The Smart Coop Review

Introduction

There’s something special about growing your own food. Whether it's veggies, fruit, or herbs, if you grow it yourself it tastes better, it’s better for you, and it feels like an accomplishment.

But it’s easy to romanticize the idea of growing your food. In reality, we would all rather go to the store for a dozen eggs than setup a coop to raise our own chickens. Or would we?

The Smart Coop is the easiest way to get started raising backyard chickens. It has a steel run that keeps predators away, two AI-powered cameras and an app for 24/7 chicken monitoring, and a design that looks nice and makes cleaning or collecting eggs easy. Let’s take a closer look.

Design

The first thing that stands out about the Smart Coop is the design. This is not a run-down chicken shack you might find on a farm. This is a chicken coop with style. It’s simple, playful, it can elevate any backyard, and it really feels like it belongs in the city.

And this is important because for Coop to re-connect people to their food and the land, their product needs to resonate with the majority of the world living in urban areas.

The run is tall enough for a human to fit inside, if necessary, but you’ll mostly be using the side and back doors. The side panels swing open for easy cleanup, and the laying boxes at the back let you retrieve your eggs without disrupting your flock.

The roost also has some subtle design features that stop rain from getting inside and keeping the air circulating.

Construction

The Smart Coop’s outdoor run is built like a tank. They use 12 gauge welded steel rods, so you won’t be able to bend these panels and neither will predators. They also use 1/2 inch openings all around the bottom 18 inches so smaller predators can’t sneak their paws inside to attack your chickens.

The roost sits on top of the run and is built out of MDPE, a common plastic used in backyard play sets for children. The ladder and roosting bars inside are also made from plastic.

The Smart Coop ships in five separate boxes and can be built in a couple hours using the Coop screwdriver provided in the boxes. Once built, the Smart Coop weighs 195 pounds, which is heavier than most chicken coops, so it won’t blow away in a storm.

Tech

Aside from the design, Coop really stands apart from the competition with their tech, specifically their Coop app and cameras.

Coop Cameras

Each Smart Coop comes with two AI-enabled cameras, one for your outdoor space and one for your indoor roost. They work right out of the box, and you can pair them with your Coop app to start recording your flock in five minutes.

The cameras use machine learning to identify different predators outside the coop, and can scare them away with sounds and lights if they get too close. The cameras can also tell you if one of your chickens didn’t return to the roost at night or if an egg was left outside. They even have two-way audio, so you can hear what your chickens are up to and talk back to them like you might talk to your pet.

The cameras have 10,000mAh Lithium-Ion batteries which need to be re-charged every month or so, but for $39 you can get an add-on Coop solar panel so you never need to manually charge your batteries.

Coop App

Coop's app might be the most polarizing feature of the product. Some will really enjoy the peace-of-mind of being able to monitor their coop from their phone, and others will say “oh great, another app to monitor a device that sits in my backyard all day”.

It’s worth noting you can have it either way. The Smart Coop is built with automatic doors that open just before sunrise and close just after sunset so even if you never touch the app, your chickens will be able to get in and out of the coop just fine.

If you do choose to use the app, it’s pretty intuitive. Your home tab displays your live camera feeds which you can click to expand, there is a tab showing interesting moments from your flock, and a tab for sharing these moments with the Coop community.

You can even book someone (Coop calls these people Chicken Tenders) from the app to clean up your coop if you’re out of town for a while.

The app also gives you a two-way audio channel to your coop, and you can trigger lights, sounds, and manually open or close the Coop door as you wish.

Maintenance

When it comes to maintenance, the Smart Coop is relatively low-touch thanks to Coop’s technology, product design, and community.

Smart Coop doors open and close automatically saving you a trek out to the backyard twice a day, and the app is designed to alert you when something goes wrong or needs attention.

That leaves three main tasks you’ll have as a Coop owner:

1. Maintaining food and water supplies for your chickens
2. Cleaning the roost on a regular schedule
3. Collecting eggs on a regular schedule

Two orange buckets come with each coop to store food and water for your chickens. They fit neatly on the roost doors, but they can also be placed outdoors in the run.

6 cardboard trays also come with each coop to line the bottom of your roost and collect chicken manure. When they're full you can fold them up and insert a new one in minutes. Coop also sells extra cardboard trays if you want to buy more.

The two laying boxes have a lid which you can open from the outside of the coop to collect eggs, although chickens may lay some eggs outside of their laying boxes. The Coop app will generally alert you if there are rogue eggs in other parts of the coop.

Overall, the maintenance necessary for keeping chickens will probably be less than a typical dog, and may be similar to a typical house cat. You don't have to walk your cats or your chickens every day, but you still need to make sure they have food, water, and a clean space.

If you don't want to do any maintenance, you can request one of Coop's Chicken Tenders to visit your backyard regularly and clean out your coop for you. This option is also useful for longer vacations where you need someone to look out for your flock.

Space

The Smart Coop supports up to 6 chickens, so at full capacity that means each chicken gets 5 sq. ft of total indoor/outdoor space and 10 inches of perching space at night.

The indoor roost is about 10 sq. ft, and the outdoor run is about 22 sq. ft for a combined total of 32 square feet. Of course, you can also open up the run and let your chickens roam freely all over your backyard, but that’s a personal choice. Chasing chickens around your yard isn’t always easy, and if they are outside the coop, they are exposed to predators.

The Smart Coop has two 30 inch roosting bars and two laying boxes inside. Each roosting bar can fit up to 3 chickens, and they often sleep very close to each other for warmth and balance. Chickens are also comfortable sharing laying boxes.

For comparison, factory farms that produce your store-bought eggs have minimum space requirements as low as 0.5 sq. ft per bird. That is roughly 1/10th of the space a bird gets in the Smart Coop, and the factory farmed birds do not get to spend their life outside pecking for bugs in the grass.

So the Smart Coop is a meaningful step up for chicken health standards, but if you want to give your chickens even more space, you can choose to raise fewer birds or get a second coop.

A couple other important notes:

• The Smart Coop works in all seasons and all climates. Chickens are able to adapt to a really wide range of environments, so they generally know how to deal with snow, rain, and heat.
• Most major cities allow anyone to keep a handful of backyard hens assuming you have a backyard with some grass. And of course in the countryside, this is widely accepted too.

Benefits of a Chicken Coop

Now that we’ve covered the Smart Coop's features and maintenance, what are the benefits of owning a chicken coop?

First, you’ll get a supply of fresh, free-range eggs, which taste better and are healthier than the eggs you buy in the grocery store. Depending on a few factors, you can get 3-6 eggs per chicken per week. For a flock of 6, that means roughly 18-36 eggs every week, plenty for most families and maybe enough to share some extra eggs with your neighbors.

Second, instead of putting food scraps in your trash, you can feed them to your chickens. Chickens are omnivores that scavenge for a wide variety of food in the wild, so with a few exceptions, chickens will happily eat most grains, veggies, fruit, and meat. You’ll have less trash, and less to spend on chicken feed.

Third, chickens are like pets to some people. They have names, they get photos taken for Instagram, and they have real sentimental value. One difference of course, is that chickens are outdoors 24/7 so they won’t eat your furniture, and they give you nutritious food every day.

Fourth, if you have a young family, this can be a great way to help kids understand where their food comes from and give them a fun activity to look after chickens and collect eggs each day.

Finally, your chickens will be spreading manure that nourishes your lawn and they will eat the bugs they find in the grass. In a way, chickens are like a natural fertilizer and pesticide.

Prices

As of 2024, the Smart Coop costs $1,695 for the roost and metal base, or $1,995 with the exterior run included. The Coop solar panels that keep your cameras running indefinitely costs $39, and a pack of 12 Coop litter trays costs $69.

Product Wishlist

The Smart Coop launched in 2023, so it is relatively new. If the Coop team is watching this and is looking for some user feedback, I have some wishlist features that I hope to see in future iterations:• Modular runs would be a cool way to let people design custom layouts for chickens depending on their backyard dimensions• Wood perches would be a nice touch to mimic the branches a chicken might sleep on in the wild• A 100% wood roost would eliminate plastic in the product, improving sustainability and further elevating aesthetics

Final Notes

The Smart Coop is an extraordinary product. It has the potential to help people re-connect with their food, the land, and to create a robust, healthy food system with less waste. All of this in a package that fits on a patch of grass in your backyard.

If you want better food but don’t want to move to the country and buy a farm to do it, or if you just want a low-maintenance outdoor pet that gives you fresh food in return, the Smart Coop is worth taking a look at.

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