Results from First Year with Deep Litter Method

[WoodlandWoman]

It sounds like what you are using is like a cross between grass and other hay. Maybe not nutritionally, but the texture and the way it would act as litter in a coop. Straw from cereal grains is hollow, coarse and kind of waxy. I know waxy probably isn't the right word, but it isn't as absorbent, tending to shed water and doesn't compost as easily, compared to grass and other types of hay.

I've only done deep litter with wood shavings. The main difference I would see with litter that has a lower density of chickens on it, is that you wouldn't need to add as much fresh litter to it, for maintenance. I think you could add less litter, less often.

I would rather manage a less crowded coop, than a more crowded coop, with deep litter. A more crowded coop not only needs more fresh litter added, you can need to break up manure that has crusted up on top in spots and stir it in. With a less crowded coop, I can just add a top dressing of fresh litter in any spots that need it. The chickens just walking around on the fresh litter mixes it a bit with the layers below.

With the wood shavings, any time I started to smell ammonia, it meant I needed to add a top dressing of shavings. After only a short amount of time, I learned to add the fresh litter just before that happened, to prevent it. I got into a rhythm with my coop's litter maintenance and it's chicken load. I mainly added new litter in the areas that showed more poo action from the chickens. Under the roosts and around the food and water were the main ones.

This is a great thread.

 

[Beekissed]

Guppy, mine free range out every day and I still use the deep litter. It doesn't really matter how much they use it or deposit feces upon it, if it is working correctly, it will still digest it and be beneficial. Over time it will pack down and start to compost in place and they will only scratch up and disturb the top layers. The underlying layers will be developing good bacteria and yeasts, attracting the right kind of bugs and start to be turned to soil like compost.

I have no smells whatsoever in my coop and I've had the same deep litter in it since last fall. I only add more when it composts down so low that I can see soil peeking through the areas the birds have disturbed. It's important to keep the ground covered, moderately moist and spongy/springy.

In a coop that does not have a soil floor this can still be accomplished by not disturbing the underlayers of the bedding/litter if you can avoid it. They will develop their own moisture that is trapped there and start the composting of materials all the same. If you want to help with that, you can add moisture in the dry months, but the litter should draw humidity from the air if you do not live in an arid climate.

Ventilation is the key to no smells as well....big, open windows and airflow at the floor level can really help.

 

[RoseMarie1]

Guppy, mine free range out every day and I still use the deep litter. It doesn't really matter how much they use it or deposit feces upon it, if it is working correctly, it will still digest it and be beneficial. Over time it will pack down and start to compost in place and they will only scratch up and disturb the top layers. The underlying layers will be developing good bacteria and yeasts, attracting the right kind of bugs and start to be turned to soil like compost.

I have no smells whatsoever in my coop and I've had the same deep litter in it since last fall. I only add more when it composts down so low that I can see soil peeking through the areas the birds have disturbed. It's important to keep the ground covered, moderately moist and spongy/springy.

In a coop that does not have a soil floor this can still be accomplished by not disturbing the underlayers of the bedding/litter if you can avoid it. They will develop their own moisture that is trapped there and start the composting of materials all the same. If you want to help with that, you can add moisture in the dry months, but the litter should draw humidity from the air if you do not live in an arid climate.

Ventilation is the key to no smells as well....big, open windows and airflow at the floor level can really help.

Got a question for you all. Bee had suggested I do the deep litter method in my chicks run. The run is dirt bottom and wire sides and no roof on it except for poultry wire. So that would mean it would get wet every time it rains. I am in the south and it stays very humid here so I worry about mold big time. How would you go about putting this method in on my area with no roof for a cover to keep it dry when it rains? ALSO wondering something else here to...... we have a small area behind our house that my brother in law made for his cows to go from one pasture to another. I call it the cow path. Anyway it has gates and they are locked so they don't stay in this area, just a coming and going area and they don't come and go every day through there so there's not lots of cow poop or anything back there. BUT there is lots of leaves and pine straw so I am wondering IF I can rake that for the chicks run and use it for my deep litter method IF you guys still think I can do this with no roof over their run? I can dump the grass clippings in there to. Their run is probably like 14 foot wide and a good 80' long.

 

[RoseMarie1]

opps I needed to subscribe to this and forgot to do so.

 

[GuppyTJ]

Guppy, mine free range out every day and I still use the deep litter. It doesn't really matter how much they use it or deposit feces upon it, if it is working correctly, it will still digest it and be beneficial....

Thanks, Beekissed and WoodlandWoman, very helpful. Can you also address this question, it's got me baffled. The original author of this post said:

"Every day or so I throw in 1-2 tubs of scraps, intentionally aiming to drop the scraps right under the perch where most of the manure has fallen. This is a very important step to get the birds to turn under the fresh manure as they are in the process of scratching for the scraps. "

I understand why this is good for manure and compost management but it seems counter to good sanitation. Doesn't this mean the chickens are eating scraps coated with chicken poo? I currently have 16 chickens of 14 weeks old on a 14 foot wide roost. They generate a good amount of poo each night, which I currently catch on plastic trays. I scrape the poo into my compost pile. It's a good sized pile every morning, as I'm sure everyone already knows. I'm trying to imagine all that poo staying on the deep litter (worked into the compost or not, either way), then throwing food scraps right on top of it. I try to keep the poo and food separated but this method puts them purposefully together.

Thoughts?
Guppy

 

[Angelicisi]

What a good tip!

There is a little thing to help with the smell that I stumbled upon completely by accident. I had a brush pile in my yard for a while and finally got around to burning it. Anyhow after it burned down and put the rest out with water, I left the ash and leftover black bits for the girls to dust bath in. Well they decided to eat the charcoal bits,there was a black poop epidemic. Concerned it would hurt them, I did some research. It seems that charcoal was regularly fed years ago to aid digestion and filter toxins from them. As far as I read it was a general barnyard practice for all livestock. But the added result was a poop with no ammonia smell as the charcoal neutralized the smell. The chemical reaction turns the ammonia to ammonium which is less harmful as less aromatic. The past couple of weeks I had noticed that the coop was devoid of that coop scent never realizing the cause until I stumbled upon the black poop and charcoal research.

 

[Mike592]

I'm curious how you dry the bags of leaves and grass you store to add litter all year long? I am imagining bags of wet leaves sitting in my shed for months getting moldy...

 

[Beekissed]

I rake up dry leaves on a dry day, smash them down into trash cans. It is natural that there be a little moisture there and that cannot be avoided. If you are using bags you can poke holes in them to allow the escape of humidity and thus keep them from staying so moist. Leaf mold is a fact, no matter what but it will not cause a problem if your coop is airy and you keep the litter well balanced.

Grass is like hay...it will always have a little moisture, no matter how you dry it, so accept that you are using a more moist and more absorbent(it will draw moisture from the air even and also release humidity as it ages and decomposes) material for bedding and use it when you need more moisture in your bedding. Some moisture is needed for composting to occur, so one cannot eliminate all forms of moisture and the resulting mold formation. There are many forms of mold and they only become a problem when allowed to thrive and take over.

When we have hot weather and my litter is getting dusty, I'll add bedding the has a natural moisture to get some back into my litter. When it is rainy and muggy, I'll use a drier bedding like pine shavings. It's those little tweaks as you go along that make for successful litter decomposition, without the formation of molds or having too much dust and no digestion of the feces.

Some people might think that is too much work but I find it requires very little work once you've got the system perking along and WAY less work than constantly cleaning out the coop, dealing with the flies and smells, etc.

 

[pdirt]

I too am also curious about the seeming contradiction about mixing fresh food scraps in the places where fresh poo droppings are, to encourage them to scratch the poo into the litter so it composts better. I have been trying this and while so far I am not really worried about it, it still makes me wonder if it is a good idea overall. Our birds free range most of th day, so they only have time to scratch these areas early in the morning before we let them out. We haven't had a lot of food scraps to use so recently I spread out a good layer of fresh grass clippings over the poo and they seem to be scratching that in a bit more.

Also regarding what to use for litter I am mildly confused. I have read that grass clippings, straw and wood shavings are all not good to use, the reason mostly being because of potential crop impaction if they eat it. It seems like that dried leaves are the best of all worlds and while we do have some of those, it's not enough. Our current DLM is mostly pine shavings, "weed straw", dried leaves and a bit of grass clippings. Again, I'm not too worried about what the bedding is since they range so much of the day. In the winter will be more interesting when there is snow on the ground and less to range on. Also, BK's comment about mixing in some moister bedding during dry weather and drier bedding during wet seasons makes sense. It's quite dry here in the summer, as well as both coop and run are covered, so I have been spraying down the whole chicken house with EM about once a week to keep the dust down. I also did have a pile,of leaves I was drying out, or tried to since the birds decided to kick through the whole pile! Those leaves are now destined for the regular compost pile since the only large dry place I had to put the leaves was in the old barn that was littered with all sorts of animals poo, from horse, bird, dog and probably more. Lesson learned, though it was entertaining watching them go to town on the pile of leaves!

 

[WoodlandWoman]

Everyone does things their own way. The only thing I've ever tossed under the perches is clean litter. I noticed with mine, they will avoid walking in that area when it's full of manure and walk on it if there's clean litter on top. So, my way of doing it is to toss a light layer of clean shavings on it occasionally. As they walk over it, it combines with the manure that's there and eventually makes a mixed layer. I tend to like thinner layers of manure and litter, rather than thick layers that need a lot of stirring. So I add less litter, a little more often and only where it needs it. I think that keeps things cleaner on top, too. For example, rather than adding a couple of inches of litter over the entire coop once a month, I would use a feed scoop to toss some litter under the perches, around the food and water, once a week. No set time, just as needed. Other areas of the coop as needed.

I haven't had a problem with my chickens eating their litter. I have chicks on paper towels for the first few days, until they're eating well. Then I transition them to wood shavings. Once in awhile one of them may swallow a small shaving, but what they really want to eat is their food. Mine have never had a problem from being on wood shavings.

Since mine get to free range, they get all the fresh, tender grass they want. I've never used dried grass in the coop, but if I did, I don't think mine would have a big interest in eating it. Now, if chickens don't have access to greens of any kind, I can see where they might want to eat hay or dried grass. I think that might be where people get in trouble with crop impactions, especially if it's really long, coarse material, that's harder to break down. In the winter, I give them wheat grass or sprouts from time to time.

When they're out foraging, mine just love to scratch around in the leaf litter. We leave it along the fence lines of the mowed area, plus there's a lot in the wooded areas, of course. They love all the little life forms that live under there. I'm sure chickens love it as litter, too. I think it might mat too much in the coop if it's not mixed with other litters, but I've never used it in the coop. That's the only problem I've heard.