The Backyard Chicken Cheat Sheet
Two printable pages with the numbers you actually look up — coop space, feed, water, brooder temperatures, incubation schedules, and what your flock can and can't eat. Free, no email required.
Every figure reviewed against university extension guidance · Last reviewed August 2026
Print it and pin it to the coop door.
Two pages, US Letter, black-and-white friendly. Free to print, copy, and share.
Download the PDF (free)What's on it
- Space per bird
- Coop floor, run, and roost for standard, bantam, and heavy breeds — plus nesting box count and dimensions. (Standard birds: 4 sq ft coop.)
- Feed & water
- How much a laying hen eats and drinks per day (0.25 lb of feed), how long a 50 lb bag lasts, and how much water intake rises in a heat wave.
- Brooder temperatures
- The full week-by-week schedule, from 95°F in week one down 5°F a week — and how to read the chicks instead of the thermometer.
- Incubation
- Days to hatch, candling days, and lockdown day for all 5 species — chicken, duck, quail, turkey, and goose.
- Safe & toxic foods
- All 91 foods from our food list, sorted into safe, moderation, cook-first, and never-feed — with the actual toxins named.
Why we made it
Most of backyard chicken keeping is a handful of numbers you need at the wrong moment — standing in the feed store, halfway through framing a coop, or squinting at a brooder at 6am wondering if the chicks are cold. They're easy to look up once and impossible to remember. So we put them on two pages you can print and stick where you'll actually need them.
Every number on the sheet is the same one our calculators use, and it comes from the same place: published university extension guidance, not forum folklore. Where no extension publishes a figure — per-breed laying ages, current feed prices — we say so rather than inventing precision. The sheet is dated so you can tell how fresh it is, and it lists its sources so you can check our work.
It's genuinely free. No email, no signup, no watermark. Print it, copy it for your poultry club, hand it to a neighbour starting their first flock — that's what it's for.
Prefer the interactive versions?
Sources
The cheat sheet draws on every source behind our calculators. Per-breed and price figures, where no extension publishes them, are labelled as such on the sheet itself.
- Virginia Cooperative Extension — Small-Scale Poultry Housing (pub. 2902-1092)
- Colorado State University Extension — Brooding and Space Requirements for Poultry (2.502)
- University of Minnesota Extension — Raising Chickens for Eggs
- Mississippi State University Extension — Incubation Duration Periods
- Alabama Cooperative Extension System — Feeding the Laying Hen
- Penn State Extension — Brooding of Domestic Fowl
- University of Florida IFAS Extension — Raising Backyard Chickens for Eggs (AN239)
- Merck Veterinary Manual — Poultry — health, nutrition & toxicology