How to clean after cocci? and how to cut down on chicken smell?

I love Backyardchickens you all have wonderful advice always and always learn me somthing new. I have sulmet on hand and I also feed medicated feed. I really am boggled into how I got this outbreak of cocci I have lost 3 babies already the 4th was sick and now is doing alot better only after having the sulmet in its system for 1 day.
 
Sulmet works fast, finish the treatment and they should be fine. I've only had cocci one time in over a decade and hundreds of birds. It can happen out of a blue moon and when the weather is just right, or that one spill of water made favorable conditions for cocci to thrive. It happens, and with the drugs on hand, you can often stop it before it goes too far.
 
Where do you get sulmet from? TSC? Can you use it as a preventative maybe once a year? If not I would at least like to know where I can get it if I ever need it.
 
Feed stores should carry it, usually for swine, but usually has instructions for poultry on it.

Even though cocci is a protozoa, it can become resistant to drugs like any other living thing. So it is best to not use it as a preventative as it is more likley to make the drugs ineffective when you need it.
 
Even if bleach would kill cocci you said yourself you'd have to really make sure things are soaked in a strong solution. You can't soak the entire ground.... Odds are the cocci isn't all sitting on top and even if it were and you dumped gallons and gallons of bleach across the top it would probably dry before being really effective. There's no good way to sterilize dirt except perhaps cooking it so if you get something in the ground you are pretty stuck with it.

We had a heck of a time with a streptococcus zooepidemicus infection because of that. The neighbor's brought it back from horse camp and it infected most of our animals making all the horses sick, killing a few hamsters in the house, and costing several $100 in treatment on the guinea pigs since they lived in one of the dirt floored horse stalls during the summers. Guinea pigs make very thick puss that doesn't drain well and are sensitive to antibiotics so such infections are difficult to treat. A cold winter is what saved us and now we have crushed packed limestone stall floors with tightly fitted mats over most of them. That at least limits infections in the stable and makes it possible to mostly sterilize if necessary. I will never ever do a dirt floor on any animal enclosure ever again. My coop has old hardwood boards and my new coop will have sealed waterproofed plywood.
 
The solution to both your problems (cocci, and smell) is the same: DRYNESS. You need to figure out how to get much, much better drainage for your runs.

Put up gutters and downspouts to intercept ALL roof runoff and direct it far away from the runs; do anything you can to keep direct rain out of the runs (roof, plywood, tarps, that sort of thing); trench all around the runs and lead the water off away to somewhere safely downhill; and if necessary get a dumpload of sand or gravel or (cheapest) sand-gravel mix to put in the runs to raise the level up to where you do have a free-draining surface. The latter will also bury the coccidia-contaminated soil so the birds get less exposure.

Also if the runs are shaded beyond what is unavoidably necessary for summertime survival, or if there is brush or tall grass or whatever blocking the breeze that might otherwise help dry them off; correcting those problems will also help keep things dry.

Dry = much much less smell and less of a problem with coccidiosis. (You cannot possibly kill all the coccidial cysts in the ground. You just can't. What you need to do is make things so the chickens don't get sick from them).

Good luck, have fun,

Pat
 

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