When people first contact us about building a chicken house, the conversation usually starts with one question:
"Can you give me a quotation?"
It's a reasonable question. Every project starts with a budget.
But after working with customers from Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South America, we've noticed something interesting. The projects that move forward smoothly rarely begin with a price discussion. Instead, they begin with a clear understanding of what the customer actually wants to build.
In fact, two chicken houses with similar dimensions can have completely different layouts, equipment, insulation systems, and construction costs.
That's why the same building size doesn't always lead to the same quotation.
Before requesting prices from different suppliers, it's worth spending some time planning the project itself. A few early decisions can make quotations more accurate, reduce unnecessary changes during construction, and help you compare suppliers on the same basis.
Step 1: Decide What Type of Chicken House You Need
One of the first questions we ask every customer is surprisingly simple:
What are you planning to raise?
Although people often use the term chicken house for every project, the building requirements can vary depending on the production purpose.
For example:
Broiler Chicken Houses
Broiler chickens are raised for meat production and usually stay in the house for a relatively short production cycle.
The building layout often focuses on:
Efficient ventilation
Uniform temperature control
Fast cleaning between production cycles
Simple but reliable feeding and drinking systems
Layer Chicken Houses
Layer farms have different priorities.
Since hens remain in production much longer, building design often needs to consider:
Egg collection systems
Cage or cage-free layouts
Lighting management
Long-term operating efficiency
Breeder Chicken Houses
Breeder farms usually require more controlled environments and specialized equipment to support breeding performance.
Because of these differences, the same steel structure may not be suitable for every project.
Knowing your production type before discussing building details helps suppliers recommend a more suitable solution from the beginning.
📌 Planning Tip from Our Engineers
Many first-time buyers focus on the building dimensions first.
In practice, it's often better to decide what you're raising before deciding how you're building.
A chicken house should support your production system-not the other way around.
Step 2: Estimate Your Production Capacity First
Let's put aside the structure of the chicken house and talk directly about farming scale, based on our years of practical experience in large-scale chicken farm design.
Many customers ask straight away how big their chicken house should be, but that's putting the cart before the horse. You should first decide how many chickens you plan to raise, then work out the house size, equipment, ventilation and total investment.
A farm for 5,000 birds and one for 30,000 birds require completely different setups. Larger operations demand stronger ventilation, higher-capacity feeding equipment, wider aisles, better on-site traffic planning, and more space reserved for future expansion.
We've seen many farmers build houses first without confirming their target stock, only to end up with wasted space, insufficient ventilation or inadequate equipment, forcing expensive reworks later.
If you're still unsure about your final capacity, we can provide several practical layout plans based on your planned number of chickens and available land area.
A Practical Example
Imagine two investors with the same budget.
The first wants to build one large chicken house immediately.
The second plans to start with one building but leave enough space to add two more in the future.
The initial investment may be similar, but the site planning will be completely different.
Thinking about future growth early often saves both construction costs and operational headaches later.
Step 3: Don't Ignore Your Local Climate
One of the most useful pieces of information you can include in your inquiry is simply the project location.
Knowing the country-or even the city-allows suppliers to recommend more appropriate structural designs, insulation options, and ventilation systems right from the beginning.
Step 4: Decide Between an Open or Closed Chicken House
There's no universal "best" choice-but there is a best choice for your farm. The right decision depends entirely on your climate, your profit goals, your budget, and how much time you can spend managing daily conditions.
Open Chicken House
Best for warm, mild climates where natural air is enough for most of the year.
Lower upfront cost: less equipment, simpler structure
Relies on wind and natural airflow instead of heavy machinery
But here's the catch: You have little control over the inside environment. When extreme heat hits, sudden rainstorms come, or temperatures swing wildly, your chickens get stressed. Growth slows, egg production drops, and disease risk goes up. Many farmers who choose open houses end up spending extra money later adding fans, curtains, and cooling systems anyway.
Closed / Enclosed Chicken House
Best for unstable weather, extreme cold or heat, and commercial-scale farming.
Fully sealed with insulated sandwich panels
Controlled system: tunnel ventilation, cooling pads, exhaust fans, automatic climate control
Stable temperature, steady airflow, consistent environment year-round
The tradeoff: Higher initial investment. But you get stable growth rates, reliable egg production, fewer diseases, and less daily stress managing the weather. For serious farmers, this stability directly translates to more predictable profit.
The Bottom Line
Neither is automatically better. Don't copy what other farms built-follow your local climate and your long-term profit plan. If heat stress, cold snaps, or unstable weather are your biggest headaches, a closed house will solve more problems. If your climate is mild and you want lower starting cost, an open house can work-if you accept less control.
Coming up next: Open vs. Closed Chicken Houses: Which One Actually Makes You More Money?
📌 Engineer's Pro Tip
We see it every year: farmers pick open houses just to save on construction cost. Within 12 months, most are retrofitting extra cooling and ventilation to fix heat stress and poor performance. Don't just choose the cheapest to build - choose the one that performs year-round.
Step 5: Choose Building Materials Based on Performance, Not Just Price
Once you've settled on open or closed housing, the next critical decision is building materials.
Again, it's tempting to only look at the upfront price. But wall and roof materials impact far more than just construction cost.
They directly determine:
- How stable the temperature stays inside
- How much you'll spend on electricity for heating & cooling
- How comfortable and stress-free your birds are
- How often you'll need to repair or repaint
- Your long-term operating costs
For modern steel-structured chicken houses, insulated sandwich panels are the industry standard-because they deliver both structural strength and reliable thermal performance.
The key is choosing the right core material for your farm.
Here's what most farmers actually care about:
EPS sandwich panels
Lower cost, good basic insulation. Ideal if you're on a tight budget and your climate is relatively mild.
PU (Polyurethane) sandwich panels
Much better insulation, tighter air sealing. Perfect for areas with extreme heat, cold, or large day-night temperature swings. Saves more on electricity over time.
Rock wool sandwich panels
Top-tier fire resistance, durable, and moisture-stable. The go-to choice when fire safety is a top concern.
The "best" panel isn't the priciest one. It's the one that fits your climate, your feeding system, and your investment plan.
Making the right choice at the planning stage is far easier and cheaper than tearing out and replacing panels after the house is built.
We'll break down the pros, cons, and real costs of EPS, PU, and Rock wool in our full comparison guide.
📌 Engineer's Planning Tip
When talking to suppliers, don't only ask about thickness (50mm vs 75mm, etc.). Tell them:
Where your farm is located (climate zone)
Whether temperature control is your main priority
These two factors often matter more than the panel thickness itself.
Step 6: Leave Room for Future Expansion
Most poultry operations start with just one chicken house.
But that's rarely where the story ends.
As production ramps up, you'll almost certainly need more houses, storage space, feed silos, and utility rooms to keep the business running smoothly. The trouble is, future expansion is often an afterthought in the early planning stage.
We've seen farms where the first building was positioned in a way that left no usable space for additional houses later on. Other layouts worked fine for a single unit, but turned into logistical headaches once the farm expanded, with narrow roads and poor traffic flow slowing everything down.
These problems don't show up on opening day. They hit you two or three years later, when you're ready to grow. By then, correcting a bad layout means costly reconstruction, wasted land, and unnecessary delays.
Planning ahead and leaving enough flexible space upfront can save you a fortune in future renovations.
Even if you're only building one chicken house now, take a minute to ask yourself: If my business doubles in five years, where exactly will I put the next house? More often than not, this one question will completely reshape your site layout for the better.
📌 Planning Tip from Our Engineers
A well-planned site doesn't just make expansion easier.
It also improves vehicle access, equipment maintenance, and daily farm operations.
Planning ahead is almost always cheaper than rebuilding later.
Step 7: Prepare the Right Information Before Requesting a Quotation
After making the decisions above, you're finally ready to request quotations.
At this stage, many buyers still send a message that simply says:
"Please send me your chicken house price."
While suppliers can certainly provide a rough estimate, quotations become much more accurate when they are based on real project information.
Before contacting a supplier, it's helpful to prepare:
Project location
Chicken type (broiler, layer, or breeder)
Expected bird capacity
Preferred building dimensions (if available)
Local climate conditions
Open or closed house preference
Insulation requirements
Equipment requirements
Expected project schedule
Providing this information from the beginning reduces unnecessary revisions and allows suppliers to recommend solutions that actually fit your project.
Instead of comparing generic quotations, you'll be comparing proposals designed for the same requirements.
What We Usually Recommend
If there's one piece of advice we'd give to first-time buyers, it's this: don't worry if you don't have every technical detail figured out before contacting a supplier.
What makes the biggest difference is having a clear idea of your project goals.
It's quite common for us to receive inquiries that already include the building dimensions, but very little information about the farm itself. In many cases, those dimensions were copied from another project or recommended by someone else, without considering whether they actually matched the customer's production plans.
We recently discussed a project where the customer requested a quotation for a 12 × 100 meter chicken house. As we talked through the project, it became clear that the building size had been decided before the customer had finalized the target bird capacity, equipment layout, or even whether the farm would operate as an open or closed chicken house.
Rather than preparing a quotation immediately, we worked through those questions first. Once the production goals became clear, the recommended building layout changed-and so did the quotation.
This is exactly why we encourage customers to define their production requirements before comparing prices. A quotation is only as accurate as the information it's based on.
Need Help Planning Your Chicken House?
If you're still in the planning stage, you don't need to have every detail figured out before contacting us.
In fact, many of the projects we work on begin with only a few basic pieces of information, such as the project location, the expected bird capacity, or the available land area. From there, our engineers help customers determine a suitable building layout, insulation solution, and structural design based on their actual requirements.
If you'd like us to review your project, simply send us:
✅️Project location
✅️Broiler, layer, or breeder
✅️Expected bird capacity
✅️Available land size (if known)
✅️Any ideas or drawings you already have
We'll review the information and provide practical suggestions before preparing a customized quotation-completely free of charge.
