The Anatomy of a Chicken House

Today I thought that I would tell you all about my chicken houses! I don't want anyone to get confused and think that when I talk about my chickens, that I have an oversized chicken coop in the backyard!

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We have 4 broiler houses and raise chickens for the Koch Foods Co. Most people have never heard of Kochs (pronounced cook), but they bought part of Tyson a few years ago. Having broiler houses means we raise the birds for their meat. There are also pullet houses (roosters) and layer houses (eggs), but we only raise broilers. Kochs likes a 4 lb. bird, so we average keeping our birds around 35 days. After those are caught, we have about 2-3 weeks to get ready for baby chickens again!

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Each of our 4 chicken houses are 510' long and 43' wide.

The size of your houses depends on how many birds they place you with. Smaller houses get less birds, bigger houses get more birds. We generally get anywhere from 32,700 to 34,400 birds per house. While we're looking at this picture, I'll go ahead and tell you what that black stuff is on the side of the chicken house! On both sides of the front of each chicken house is a "Cool Cell" pad. It is like a giant radiator for the chickens. When the temperature in the houses gets hot enough, water will trickle down that black stuff and at least 6 tunnel fans (which I'll explain later) will come on and suck it through the house.
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This is a control room. There is one of these at the center of each one of the houses. It's the "brains" of the chicken houses.

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These are the controllers. This is what controls everything inside the chicken houses. You can check temperatures, water consumption, humidity, all kinds of things. You can control how many fans are on, what the temperature needs to be (which by the way, starts out at 92 degrees, ends up about 67 when we catch), even how bright the lights are in the houses. The box on the right is the backup box. If the box on the left gets struck by lightning or just goes kaput the backup box takes over. That little box on the right with the 2 light switches under it, is the dimmer. It controls the light brightness in the house. The older the birds, the dimmer the lights need to be to prevent heart attacks. When the lights are bright, the birds flutter and jump around like crazy, but when they are dim, they are much more calm. If you turn the lights completely off, which happens a few hours each night, the birds will sit down and hardly move at all. ----------

This is the other wall in the control rooms. It has all the water lines, water overflow alarms, water filters, water pressure gauges, and our medicator. The medicator is that green thing with the hoses. You put some medication, such as liquid aspirin, into a 5 gallon bucket, stick that clear hose into it and turn the valves so that water will flow through the medicator. The medicator pumps 1 ounce of medication per 1 gallon of water that the birds drink. The birds are small now, so they are only drinking about 400 gallons per day per house, but by the time we catch, they can drink 2,500 gallons a day per house. You can also see the foot bath on the floor by the door. We have to disinfect our shoes everytime we walk in each chicken house to keep from spreading any disease or bacteria from house to house. Above that, on the wall, is our mortality chart. We have to keep up with how many birds die each day per house.

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*NOTE* Sorry for horrible picture quality, this is a chicken house, not a photography studio! It's due to the 100 or so lightbulbs in each house. Every other lightbulb is 100 watt, and the other lightbulbs are 60 watt. All that bright/dim/bright/dim junk doesn't work well with my camera!
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When you walk into the chicken houses from the control room, this is what you see in the center of the houses.

Those gray things are the feed hoppers where the feed comes in to fill the feed lines up. That big black pipe is called a migration pipe. There are 3 per house and we seperate the chickens into 4 sections. This is to keep them from piling up. If it gets too hot in the houses, chickens pile up, too cold in the houses, chickens pile up, chickens get sick, chickens pile up...so you want to prevent as many chickens from piling up on top of each other as possible because they smother.
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Here's a closer picture of some of the feed lines and drinker lines. We have 2 feed lines that run the length of the house and 8 water lines. 4 water lines go to one end of the house, and 4 water lines go to the other end of the house. We raise all these lines as the birds get bigger so they can reach it better. Theres a control pan at the end of each feed line that when the birds empty it, the feed runs again and the lines fill back up.
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When the chickens are small, like they are now, we put out feed lids. 300 per house to be exact.

Feed lids are placed between 2 feed pans (those red and gray things) and a "chickmate" (that red tube thing) is flipped so that feed can run into the lids. It helps get more feed to the chicks because some may not be able to reach in the feed pans yet. By the time we're ready to turn the birds "full house", we've pulled all those feed lids up and flipped the chickmates back over.
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This is standing in the center of the house looking toward the back of the house.


This is standing in the center of the house looking toward the front of the house.
The chickens are small now, so we only keep them in the center 250' of the house. Thats why it looks so dark in the other parts of the house. It's called "center house brooding". In the winter, there is a plastic curtain we can roll down to keep the heat in just the center part of the house. When the chickens get big enough, we open up the migration pipes and let them fill up the entire house. Remember the every other lightbulb 100 watt/60 watt I mentioned? When we go full house, the 100 watt lightbulbs are turned off, and just the 60 watts are used.
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Keeping the houses a balmy 90 degrees at the moment (talk about sweating to death!) are these things.

It's called a brooder. There are 22 per house. They come on when a temperature sensor in their heat zone, falls below "set temperature".
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At the very back of the house are the tunnel fans.

There are 10 in all, 5 on each side. They are 48" fans and how many come on depends on the temperature in the houses. They are called tunnel fans because they suck air through the houses like a tunnel. Air comes in through "vent boards" (which I don't have a picture of) that are located where the ceiling and walls join, and they open every so often to let fresh air in. The fans and vent boards run on a timed cycle so they will be in synche. Otherwise the fans might come on and without the vent boards opening, it would suck the roof in! There are also 4 exhaust fans (that dark square on the back wall). 2 in the front, 2 in the back. They are 36" fans and are usually used when you don't need that much air pulling through the houses.


Between houses 1 and 2, and also between 3 and 4, we have 3 feed bins.
Each feed bin holds 18 tons of feed. We open them one at a time and they supply both houses feed. When the birds are big, 2 houses of chickens can eat 10 tons of feed per day! So we get a lot of feed deliveries!
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Also between chicken houses 2 and 3, is our generator shed.

The generator is there to run the houses in case of power failure. You better make sure it works to, because if the power goes out and the generator doesn't come on, you may have thousands of dead chickens in a matter of minutes.

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Out in front of the chicken houses is our freezer shed.
The freezer is where we put all of our dead chickens. A company called American Proteins empties it with a truck that looks like a garbage truck every week or so. They take it and turn it into dog food. Yum.

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So, now that yall know how much goes into growing chickens, everybody go eat some chicken!!