Flooded chicken barn...!

[Borncountry419]

So my barn has flooded. Yay!

The ducks love it of course, but the chickens hate it! They all hang out in the stalls, where the floor is higher and dry. They look miserable though. My question is, should I put down a thick layer of hay and straw in the barn so they won't be walking in water, or would semi clean water be better than straw potentially molding? It's going to be wet in here until the snow finishes melting. Thanks!!

 

[catchthewind]

Do you have any way to get free pallets? Then put them down on the floor and the hay on top of those?

 

[Borncountry419]

Eh, I'd need at least 50 of them. The chicken barn is actually a horse barn, so it's pretty large... But otherwise it'd be a good idea!

 

[patandchickens]

Pallets would be a lot better than straw or hay, which you'd need to waste a LOT of and will be HORRIBLE to have to remove when the water goes down. Alternatively do you have any sheets of plywood that could be put up on cinderblocks or buckets or whatever, and bedding put on them?

(e.t.a - the point isn't to cover the ENTIRE barn floor with pallets, the point is just to give the chickens a high and dry area to congregate. So ANY amount of pallets is a big improvement over all-wet!)

Try real hard also to get some runoff drainage going, especially if this is snowmelt. Unless your barn is built in a very inappropriate location (i.e. a pondlike dip) you should be able to find some snowbank or 'ice path' somewhere to cut thru with a shovel to let the water drain away better, and/or to intercept *incoming* meltwater so it goes elsewhere. Also make sure you haven't got damaged gutters/downspouts adding to the problem.

In some cases you can find (or make, e.g. if your floor is brick pavers and you can chip a few loose) a low enough spot to run a utility pump. Just going out there every hour or so and firing it off til it slurps dry can sometimes make a suprrisingly big difference in quality of life to the critters in the barn.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat, with a slightly-below-ground-level barn with *two* actual sump pumps in it, located in almost hte wettest part of our property, we did NOT put it htere ourselves needless to say!, and thus able to sympathize fully -- but after 8 years of slow but steady trenching, ditch management and so forth I have *finally* got it figured out to where this is the first year it did not flood at all even in the slightest at all, ha!

 

[Borncountry419]

Well the floor is cement, so I can't really do much about that. And the water level is like a centimeter deep at the deepest, so idk if a pump would work. I have been using a squeegee, but it's not very effective for long. I've had flooding almost every year, but it was always basically just a a thin puddle that ran along the step next to the stalls. So I never worried about it. It's coming from under the back overhead door, so it'll probably a really simple fix once the snow melts and the ground thaws. But for now I need to figure something out.

Glad you figured out your flooding! And thanks for the advice!

 

[patandchickens]

It sounds like it would be highly worthwhile to (not right now -- whne the weather is dry!

) knock a bit of a sump hole into the floor, not necessarily a REAL sump-pump hole all big and deep but just something sized to put a little 1/6 hp utility pump in when you need to.

In the meantime, you might experiment with making a dam of shavings, if you have any used shavings (you can of course use new ones outta the bag but it pains me to waste money that way, personally, so I use shavings out of the horse stalls or chickens). Make a dam maybe 12-24" wide and 6" tall, wherever it seems like it'd do the most good. Walk on it to kind of compact the shavings. You will most likely find that, if you only have that minor 'creeping' flooding you describe, it will take like 6-12 hours (or more) for the water to soak thru the shavings dam enough to start going beyond it; and at that point you can go out, squeegee the backed-up puddle behind the dam out of the barn, shovel the sopping-wet shavings from the dam outdoors, and replace with new shavings. It's a little more work and materials that just letting the whole barn flood (although you might've been going to lose those shavings to water ANYhow depending how your stalls are) but it keeps the moisture from getting so widely distributed thru the barn so it will dry out much faster, and keeps the critters drier. (In my case it also keeps the hay drier, since I have to store my hay in the downstairs of the barn)

Good luck, have fun, hope your thaw finishes soon,

Pat