Poop Boards

Quote:
Maybe I'm reading that wrong, but you must have a twisted sense of humor!

We opted for sand boxes under the roost. I used some of my Jiffy seed starting trays (the kind without the compartments) from my garden supplies and filled them with sand. We use a kitty litter scooper to remove the poops to the compost bin.

No muss, no fuss, works great for us!

NanaLantana said:

I didn't like the idea of scraping poop, either, so I put my thinking cap on and came up with the poop slide. It works great in my florida coop. It's made of 20" x 10 ft aluminum flashing, and is mounted to two rails, and inserted under the roost, angling down into a bucket at the exit end. You pull the rails together a little so there's a dip in the middle. It's also covered with chicken wire, so no chickens slide into the poop bucket! I simply hose it off each morning, takes about 15 seconds, less than a flush of the toilet in water, and it's in a bucket. I throw the poop water under my fruit trees. Easy - you might ask for photos, but I'm ancient and cannot figure out how to get them to appear in the thread!

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I noticed you mentioned chicken wire over the poop slide. Taking into consideration the two facts that closely spaced wire mesh is more comfortable and safe for chickens to walk on, and that wider spaced mesh is better for poop to drop through and not stick/accumulate on the wire, what is the widest spacing for wire mesh to keep the chickens off the poop tray itself? If the mesh is too wide, will they step through and injure their legs/feet? Or are they smart enough to see the wire and keep off? Thanks in advance!

I did put chicken wire over my 'poop slide', buy you could always double it. Don't use the rabbit stuff, or you'll still be scraping. Now that my coop and chickens are on their 4th year, I don't clean the slide as often as I did when they were new - once every 2 weeks is fine for my 5 hens.

crosscreekfarmpaulinesc said:

I have a great chicken coop, but now that I have my chickens I am tweaking what I thought was a good roosting area. I am spending so much of my time cleaning out poop!!! I keep reading in the forum about "poop boards" under the roosting area. What is this? Does anyone have any pictures? Do you still add shavings on top of these boards? I am throwing out sooo much shavings each week so I know I am doing something wrong. The chickens are healthy, happy and love their coop....but I am exhausted! Thanks for any suggestions!

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Poop boards are great and will make it easy to remove waste from the coop daily. They also create more room in the coop since the chickens can use the floor space below the boards and you can use the space to hand waterers or feeders. My poop boards are a table style and I use a scraper and dust pan to remove waste daily. I also dust DE and or Sweet PDZ to keep them dry and smelling good!

Foreground roost bar does not have a board but the other roost bars use poop boards. They are great to have!

Lots of different ways to do this as you can see. I have a brooder built into my coop. The top is my droppings board. It’s just a sheet of unpainted plywood. I clean it whenever I need to, which depends on how many chickens I have and how humid the weather is, sometimes weekly or sometimes every three weeks. If you ever start to smell it, you are a little late in time to clean it.

I do not use any kind of bedding on it so I get pure poop for my compost, no PDZ, shavings, anything. I have a garden hoe with a broken handle I use to scrape it to get everything loose, then a Squeegee to rake it into a bin.

My brooder does not reach all the way across under the roosts. I have about two feet of roosts not over the brooder. I got a couple of plastic bins from Walmart, maybe 44 quart size?, and put them under that. No screen, no cover, no nothing. That’s worked out pretty good but be careful not to create a hidden space behind those bins. Hens will occasionally try to hide a nest back there.

NanaLantana said:

I didn't like the idea of scraping poop, either, so I put my thinking cap on and came up with the poop slide. It works great in my florida coop. It's made of 20" x 10 ft aluminum flashing, and is mounted to two rails, and inserted under the roost, angling down into a bucket at the exit end. You pull the rails together a little so there's a dip in the middle. It's also covered with chicken wire, so no chickens slide into the poop bucket! I simply hose it off each morning, takes about 15 seconds, less than a flush of the toilet in water, and it's in a bucket. I throw the poop water under my fruit trees. Easy - you might ask for photos, but I'm ancient and cannot figure out how to get them to appear in the thread!

Click to expand...

This is a fantastic idea. Would love to see a picture

We use a poopboard in our coop, keeps the floor cleaner and is a breeze to clean. It's filled with PDZ. We sift it out everyday or so with a wire mesh paper tray and a wide putty knife. The poo goes into a bucket then dumped onto the compost for later use in the garden.