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When it comes to food, people eventually make their way back to basics. Heritage vegetables, free-range meats, artisanal cheeses — they’re all examples of what I mean.

No matter how modern and convenient our food system has become, it has a hard time delivering a close enough connection to the land for many of us. This dynamic is probably why backyard chicken husbandry is on the rise and, of course, this means an interest in backyard chicken houses of the kind I want to show you here.

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We’ve kept chickens at our island home since 2002, and there’s one housing idea that we keep coming back to: modularity. A handful of smaller, semi-portable coops is better than one large, permanently anchored house.

This is especially true when you’re dealing with a city or suburban backyard. Permanent coops don’t make much sense in places like these, yet the serious drawbacks aren’t obvious until it’s too late. That’s why people keep building the wrong kind of chicken house, only to have to stick to it because they’ve invested so much in the structure.