Keeping chickens in an urban setting has become quite popular recently. And when people first
start to think about getting a couple of chickens for their own garden, they often encounter
images like this. Who wouldn’t want to have something so pretty
in their garden, plus the bonus of fresh, super-delicious eggs?!
But although that’s a pretty picture, the reality often turns out a bit different. In
no time at all, the flowers are scratched up and the lawn is bare and pitted with dust-bathing
craters.
In this video I’d like to think about how much space you actually need to keep chickens.
Of course, like many questions about chickens, the answer is “It depends”.
First let’s clarify just what space we are talking about – space in the chicken house
or in the run? There are some chickens who live their whole
lives inside one big house, usually called a barn. New Zealand law, like that of many
countries, sets a stocking limit for barn-raised chickens of no more than 7 chickens per square
metre. What does that look like?
This is a square metre – it’s one metre wide and one metre long.
If you think in feet and inches, then it’s pretty close to 3 feet by 3 feet.
So how big is a chicken? Well, this is an adult leghorn hen. She’s full-grown, about
3 years old now, and her name happens to be Koo. She’s not very keen on being measured
but you can tell she’s about 500 mm from beak to tail. Leghorns are a light, Mediterranean
breed so they are quite slender chickens. She’s only about 200 mm wide.
The heavier breeds, like this Speckled Sussex, whose name is Kate, are much broader across.
Like many of us who are not as slender as we should be, she’s not keen on demonstrating
her girth, but she’s more like 300 mm across. And that demonstrates one of the variables
to consider – the breed of the chickens makes a difference in how much room they need.
Of course the bantams take up much less space than the large breeds of chicken. But even
amongst the so-called large breeds, some are bigger than others.
Naturally the smaller chickens take up less physical space but when you’re thinking
about how much space your chickens will need, you should also consider the temperament of
the breed. The Mediterranean breeds like the Leghorns and Anconas are pretty slender, but
they are also very active and they like lots of room to run around in. Some of the bigger
chickens, like Sussex and Orpingtons are more placid, so even though they are physically
bigger, their need for space is actually not so much.
And the temperament of the commercial hybrids is even more laid back – they have been bred to cope well with living in confined
spaces and they won’t fret so much if their quarters are a bit cramped.
So, let’s just work with an average chicken and let’s say she’s about 500 by 250 mm.
We’ll put her on our square metre. I’ve stretched this photo a bit to make our slender
leghorn as wide as the average chicken – sorry Koo.
Now remember we can legally fit seven chickens into this one square metre, so let’s add
the others. They fit, but there’s not much room around them. And sure enough, it’s
pretty crowded in that barn, although it’s a well-cared for barn. Most people who keep
chickens at home don’t want to keep them in those kinds of crowded conditions. I know
I certainly don’t! People who keep a small number of chickens
at home, usually have two distinct areas – the chicken house and the chicken run. You have
probably heard a commonly quoted amount of space required per chicken is
4 square feet inside the chicken house And 10 square feet in the run.
So let’s look at that. Here is our chicken on 4 square feet, that’s a bit under half
a square metre, or about 60 centimetres square. And if you have 1 square metre of space in
your chicken house, you can have about two and a half chickens.
If you want five chickens, you can have a chicken house with a floor area of two square
metres. But you’ve seen my chicken house, and you
can probably guess that it’s not much bigger than 2 square metres. In fact it’s 1.8m
x 1.2 m, which is 2.16 square metres. And yet I have more than 5 chickens. In fact I’ve
quite successfully had up to 12 chickens with that one chicken house. How does that work?
It works because how much space you need in the chicken house, depends on how much time
they spend there. And my chickens don’t spend much time in the house except when they
are sleeping. As soon as they wake up in the morning, they go out into the chicken run.
So a chicken house can be quite a lot smaller than the recommended 4 square ft per chicken,
as long as they have plenty of roosting space and easy access to get on and off the perch,
without bumping into a wall, even once some of the others are already spaced out along
it. It’s the size of the run that’s more important.
So let’s think about the amount of space you need for the chicken run.
Once again, the amount of space you need depends on several things, including, once again,
how much time they spend there. If they get out to free-range, even some of the time,
then the actual run can be smaller than if the chicken run has to provide all the space
they live in. And of course whether your chickens get to free range or not will depend on lots
of things too – the weather, your work demands, what predators are in your area, and so on.
Check out my video about your choice to free range your chickens.
Your climate and what’s on the base of your chicken run makes a difference too. Unlike
the pictures in those dreamy sales brochures, your chicken run is almost certainly not going
to have grass. Chickens love to peck growing grass, and scratch around to find bugs below
the surface, and in an amazingly quick time, nothing will grow there.
These few young chicks have been allowed access to this grassy area for just a couple
of days and already you can see that the original grass cover is much reduced.
If you want your chickens to have access to a grassy area, then it needs to be really
big. This area is nearly 100 square metres and it’s coping with ten chickens having
access to it every afternoon. There are bare spots, but the grass isn’t being totally
destroyed. So that’s pretty easy maths – 10 square metres of grass per chicken, in a free-draining
area, in a mild climate. If your chicken run is a more typical size,
the chickens will quickly turn a grassy run into completely bare ground. If your climate
is dry, the whole thing will be one giant dust bowl. Now a dust bath in a chicken run
is a good idea – chickens love dust bathing. But if the whole run is dust bowl, when it’s
rainy, it all turns into mud. I’ve found great success using something soft and loose
like bark chips or shredded tree mulch so the chickens can scratch around to their hearts
content. My chicken run is 36 square metres and although
they do like to get out onto the grass, my 12 chickens are pretty happy to spend a lot
of time in their run. In fact they stayed entirely in the run for 6 weeks when I was
away on holiday, and that worked out very well.
So that’s about 3 square metres per chicken in your chicken run, or 32 square ft per chicken.
I think the recommended 10 square ft is just a bit too crowded. I suggest 25 to 30 square
ft each in the run, or 3 square metres per chicken.
But the maths also depends on your total number of chickens, and although it might seem odd,
the more chickens you have, the less space they need per chicken. Look at it this way.
If you have 1 chicken in 3 square metres, that chicken physically takes up about a tenth
of that space so it has over 2 and a half square metres to explore.
If you have 2 chickens in 6 square metres, the two chickens physically take up less than
half a square metre so they each have 5 and a half square metres to explore.
If you have 4 chickens in 12 square metres, each chicken has 11 square metres to explore.
And 12 chickens in 36 square metres, like I have, gives each chicken 30 square metres
to walk around, scratch, investigate, flap her wings, break into a run, and generally
enjoy being a chicken. It’s no wonder mine are so happy.
But why am I so generous to my chickens? Is it just because I want to spoil them? Well,
no. not entirely. It’s for my benefit too. If the chicken run is a bit cramped, then
the chickens are more likely to get bored, frustrated, aggressive, peck each other viciously,
not share access to their food and water, get stressed, and be more prone to disease
and lay fewer eggs. And with lots of chickens all using the same small space, the ground
gets sour, and the hen house needs cleaning out more often and it’s all more work for
me. More work, less eggs, and not a pretty sight in the back yard – that’s not what
I want at all. And probably you wouldn’t want it either.
So if you’re wondering about getting chickens and how much space they might need, I suggest
you concentrate on giving them as big a run as possible.
If you start with 5 chickens, then they need around 15 square metres, that’s 160 square
feet, or a run that’s 10 ft by 16 ft. If you can only manage 8 or 9 square metres,
that’s a 10 ft by 8ft run, then just have 3 chickens, or plan on letting them out to
free range sometimes. And if you don’t have enough room to keep
three happy chickens, then you might as well save yourself the work and misery, fill your
garden with flowers instead of chickens, and buy your eggs from the commercial suppliers.