Composting chicken run

[vpatt]

Thanks again everyone. I do have buckets like that from Lowe's and Home Depot with lids and I have always used them for fermented feed....But I have no idea if they are food grade....I may have to check out Tractor Supply. If I ever get a break between storms.

 

[Red-Stars-in-RI]

That is a lot! If you have a lot of chickens I imagine they gobble it up. What is your system/process though? Are you simply dropping all this in the run twice a week? Are you adding brown compost materials (carbon rich thinks like woodchips, straw, dried leaves, etc.) in between loads? How many chickens? And how large is the run?

Also, does it all go to the chickens, or do you also have a large composting setup outside of the chicken run? And either way, what do you do with all that compost? My gardening, yardwork, kitchen and chicken/duck waste products make me enough compost for my garden, which is fairly large (~25'x55'). All that additional matter you are taking in would make a tremendous amount of compost each year. Are you selling it or giving it away? Do you use it on a field or large garden? Or perhaps you just leave it right there in the chicken run and let it build up?

Yes, it's a lot. It's all evolving. I only started this last spring (before that it was just deep-litter composting in the run).

At the time I had about 20 chickens. I piled up a bunch of leaves and muck from a wet part of my run and started picking up food waste once a week.

Then in August, I added about 55 more chicks, who are now at point of lay. I put last year's pile to bed in late October and built the current compost bin. It's 14 feet long by 7 feet wide. I started with all my fall leaves and then started in with the food waste. The food pantry asked if I could start coming TWICE a week recently. I bring in the food waste, check it to make sure it's clean (and open any packages that need opening) and then dump the food on the top of the compost pile.

A good amount of the food gets eaten as it's added to the pile. Whatever else is there either gets eaten later or rots into the compost. Usually I try to add a dose of carbon between trips to the food pantry to keep the ratios in check. With the snow on the ground, leaves have been tricky...which is why in the pick I posted you see a lot of hay on the pile. I plan to get some wood chips this spring to spread around the rest of the run and to add to the pile. Most of my carbon is leaves, but I supplement with spent hay, shredded paper and cardboard, shavings from coop cleanouts, etc.

Last year's pile should be ready for shifting and harvesting as soon as the weather warms up. I do plan to build a couple raised beds this spring. Other than that, I plan to spread a lot on the lawn, as our soil isn't great. Beyond that...I don't really know yet. I imagine I'll share some compost with family and friends. I may look to donate some to community gardens or organizations that grow food to donate to food banks as well. I'm jealous of that cement mixer sifter, for sure.

My total "farm" is about 7500 sq feet (the property is less than a half acre). Part of that 7500 sq feet is the goat run (the chickens visit it) and the rest is chicken run. So, nobody wants for either space or food.

So yeah, it's been an adventure. Kind of crazy what a guy can get up to when the world tells him he has to stay home for a year.

 

[gtaus]

I'm hoping that saves a lot of waste plastic and makes it easier to move the food waste (a 5 gallon bucket of food is easier to move than a bag).

Sounds like a better option. Those 5 gallon buckets can be used over and over for many projects. Easy to carry, dump, wash out, and reuse.

 

[gtaus]

I'm jealous of that cement mixer sifter, for sure.

Yeah, it's a real back saver and it paid for itself in just a few days work. Here is a picture of it in operation.

I go more into depth on how I built this on my thread from last fall: How to determine quality of different types of compost? Basically, I built the attached wire/barrel so that it can be removed from the cement mixer and you can use it again for cement. I have different sized hardware cloth wire (1/4 inch and 1/2 inch) to screen the compost. The finished compost falls into one wagon underneath the wire and the larger, unfinished compost rotates its way out the front of the barrel and into the other wagon. The finished compost wagon holds 6 cubic feet and it takes me about 20 minutes to fill it up.

For years I just used a manual 2x4 sifting frame, but it would take me hours to sift compost that now only takes minutes. I am at an age (60+) that I value both time saving and back saving machines to make my life easier.

When I decided to turn my chicken run into a composting chicken run, I knew that I would not be able to process all that compost by hand anymore. The whole cement mixer setup cost me about $200, but if you consider the cost of a bag of compost, you can quickly cover that cost with this machine. We pay about $5.00 per 1 cubic foot bag of compost at the big box store and I can guarantee it is not as good as what my chickens are making in the composting chicken run. Essentially I can make $30 worth of chicken run compost every 20 minutes with the cement mixer sifter.

I made so much chicken run compost last fall that I filled all my raised garden beds, then all our flower pots, put sifted compost in a number of large outdoor garbage cans, and then just started giving some away to my good neighbors for their gardens. My only problem is that I have way too much compost in the chicken run then I can use.

From the pictures you posted, it looks like you are well on the way to having excess compost yourself. Hope you find a way to process it down. That is a huge pile of compost you have cooking there.

 

[Red-Stars-in-RI]

Yes, the compost adds up quickly. I moved one of my coops last year, and to do so, had to dig down to solid bare ground. This was in an area I've been "composting in the run" for a number of years. Even after scraping away the layer of leaves, and other material that hadn't rotted yet, I had a solid 6" of amazing compost underneath.

I filled a flower bed near the house that was about 20' x 4' a solid 8" deep. I built a 40' x 2' raised flower bed along one of my coop fences. I spread some on the lawn. The amount of compost in a fairly small area was staggering. Just wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of it.

I'll take a picture of last year's pile if I get a chance tomorrow. It's going to provide me a LOT of compost this spring.

@gtaus - where did you buy the cement mixer for your sifter? I was going to build a simple box sifter, but now you've got me thinking.

 

[gtaus]

where did you buy the cement mixer for your sifter? I was going to build a simple box sifter, but now you've got me thinking.

I bought my cement mixer at our local Fleet store, on sale, for about $180. I would have preferred to buy a used mixer if I could have found one. But after looking in the ads and Craig's List for over a year, I just decided to buy a new mixer. It was a great investment for me, but if you can find a used mixer for cheap, it would be even better.

Many people will buy the Harbor Freight cement mixer, but my local Fleet store had a sale on their Yardmax 4.0 Cu Ft mixer.

There are YouTube videos of guys making compost sifters out these cement mixers. Most of them show how they drill into the mixer barrel to attach hardware to then attach the sifting barrel. In my setup, I did not have to make any holes in the cement mixer barrel. I used eyebolts and turnbuckles instead. I think my design is an improvement because you don't actually drill into the cement mixer barrel itself. If ever you want to sell the mixer, you just take off the eyebolts and there are no holes in the mixer barrel. The only thing I have to do is to periodically check the turnbuckles that connect the mixer to the shifting barrel because they will loosen over time.

I used a simple box sifter for many years, and it works just fine for small amounts of compost sifting. But I knew that having the chicken run compost system was going to produce way more compost than I could sift by hand. I would have been just as happy to buy a cheap, beat up, old mixer but none were available. Still, I consider my cement mixer compost sifter one of the best investments I have made.

If you seriously consider making one of these compost sifters from a cement mixer, I suggest you watch some of the YouTube videos of the machines in use. Also, you can see how some guys made their sifters. But I would also suggest you take a look at my modifications to that plan (which I think are in that link) because my system requires no drilling into the mixer barrel.

Even Dear Wife loves the compost sifter because I filled up all her flower barrels and pots with fresh compost. It's not often I get to be a hero for the day.....

 

[jthornton]

This is my compost sifter and bagging table.

JT

 

[gtaus]

This is my compost sifter and bagging table.

JT

That looks like a real nice setup for manual sifting. My manual setup was using a 2x4 frame with 1/4 inch wire sitting on top of my pull behind dump cart. I basically used my manual setup for the past 20 years. It was always good enough for the amount of compost I was sifting.

Some observations: The compost, or garden box dirt I see in the video was either very finished compost, or maybe you were just sifting out an already established bed. Most of your compost is screened through the wire and you only had a little bit of debris left after you manually sifted the material. It looks like about 95% of your compost was finished and filtered through the wire frame. That makes life easy, for sure.

However, with the chicken run compost I deal with, about 50% of the material is finished and the other 50% needs to be thrown back into the run for more composting. If I had to do that with a manual sifter, it would take me a very long time. The cement mixer compost sifter is able to separate out the finished compost from the not ready for prime time debris much faster than I ever could by hand.

I really liked the way you bagged up the sifted compost. I have been thinking of doing something like that with my empty chicken feed bags. Last year I just used some empty plastic garbage cans to store the sifted compost outside for use later. But I think I would bag the sifted compost if I had a good covered shed to put the bags in for the winter. I have saved all my empty feed bags, so I do have a good supply to put to use.

 

[vpatt]

This may sound silly but what is at the bottom of the compost is ready to use? In other words if it looks finished it is ok to use in a garden? I was wondering about that and if it might burn the plants and maybe need to be moved out of the run and aged for a while....well the chickens will keep adding to it and I didn't know.

 

[RUNuts]

This may sound silly but what is at the bottom of the compost is ready to use? In other words if it looks finished it is ok to use in a garden? I was wondering about that and if it might burn the plants and maybe need to be moved out of the run and aged for a while....well the chickens will keep adding to it and I didn't know.

should be fine. The little bit of fresh stuff will get well mixed by the time it's spread on the garden. If it's at the bottom, it is well aged and ready to go.

I have the chickens walking around a mulched area with bananas. The bananas are loving (or were loving until the freeze killed them) all the nitrogen richness of the chicken yard.

Here's hoping the bananas come back. They got hit hard.