Saw a coop at the Sedalia MO county fair that made me rethink my whole setup
I went to the Pettis County fairgrounds in Sedalia on Saturday mostly for the funnel cake, but I wandered into the poultry barn and ended up staying almost two hours. This older fellow had a small coop on display that he built out of an old chest freezer he picked up for $20 at a farm auction. What got me was the insulation, he said his hens laid steady all through January while his neighbor's birds slowed way down. He had a little pop door cut into the side with a sliding panel and hardware cloth over the vents. I have eight hens in a basic wooden coop I slapped together from pallets, and watching my girls huddle up on cold mornings has been nagging at me. I took maybe ten pictures of his setup and asked him more questions than he probably wanted to answer. Now I keep scanning Facebook marketplace for a dead freezer to convert. Has anyone here tried the chest freezer coop thing, and did the airflow end up being a problem in summer?