My daughter works for a county park, and has been tasked with choosing five trees, one of which will be planted next to a chicken coop to provide shade, but it shouldn’t be a messy tree. The others will go out in the pasture so they need to be nontoxic to livestock. Native trees preferred. If it all possible, definitely not any that are on the invasive list. Think you could help me come up with a couple types of trees??? I thought of American Yellowwood as a possibility. Thanks!
Really depends on the location. What city or region? And are the sites well-draining, moist, excessively dry, periodically flooded, the soil acidic, heavy, light, etc.
I’d be curious to know what kind of park has a chicken coop and pasture with livestock. That’s pretty unusual.
Presumably they want shade sooner rather than later? So a fast or at least not slow growing tree is important.
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The only purpose is to provide shade? There are some pretty good fast growing trees that can also provide forage for certain livestock (goats, cattle, etc.). Mulberry (females can be messy, but males not so much) is one that comes to mind.
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Willow (broken branches are common)
Cottonwood/aspen (cottony mess)
Basswood
Hackberry
Tulip poplar
Sycamore
Pine
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Yes, region would be helpful. Ash (emerald ash borers) and elm (dutch elm disease) are no good in the northeast, but bigtooth aspen is popular. Fast growing and disease-free.
We’re starting to see the city replace aging Norway maples with ash, burr oak, white swamp oak and linden. They all seem pretty well behaved, but only the linden grows very fast, I think.
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mulberries can be messy but the leaves are high in protein and the berries near the coop feeds the chickens when they fall. in Europe it was common the farmers would harvest and dry whole branches to be stored for winter as tree hay. they should grow very fast in your climate. siberian pea shrubs grow to 15ft. are a N fixer. have attractive leaves and flowers and the seeds are 30% protein. i have 2 near my coops and the birds fight for the seed. when the seed pods dry they explode scattering the seeds. what falls outside the runs are enjoyed by the chickadees and other small birds.
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My basswood trees are messy. I really like them for shade but they shed incredible amounts of sticks and seed pods. When my biggest one flowers it is a total magnet for bees and wasps - could be good thing - except in a park with people you probably don’t want this.
grows best near water - I like this tree very much if you have the right area for it
It is a county park that includes a farm to treat people to kind of a petting zoo too. Called Springton Manor Farm in SE Pennsylvania. I do not know all the details about it, just that they feature goats, horses, sheep, a few head of cattle, and a chicken coop that also houses a peacock. Shade for the animals seems to be the main thing they want, without any toxicity dangers from fruit, leaves or bark to the grazers. No maintenance burden to the staff is highly desired - no tendency to breaking branches, spiny nuts, etc.
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Linden/basswood, serviceberry, spice bush, witchhazel, hazelnut. Sycamores become monsters. Not sure if size is a factor. Obviously I’d advocate for persimmons too.
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A male mulberry could be a good candidate. It doesn’t produce any fruit. The foliage would be beneficial to chickens and livestock. Also a mulberry tree is drought tolerant once established.
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As a European, living in one of the regions where a fruiting mulberry is The chicken coop tree, I owe it to my elders to ask, why would you not want to feed the chickens with the mulberries? (The moment the mulberry hits the ground, there is no mess. It is gone and benefits the chickens and whomever eats their eggs. 
) As for the off-chance that a mulberry may hit someone’s head or white shirt, well a white alba does not stain.
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If looking for natives, red mulberry could be hard to source. Probably the best option for chickens though as you said!
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Nothing I’ve ever grown even approaches hybrid poplars for fast growth. Siouxland poplar is a cottonless cottonwood. Poplars can lose limbs in big winds, but so can most every other tree I’ve ever been around. They do get big in a hurry and need plenty of room.
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If it’s a northerly location, maples and birches are both really nice trees imho. Maples have denser and more shade, birches are really attractive, don’t mind poor soil, and fix nitrogen.
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Yellow Poplar aka Tulip Poplar would be nearly ideal for your purpose in a pasture setting. You get rapid growth, valuable lumber, and honeybees collect nectar and make reddish good flavored honey from the flowers. They are deciduous and relatively good at holding onto their limbs.
Others worth consideration include maple, linden, and sycamore.
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Red maple and sugar maple make nice shade trees.
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I’m with @Tana. Mulberry would be the best pick, IMO,… In pre-WW II era, mulberries were commonly planted, at least on Southern farmsteads, as food/forage sources for poultry and pigs. Goats/sheep/deer LOVE mulberry leaves… There are a number of folks who are working on selecting ‘forage’ mulberries.
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Tulip Poplar, Red Mulberry, and one of the white oak varieties would all be good choices.
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For the chicken coop tree, there are a lot of options. The pasture trees might be very limited if they’re not getting protected.
Pretty much any of the suggestions above would be fine for the chicken coop, it just depends on how fast you want it to grow and how big it’ll eventually be. Deciduous is probably a good idea, since the chickens will be wanting sunlight during the winter. I’d recommend planting something that isn’t already growing nearby to improve biodiversity. Ideally, plant something uncommon. Kentucky coffeetree or American hoptree are both quite interesting plants and underplanted, hoptree being especially interesting as it supports giant swallowtail butterflies and together with prickly ash is of the very, very few tree-like members of the citrus family Rutaceae that can grow as far north as Canada.
For the pasture, unless the protection is very good (unlikely if the staff wants to keep things low-effort), then most broadleaved plants are out of the question given the presence of goats. Also, many of the trees suggested above can be toxic to grazers, horses in particular, under the right conditions. Pines and juniper can cause birth defects and abortions, and for all ruminants chokecherry, black cherry, sand cherry, American plums, oaks, black locust, walnut, persimmon, maples, and crab apples all have some degree of toxicity. Additionally, yew, chinaberry, horsechestnut, and laurelcherry are just straight up poisonous.
Unless properly managed, trees in a pasture setting stand a chance of either being killed by or killing the animals. Some protection of the young trees, and ensuring the animals are never starving will prevent 99% of problems, but you’d be surprised how often hobbyist farm animals are maltreated and periodically starving to death.
With that out of the way, I’d second the tulip poplar suggestion, so long as the goats are kept off of them the first few years. Another native that would do very well and grow quite fast especially if the pasture site is a bit damp, is dawn redwood. Sure, the modern native range is some mountains in China, but prior to glaciation, dawn redwoods were not only native to Pennsylvania, it’s arguably their ideal climate. Decades-old dawn redwoods in Pennsylvania are already taller and larger than centuries-old dawn redwoods in China, showcasing just how much healthier and well-adapted they are despite their few thousand year hiatus from the area. They basically never drop branches, their seeds are small and non-descript, and their needles are fairly soft and decompose easily. Being deciduous, they’re also much less likely to get eaten by hungry animals in the winter.
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