I Have a Question About Mold Spores

[spydertoys]

I have (at least partially) converted a horse barn into a chicken barn. I still have many plans that include windows and seperate runs for each breed.

One of the horse stalls was used as a tack room and feed storage area. It had a lot of moldy hay in it, but since it was the biggest stall, I wired it off to use as a baby pen.

All the hay was raked out and I used pine shavings for bedding. I have many of those babies who are having infected eyes and runny noses, and I have lost quite a lot of them. I have tried different medicines and nothing seems to work. I have moved them to a different stall, where hay was not stored.

My question is...could there be enough mold spores flying around to cause this problem?? How do I eliminate them and get my babies well. I really need to be able to use that stall in the future.

A friend suggested I wash the walls down with bleach water..I can do that but the floor is dirt..so what do I do about that?? I was wondering if lime would help any.

 

[Jenski]

Lime can burn their feet, so use cautiously if you decide to go with that.


I personally would use Oxine (chlorine dioxide) instead of regular bleach to wash down the walls. Oxine biodegrades into a salt.

I would also use the Oxine in their drinking water once a week (1/8 tsp. Oxine per gallon of water) and follow with a probiotic supplement in a new batch of water.

Here is more info on the Oxine:

http://www.shagbarkbantams.com/oxine.htm

http://www.shagbarkbantams.com/page11.htm

http://www.shagbarkbantams.com/page4.htm


If it were me, I would dig out the floor of the entire stall (at least 6 - 8"), scrub the walls down with Oxine water (at least 6.5 ounces Oxine to a gallon of water for surface disinfectant), let the whole thing dry out a few days, treat the exposed floor with food-grade DE, move in a new load of dirt/clay for the floor and amend the new dirt with DE, add new, dry bedding, and move chickens back in. Whew!

I would then rotate them with the Oxine-then-probiotic in water (above).

Several folks here use Stall-Dry as well; you might do a search on that.

Good luck!