Editorial policy

1. Sourcing standards

Every factual claim on this site falls into one of these classes, and each class has a fixed sourcing requirement:

• Health and disease — Salmonella, avian influenza, mites, frostbite. Requires an inline citation with a link to CDC, USDA APHIS, or a named university extension service. Non-negotiable, and there is no circumstance in which we publish a health claim without one.
• Space, sizing and husbandry standards — square feet per bird, roost length, nest box ratios. Requires a named university extension service. These are the numbers beginners trust us on most.
• Feed quantities, water intake, incubation parameters, temperature thresholds — a named extension service or published manufacturer guidance.
• Product specifications — attributed to the manufacturer or retailer listing, as published at a stated date. Specifications change silently, which is why we date them.
• Prices — never cited. Live from the retailer or absent. See how we pick.
• Owner-experience patterns — described as what verified retailer reviews report, never as our own testing.

Two prohibitions follow from that list. We never cite another review site’s roundup as evidence for a fact, and we never treat a forum thread as authoritative on a health or safety question.

If no authoritative source can be found for a specific number, the page omits the number. This is why you will find pages here that decline to tell you how many eggs a breed lays per year, or what temperature is “too cold” for chickens. Those figures circulate widely and we have not been able to source them to anything we trust, so we explain the pattern instead of inventing a number.

2. Health content is never monetized

Pages about disease carry no affiliate links, no product picks and no buy buttons. That applies to our Salmonella and bird flu pages, and to the coop heater fire safety page.

The reason is simple. The entire value of safety advice is that it has no commercial motive behind it. Putting a buy button next to guidance about a disease would destroy that, and no commission is worth it. Where a page is deliberately unmonetized, it says so on the page.

3. Separation of commercial and editorial decisions

• Commission rates do not influence rankings. Where a cheaper product is the right answer, it ranks first.
• No manufacturer has any input into what appears here, in what order, or what we say about it. We accept no sponsored placements, no paid reviews and no gifted-product-for-coverage arrangements. If that ever changes, this page will say so before any such content appears.
• We publish negative assessments. Where a product fails for our buyer we say so, and where the answer is to buy nothing at all — a coop heater, for most flocks — the page leads with that.
• No urgency or scarcity language. No countdowns, no “stock running low”, no invented deadlines. We are not the retailer and have no business implying we know their inventory.

4. No fabrication, specifically

These are absolute, and worth stating individually:

• No invented testing. We do not run a product testing lab and never claim to. Where a product was assessed on specifications and owner reports, the card says that.
• No invented credentials. Mike M. is the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media. He is not a veterinarian, a poultry scientist or a certified anything, and this site will never imply otherwise.
• No testimonials. We publish no reviews or testimonials we have not received, which currently means we publish none at all. There is no testimonials section anywhere on this site, by design.
• No invented prices, ratings or review counts. Prices come from the live feed or not at all, and we do not publish star ratings or review counts of our own invention.
• No review-rating markup on our own scores. The rubric scores you see are our editorial judgment, shown openly on the page. They are deliberately never emitted as review or aggregate-rating structured data, because marking an editorial score as a product review rating would contradict the methodology page.
• No stock photography presented as our own. The atmosphere photographs on this site are licensed stock, used illustratively, and are never captioned or framed as Mike M.’s own flock, premises or work. There is no author photograph, because a stock portrait presented as a real person is the same category of lie as a fake review.

5. Corrections

Corrections get priority over new content. If you find an error:

1. Email contact@chickensandcoops.com or use the contact form.
2. We check the claim against the original source rather than against another website.
3. If it is wrong, we fix it and the page’s visible updated date changes.
4. Where a correction materially changes a recommendation, we note what changed on the page rather than quietly editing it.

6. Update cadence and dates

The visible last-updated date on a page changes only when the content actually changed. We do not bump dates to look fresh to search engines. Reviewing a page and finding nothing to change does not produce a new date.

The schedule is published on how we pick: main roundups quarterly, others every six months, the winter cluster annually before October, health pages annually or immediately on any guidance change.

7. What this site is not

It is not veterinary advice and not medical advice. For a sick bird, speak to a vet with poultry experience or your state extension service. For a sick person, speak to a clinician. We summarize published public-health guidance and link to the original, which is a different thing from advising you.

8. Who is responsible

Chickens & Coops is published by Iron Mako Media and written and edited by Mike M., who is accountable for everything on it. More about who writes this.