Poop Board vs. Poop Hammock

[cementitiousman]

Have you read about deep litter management? Six inches of wood shavings, food grade diatomaceous earth sprinkled in, stir it up each morning (or throw in some scratch and the chickens stir it up, while getting dusted for mites). Add more shavings and DE as needed through out the year. Once a year shovel it all into the compost. Our coop has never smelled better. It may sound gross but it really works. No poop board ,hammock, or scraping, looks and smells clean.

 

[Shai]

I was considering doing a deep litter in conjunction with the poop board/hammock. In my part of the world it gets pretty humid for a decent portion of the year so moisture management could be a problem even with lime/DE, particularly in the spring and some summers.

 

[briteday]

OK, here's my poop hammock...it's about due for replacement (pretty dang dirty for my taste. And the weather here has been extremely cold and really wet, so things are bit dirtier than they usually are. Finally, I have a bucket below the bottom roost where I unclip the bottom edge of the tarp in one place, "roll" the poop by working it from under the tarp...to the center where the tarp can be unclipped, and then just shovel into the waiting bucket with a dustpan.

I have never found a bird sitting in the tarp getting dirty. They all roost on the top two bars. The bottom bar that the tarp is clipped to is about 30" off the ground (just over the top of a 5-gallon bucket) and there is one bar lower yet that they use to jump up on, especially the banties. I have about 25 birds and the tarp needs to be emptied twice per week. The clips at the bottom will not hold much more weight than 3-4 day's worth, and neither will my 5-gallon bucket. The roosting wall is 8' long.

I am hoping to build a chick brooder under the hammock for Spring chick rearing...keeping chicks in the house is awful. After three years of rearing them in the house I am anxious for the outdoor brooder building to begin! I have found that poop boards just never fit well (see poop running down back wall in photos), were sat on by low-ranking birds, and were harder to clean. The hammock keeps things cleaner and allows more vertical space use since I will be able to house a 4'W x 8'L x 2'H chick brooder underneath. The hammock should also help to keep the heat down low near the brooder space. I also think it will help integration of the flock later in the summer if the birds have been housed together. The only other major improvement I'm planning is to put a window in the coop so that the chicks will have daylight while in the brooder.

connected to the top of the wall...

under the hammock where I hope to build a chick brooder pen this Spring...

 

[churchx3]

I put up a poop hammock about a month ago. I used shade cloth under the roosts and placed a tarp on top of the shade cloth. Once a week I take the tarp out of the coop, dump the poo in the compost pile and then hang the tarp to allow the rain to clean it. I have several tarps so install a nice dry clean one each week. I do put some DE and leaves on top of the tarp which helps to dry out the poo quickly and the leaves make for easy work in dumping the poo out of the tarp. Works great for me and allows additional space under the roosts for the chickens.