Like many people, I started off with a nice grass filled chicken run. It was sure fun to see the girls running around on the grass and pecking away at stuff to eat. After a couple of months, the chickens had pecked, scratched and ate everything down to bare dirt. Bare dirt turns into mud when it rains, so I had to come up with another plan.
My first idea was to use wood chips in the chicken run. I laid down a layer of wood chips in the run and that keep everything from getting all muddy when it rained. I have access to all the free wood chips I can use from our local county landfill. I can fill up a trailer full of wood chips whenever I want.
But I noticed that my chickens were always on the fence line and reaching over to eat the green grass on the other side of the fence. I can't let my chickens free range where I live. I live on a lake and we have Bald Eagles and hawks overhead all day long. So, I decided to bring the free range to them by cutting my lawn and dumping the grass clippings into the run.
The grass clippings were a big hit with my chickens, and I liked the look of a green carpet inside the chicken run. I kept on dumping all my grass clippings in the chicken run and let it build up. In the fall, I mowed up my leaves with the riding lawn mower and dumped all the leaves into the chicken run.
Evidently there are lots of good bugs and stuff to eat on leaves, too. My chickens loved the leaves. Mind you, all this time, my chickens are scratching and pecking all the wood chips, grass clippings and leaves in the run. Everything gets all mixed together. All that mixing of chicken run litter means that things start to compost in place over time. By the fall, I had over 12 inches of chicken run litter composting in the chicken run.
Whenever I clean out the chicken coop, all that old litter gets tossed out into the chicken run to breakdown and compost. I typically use wood chips as litter in the coop, but this winter I am using shredded paper which I shred at home from all our paper products that will fit into the shredder. Just about all my paper, newspaper, light cardboard and even some cardboard boxes get shredded up to use as litter in the coop. I am expecting that once I dump the paper shreds out into the chicken run, the shreds will compost much faster than the wood chips I used before.
The chicken run compost is pretty much a cold compost method that does not really heat up very much. It's the constant scratching, pecking, and pooing on the material that helps it break down over time. The advantage to a slower, no high heat, compost system is that worms are free to live in the litter. My chickens love to dig down and find worms, and other bugs. By late fall, I noticed that my chicken run litter was really composing well once I dug down past the top 3-4 inches. I struck black gold.
Around that time, I built a cement mixer compost sifter using the ideas I watched on YouTube. I just had too much compost to work with on my old manual 2X4 foot sifting tray. Since then, sifting compost with the cement mixer compost sifter, I have yet to buy a single bag of commercial compost from the big box stores. I can sift out about a $5 bag of compost every ~5 mintues, which saved me about $60 per hour using the cement mixer compost sifter. In my case, the costs of the cement mixer compost sifter paid for itself in about 4 hours of work and since then, everything is just a bonus.
I have a number of raised bed gardens, pots, and inground gardens that I use the chicken run compost. My plants seem to like it. I will spread out the compost in the fall and let it winter over for spring planting. There are a few of us who keep chickens primarily to make compost for our gardens, and the eggs are just a nice bonus for us.
If you don't need compost for your gardens, then the chicken run compost system like I described is still great for your chickens because my litter is always full of worms and bugs. My chickens spend all day outside (in the non-snow months) scratching and pecking away in the litter finding all kinds of good things to eat. As I said, my commercial feed consumption goes down about half in the summer months. That saves me money, while at the same time the chickens get to enjoy themselves scratching and pecking in the litter for good stuff to eat.
I also throw out all our kitchen scraps and leftovers to the chickens in the run every morning. It's just Dear Wife and myself, so I don't have lots of stuff in the chicken bucket. But man do those chickens love whatever I can feed them from the house. I think it's just a nice change for them compared to their commercial feed. What they don't eat, like maybe the outer peel of a banana, just gets mixed into the litter and turns into compost. They will pick a leftover bone clean of any meat and the bones just disappear into the compost. when I go fishing, I will dump the fish guts from cleaning into the run and my chickens will peck at it throughout the day. Around evening, I'll dig a hole in the compost and bury any remains so as not to attract predators. At that point it basically is worm food, but then it's just more worms for the chickens to find later.
Probably more than you cared to read, but I really like the composting system I have settled into over the past couple of years. It works great for me and my chickens.
. But if you do the nutribalancer you don't have to mix buttermilk or kelp or salt. I do however use the sunflower oil and molasses to get the nutribalancer to stick to the grains so if they only pick out one or two grains they'll still get the vit and minerals they need. (plus the oil really makes their feathers shine!)
