Odor from chickens

[maggiegigs]

Would three chickens (well maintained) close to the house cause an odor?

 

[ADozenGirlz]

Quote:
Chickens have no odor themselves. Their droppings are the problem. If you keep them picked up after, there shouldn't be a problem. We have 18 hens that free-range in our backyard and I "pooper-scoop" up after them in the yard and the run (which is sand) every single day. There is no odor problem at all AND no fly problem.

 

[RedRoosterFarm]

I would not think sounless you had setting water and old stinky grass and food sitting. Well kept you would not have problems I wouldn't think.

 

[dntd]

3-6 wouldn't if you cleaned the coop often enough. With only 3 a movable coop would cut down any worries ay you can move the coop often

 

[poltroon]

Even freshly washed chickens have an odor, but it dissipates quickly with distance, so it's not only droppings.

We have a tractor-type coop about 10' from our bedroom window that is rarely cleaned, with 3 bantam chickens inside. (They seem to have enough space and do enough churning and there's enough ventilation that the poop degrades before it can build up.) You can walk directly up to the coop and not smell anything in particular.

Meat breeds, meant to grow very fast, seem to have the most droppings and are the most stinky.

 

[brownlikewoah]

everyone has their own standards of what they consider stinky. I have four banties that are currently next to my house, in an allyway that is probably 15' X 40' they completely destroyed all the grass in a week or two, and yes the poo stinks. I scoop their run about every other day and clean out the coop, and use DE weekly. The flies are really bad, so we are moving the girls to a new location within in the next couple weeks...

 

[elmo]

When I fed my chicks on a soy based feed last summer, they did develop a distinctive BO. But this odor went away when I switched them to a non-soy feed. I now have nine bantams and no smell other than the occasional whiff of cecal poo (yuck!) that quickly dissipates as it gets dried out in the sand.

 

[JanetSmithery]

I've currently got 3 birds, and my coop is right next to my house and in between my porch and my deck. Their coop/run is on sand. When I let them on the lawn as we were building the coop, it did get pretty stinky in those areas. Every day I hosed down the place they'd been in their tractor to kind of break up the poop and help it dissolve into the ground, but I still noticed a smell, and the flies were pretty bad in those places for 3-4 days afterward.

Now that they're in the coop/run, I scoop their poop out of the sand every day. The only time I notice 'chicken smell' is when I'm in the process of scooping poop...and that's probably because I'm in close proximity to a quantity of it. However, even then it's pretty slight. I don't notice any smell at all when I'm hanging on my deck or porch. The birds themselves seem to have less of a smell, too. And the sand-covered poop definitely has a much less strong smell overall than the uncovered poop decomposing on the lawn.

 

[Anny]

I think my cats smell worst then my chickens.... But that's just me.

 

[frog522]

Quote:
This sounds alot like the situation I'm currently having except I haven't completely set up my run.
-- How many inches of sand do I need to put down?
-- Do they sell bags of sand in manageable sizes like around the size of a bag of soil? I can't haul a ton of sand but over multiple trips and bags (that I could carry myself) I might be able to do it.
-- If I scoop poop in general at least once in three days (I'll try everyday), how long will the whole batch of sand last? How many months or years would I expect to need to completely remove and refill the sand for 2 hens?

I need to get rid of this stink!