Is bedding really necessary inside the coop?

[BDutch]

I got fed up with the flooring of our coop and didn't like any bedding that was being suggested. Any amount of bedding in there for longer than a day became a fly magnet regardless of how often I cleaned. I wound up ripping out the wooden floor of the coop, filling in the entire bottom of the coop area with riverbed rock for drainage, laid hardware cloth over that to keep out potential rodents and whatnot, and then put vinyl flooring directly over all that and called it a day. With the pebbles underneath, the flooring is nice and soft so I don't need to worry about the birds making hard landings, and I just go in every morning with a dustbin and paint scraper to scoop up the nighttime droppings and transfer them to the compost- the birds don't use the coop during the day, so after the morning scrape there's nothing to attract flies until the next morning. I haven't had to wash the floor yet, but if it ever gets bad it'll be a cinch to toss some water in there and squeegee everything out. I keep one bag of shavings in the coop just in case it rains and the birds track in the damp. An extremely light dusting of shavings absorbs the wet so I'm able to easily sweep it out into the run and everything is dry again.

That's a very long way of saying, no, I haven't found bedding to be necessary inside the coop, and I actually far prefer my beddingless coop setup.

How is the ventilation in your coop? How many chickens in how much space? If the ventilation is good it shouldn’t smell inside the coop, the poop dries and doesn't attract much flies.

I have no floor and sand in the coop, a poop board under the roosts and lots of ventilation. After sunrise the chickens can go to the run, through an auto pop door. The chickens do not poop in sand of the coop area. They even like to dustbath in the sand.

 

[fowltemptress]

At the time I fixed the floor it was 10 chickens in a 10x20 open air coop with ventilation that runs the length of the eaves - I think that's about 10 inches wide going down two sides of the coop. They free range during the day so the coop is only in use during daylight hours if someone is laying an egg. The flies here love hanging out in my clean, unused straw bales and opened bags of pine shavings. By removing the bedding, it wasn't so much that I was taking away the flies' poop snacks, but that I have denied them all the nooks and crannies and shelter the bedding provided. Sand would have worked too, I'm sure, but without any bedding I'm able to completely clean stuff more easily and I don't have to worry about the sand getting dusty and needing to be replaced several years down the road. My geese and ducks do still get bedding, but unlike the chickens my ducks actually hunt and eat flies so it's never as much of an issue in their coops.