Lighting and heating for greenhouse

I'm nearly done building a kind of hoop house which will house our chickens and hopefully allow me to garden (cold tolerant crops) through the winter.  My first question is about lighting.  I've read that crops need a minimum of 10 hours of daylight per day or they stop growing?  In southern Vermont, I have 1o hours of daylight until early November, and after late January, and the shortest day of the year is 9.5 hours.  So I would need to provide up to 30 minutes of light a day.  Except the winter sun is weaker than the summer sun.  So how much light to I need to supply?  My growing space will be four 4x15 foot beds.  What would be the best cost effective way to supply the light?  What kind of solar power system would I need to power the lights, and a couple of fans?

My second question is how to heat the hoop house through the winter.  I want to keep it above freezing.  Above 40 degrees F would be better.  This is a temporary structure.  I plan on taking it down next July, so the heating system needs to be removable too.  

Hi Diane;
On a perfect winter day, you might get those hours of sun.
However, having lived in Southern VT,
I know that you will get many cloudy snow flurry kind of days with the temps in the upper 20s.
You will want extra lighting to keep your plants happy.
I suggest LED lights. that can be lowered or raised as plants grow.

Solar is going to be limited by those cloudy snowy days I mentioned.
You want solar and batteries but you also will want a backup generator.

I have a wood burning sheepherders stove in my hoop house. It has kept things above freezing. This summer I dismantled it and am building a concrete block L cove for the stove as a safety measure.

To keep things growing, you probably need at least 7 led lights per bed. We use 18 to overwinter the patio plants in the garage, all crammed into a 6x12 space. They pull 42 watts per light, maybe a touch more.  And most plants need more like 16 hours to actually grow.

Search for barina grow lights on Amazon, they are by far the best deal for budget grow lights that I’ve found.

So you are looking at roughly 1500 watts of led lights for a minimum of a half hour but probably 2-6 hours a day.  That’s going to be a lot of solar, like $10k ish lot of solar. Cheapest option is a generator, although you may have objections to that.  You could scrape together a tiny system to keep a few plants alive but almost dormant but I think you would be better served by following Eliot Coleman’s system of row covers in the greenhouse and choosing the right things to grow. Many Chinese veggies don’t need as much sunlight, for example.

There might be a some plants that stop growing with short daylight hours, but most will just grow really slowly, and with long, thin stems. Some plants might have trouble supporting themselves. So you can decide if you want to limit yourself to plants that can grow in these conditions, or spend the money and get grow lights to be able to grow whatever you want.

The other thing to consider is that chickens like to kick up a lot of dust, which will coat the inside of your greenhouse, you will need to plan to have it easy to clean the inside walls and ceiling if you have chickens in there.

I recommend autumn leaves as deep bedding, it will make the chickens happy and  keep the dust down.

A big tank of water heated to boiling could be a good way to keep the tunnel warm overnight.
This could be achieved through a basic wood stove, charcoal making tlud stove, a batch box rocket stove, a propane fired turkey fryer, a propane powered outdoor shower, photovoltalic powered heating element, thermal solar water heater, some combination of these, or some other means.