reviews on Amazon.com. In response to their comments, we are correcting the description of the book to make it clear that the building plans in the book do require some construction knowledge on the part of the reader.

I wanted to clarify what the book is and what it is not. If you are looking for a design manual, this is not the right book for you. The book is a compilation of 45 real chicken coops, most of which were built by hand by their owners. Yes, many of the coops were thrown together (albeit carefully planned beforehand) with scrap materials. That was the most interesting discovery I made while writing the book!

From all across the country, coop owners that I encountered were proud that their designs were individualized and built with recycled or salvaged materials. This soon became the book's central theme. It also made it difficult to provide formal construction drawings and material lists. Almost every coop featured in the book was customized to that owner's needs, whether it was according to the size of the salvaged wagon bed, truck chassis, or manure spreader on which it was built, or the size of the backyard or the width of the garden gate. The publisher and I decided that the most useful way to present the coops was by providing a floor plan, front and side elevations with dimensions, and as much information in the text as possible about features of the coop and materials used. This way, the reader could choose the type of coop and favored features he or she wanted and, with some construction knowledge, build a customized coop specific to his or her needs and site.

If you are looking for lots of chicken coop ideas, unique coop features, and a lighthearted look at backyard and pastured poultry coops and their very interesting owners, then this is the right book for you.