Looking for input regarding composting chicken litter

I LOVE reading other people's composting ideas. I have only a mid-size rotating compost barrel myself, but for our family garden, it's all I need. Some really great tips on this thread though. Thanks all who shared!

I love the soldier fly maggot idea too for the hens, and I would love to implement something like this in my run, but I am concerned about the smell. I despise the smell of rotting flesh (who doesn't I guess). Wish there was a way to let the setup work without being so smelly.

I am now doing worm composting which I hear is more efficient for moving nutrition through. I am shredding my used paper for some of the brown matter and then alternating it with food scraps. So far so good. In the first three weeks I had a bucket of black gold (liquid fertilizer) in my catchment under the worm bin. Diluted it 1:1 and put it on my winter greens. Worms are keeping up with me nicely, always room to dump into the bin as I need it. In about 6 months, I will harvest my first worm casings. I have given up on trying to get to hot composting all together. I am using my yard waste as layering with 1/ the chicken hen box waste (either shredded paper that they have sat on for about a week, or mulched magnolia leaves that they have sat on), 2/ leafy and woody waste from the yard and 3/ cardboard that arrives with shipping orders. The layering is defeating the grass that wants to take over and building soil in my fallow patches. I am also burying some of the hen box used waste directly in areas that will be fallow for a while. I am loving this new system, but am only about 2 months into it's implementation.

Has anyone used the rotating plastic drum bins? I see a lot of open bins here but I'm afraid of attracting rats since the pile would be closer to my neighbor than my own house. I have 5 chickens so not sure how much I would generate. I am scraping down dropping boards every day so I have a small bin for that. Curious how those store-bought bins work.

I have a rotating bin. I thought it would perform as advertised, but it's way too small. In order to compost well, "they say" that you need a cubic yard. I use my bin mostly to hold stuff in late fall. Then, in the spring, it gets dumped where I can most effectively use it, but it's no where near composted. I also have a worm bin. Almost all of my composting is done with sheet or trench, directly in the garden. I also dump a lot of debris into the chicken run, working on DL there and in the coop. That's a long term project, the stuff just melts into the soil. Eventually, I'll have tons of black gold that can go into the gardens.

My biggest problem, IMO is that in spite of having 25 chickens and 4+ acres, and bringing in 100 construction bags of leaves last season, I have no where near enough compostable matter.

Keltown, If I were looking for a "compost" solution, I'd consider making a combination hay bale garden/compost bin. I'd either make a horse shoe shaped bin out of hay bales, and put my compostables in the horse shoe, while gardening in the hay bale perimeter, or, I'd put 2 sets of 3 bales lined up parallel to each other, and about 2 - 3' apart, and garden in the bales, and use the space between for a "raised trench" compost bin. You could keep some flakes of hay, or piles of leaves available to cover new additions to the compost pile if you were concerned about "city neighbors".