If humans can have off-grid, prefabricated structures, who says livestock shouldn’t get the same eco-treatment. A recent competition held by the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development asked for an upgrade to inefficient and polluting family-run chicken coops in Galilee and the winning design was this sleek, prefabricated, renewable energy powered chicken coop by Peleg/Burshtein Architects and landscape architect Nathan Gulman. Their winning design incorporates all the necessary functions of a chicken coop into one building, provides its own renewable energy and processes its own waste in a closed loop system.
The chicken coop is a 200 foot long prefabricated layer farm that can also be adapted for free-range use, and is designed like a wind tunnel in order to provide constant ventilation, which is necessary for the hot climate and the hot chickens. Wind turbines, solar panels and vegetation are installed on the exterior of the structure and providing the coop with its own energy. Inside the coop, water tanks, silos, egg storage, and a waste-treatment system turn chicken manure into biofuel. The designers hid all the extras inside the coop in order to visually improve a farm’s landscape as well as integrate their functions.
Local farmers, who worry that the government is trying to impose an industrial model on their farms haven’t quite taken to the concept yet, but the Israeli Ministry is using the design to guide their future farms. Plus, Agrotop, a large industrial-chicken-farm manufacturer, is planning on introducing a version of this coop in the UK. Joseph Burshtein says about the design, “Instead of each one having a small, outdated, unsafe, and polluting henhouse in his own residence, it will be housed in a cleaner, safer environment. That means they will actually make more money using these henhouses instead of the old ones. That’s basically just economical efficiency and functional efficiency.”
Via Jetson Green and Metropolis Magazine