Zero Effort Backyard Chickens (Our DIY Automatic Coop Build)

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We left our chickens completely unattended.

No food refills.
No water checks.
No daily chores.

Not for a day — for two full weeks.

This video isn’t about becoming a farmer. It’s about designing a chicken coop that doesn’t depend on you — so when life gets busy, the birds are still fed, watered, and safe.

I like raising chickens. I love fresh eggs and the way animals bring life to the land. What I don’t want is another daily responsibility that ties me down or makes travel, kids, or real life impossible.

I’ve watched so many people give up chickens after having children — not because chickens are hard, but because their setup required constant attention. That’s a design problem, not a chicken problem.

So I set out to build a fully automatic, off-grid chicken coop that could reliably support 35 laying hens without daily human involvement.

In this video, I walk through:

The design philosophy behind a low-effort, resilient chicken coop
-Why most backyard chicken setups fail long-term
-Our automatic feeding system (600 lbs of feed capacity)
-Our off-grid water solution using gravity and float valves
-Predator-proof design choices
-The nesting box and interior layout redesign
-And the real-world test: leaving the coop alone for weeks at a time

We live fully off-grid in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York — no grid power, no hose hookups, no constant supervision. Everything in this coop had to work without electricity, without running water, and without daily maintenance.

The result is a chicken coop that replaces daily and weekly chores with simple monthly maintenance — and keeps the birds healthy and productive even when we’re not around.