The amount of online advice from people like the Chicken Chick, Fresh Eggs Daily, and a plethora of others is always so different. Lately it is the use of DE, giving your chickens oatmeal, and using sand in the coop/run.
I would like to hear from you all what you think about the above topics. I don't use sand only because I cannot compost it and we get brutally cold winters here. Thanks!!!!
So online advice from random strangers on a forum, to compare with online advice from random strangers with websites?
DE--most sources seem to agree that breathing it is bad, and that it doesn't work when wet.
A chicken coop is always either dry or wet. If DE doesn't work when wet, and if it gets thrown in the air to breathe when chickens scratch in dry bedding, then I don't think that's a good thing to use. But I don't think it's deadly dangerous either, more like a slightly-harmful waste of time and effort.
Oatmeal--I would serve wetted chicken feed instead of oatmeal. Easier (no cooking), probably cheaper, and certainly has the nutrients balanced right. Wet it with cold water in the heat of summer and for a cool treat, use warm or hot water in winter for a warm treat. Chickens seem to love it. But oats can be an acceptable food for chickens, and should be fine in moderation.
I have issues with the oatmeal article on the ChickenChick website. No point in cluttering up this post with them, but I listed them at length here:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...meal-to-chickens.1339256/page-4#post-21942543
Sand--apparently wonderful for some people and some places, but not for everyone. Good especially for those who like being able to scoop the poop out ever day and live in dry climates. The threads I've seen complaining of stinky sand seem to be mostly in wet climates. I've never used it myself.
I have tended to combine chicken run with compost pile, so anything suitable for compost just gets thrown in the chicken run. The chickens stay busy and happy digging through it and eating little bits. Anything suitable for coop bedding (dry leaves, hay, straw, wood shavings, etc) tends to get put in the coop first, then later moved to the run, and then later yet it may get moved to the garden. (When I say "anything" gets thrown in the chicken run--not if its really poky, like blackberry plants. Or poisonous, like potato leaves & rhubarb leaves. But I include plenty of things that chickens "shouldn't" eat like orange peels and avocado skins and onions, because the chickens don't eat enough of them to cause a problem-- like how chickens do not eat enough wood shavings or sand or coffee grounds to cause a problem, when those are used as bedding.)