Poo Pits - Your Thoughts?

[Sissy]

All great ideas but for me
the laying flat of the feed bags is the best. I just roll up
and toss onto compost pile.

 

[elmo]

Mr. Peepers :

I'm getting the impression that most feel that a poo pit is not that important, that it's just as easy to shovel under the roosts (assuming an easy clean floor) as it is to shovel out a poo pit.

Anyone else?

To me, the important feature is not the board vs. pit, but the removable vs. nonremovable. I use a removable plastic boot tray under the roost and it's a snap to clean. I pull it out, take it over to the composter, dump it out, and then hose it off every morning. Spic and span. I don't have to bend over to scape or shovel anything in an enclosed area.

I think the material of your board or pit makes a difference, too. Cecal poo will smear and sink into an unsealed surface, so if that is going to bother you, go for something with a slick surface like plastic or painted wood.​

 

[ozzie]

I like poo pits because it means when I go away for a week, my chicken sitter just has to deal with feeding and watering and egg collecting and not the cleaning of the poop. Whilst it may not be a problem for me, it's hard (esp. if you live in the city) to have neighbors willing to do that on a regular basis.

ozzie

 

[elmo]

Quote:
Good point.

 

[chookchick]

With a poo pit, your chickens are still going to be sitting above a growing pile of poo, with the attendant ammonia fumes and humidity (if you don't empty it often). Too me, it seems sooo much easier to just have a dropping board. I'm not sure why people feel the need to put wire over the dropping board either--they don't want the chickens to step in the poo? I very rarely see them step on the board--they just use the side to get to the roost. I have a "tray", similar to wildorchid's, with Stall Dry in it. Poo gets sifted out with kitty litter scoop. Like Pat says--nothing difficult or messy about it. The high sides like on wildorchids would hide the poo from view if that is a concern.

 

[SunnyDawn]

It depends on your needs. When I was younger (ok, a LOT younger) it was no big deal cleaning out the coop. Now that I've had spinal fusion and bending over at all IS a big deal I LOVE my "poo pits" as you call them. My coop is raised up off of the ground by 2.5 feet and when it is time to clean the coop I just scrape it into buckets that are waiting under the holes (I have 2 so I don't have to go very far). I use the deep litter method and use untreated garden mulch (no herbicides) for the litter so that everything I gather from my girls goes back into the gardens. However if you are not a gardener and you have a strong healthy back then why bother? I cannot believe how much easier my "back friendly" coop has made my life and I enjoy my gals so much more now than I ever have in my life (including when my back was strong and I thought it was "no big deal" to bend over to clean the coop, gather eggs, water and feed...)!
BTW, it wasn't very hard to design trap doors with wire mesh over the holes to keep out predators and the pay back has been huge! But hey, if a little extra work now, to save repeated work in the future, doesn't appeal to you don't do it! Oh, and the deep litter method avoids above mentioned problems.

 

[madrona]

Hi --

We cover the wooden floor with a couple inches of fresh dry straw. The straw tends to absorb the droppings and get turned over a bit so the droppings mix in and the chickens have a relatively clean surface to walk around on for quite a few days. In winter, when the straw finally gets mucky, we add a couple more inches of fresh straw on top of that. My elderly neighbor taught me that this will cause some composting action which lends a bit of warmth. It doesn't smell at all bad. Eventually we remove all the straw and droppings and put them in our compost bin, and start out with fresh straw. It's easy because our chickenhouse floor is a couple feet off the ground, and one side of the house opens up so you just reach in with a hoe and pull all the straw out, like cleaning a cabinet.

(I'll write a proper introduction for myself when it's not midnight, but I just happened to see this thread and wanted to add my two cents worth.)

 

[gsim]

I do poop planks which in my case are sheets of 1/2" OSB with linoleum glued to one side. They are centered under the roosts at a ht of 24". Roosts are 48". I throw open two of the 4 windows daily in AM and take an 8" drywall finishing knife from it's hanging place and simply scrape the poop into the plastic tub/bin I keep in the run. It goes to my garden in cool weather and into compost in warm weather. Floor litter easily lasts a year this way. In warmer weather, I can easily keep litter on the poop planks too as I have lots of grass clippings every week to add. The poop odor vanishes in minutes after I scrape the poop planks, and the coop is pretty much odor free. No ammonia smell ever. If a person could get it, I think formica would be a better covering, but more expensive unless some formica from a job somewhere could be salvaged. Another option is a large aluminum traffic sign. The reverse side would be slick and extremely easy to clean. Still another really good one would be something like 24 ga galvanized steel glued to 1/2" OSB. Lots cheaper than formica and more durable too. Contact cement would work really well for these types of poop planks.

If I had a small coop, I would do a poop drawer under a chicken wire or 2 x 2 welded wire screen and pull it daily for dumping. Being as I have a large coop at 8 x 16, I would rather just go into it on a daily basis to keep a watchful eye on everything happening inside. For that reason I did not bother with a bump-out for nest boxes. For a small coop, a bump-out is a great idea to give the chooks more floor space as well as making egg-gathering easier.