Should I replace the dirt in the chicken run?

[EmmaDonovan]

I was reading in another thread that someone's hens ate bits of metal they found in the dirt and passed away. The house where I live is nearly 70 years old and the backyard has been used for who knows what over the decades. We find all kinds of things in the dirt including broken safety glass and tiny screws.

We haven't built our coop yet, we're still designing it. It should have about 128 sq ft of run. The hens will not be able to free-range because of predators. We have burrowing rodents here so we plan on digging down about a foot and laying hardware cloth across the entire bottom of the run so the rodents cannot borrow under and come up inside the coop to get at food, etc.

Since we're going to be displacing about 128 cu ft of earth anyway, should we replace it with something else, so we know there won't be any glass or metal bits? If so, does anyone have recommendations of what we could replace that dirt with?

Note: we're in the desert so it's not like this is gardening soil, it's very dry, sandy dirt, and rocks (see attached picture for an example) and we'll just be spreading whatever we remove from the run across the yard.

 

[rosemarythyme]

Is there any part of the yard that's been more untouched, where maybe you can swap materials from the run location with the cleaner material from then other spot?

 

[perkolator]

I’ve sifted dirt for various reasons over the years, a simple supported hardware cloth screen at an angle to throw your shovel full of dirt at works quite amazingly and quickly for how simple the concept is.

I have moles and gophers so in my coop I ended up removing dirt to make my hardware cloth floor deeper for chickens to dig - then just tossed about 4” of dirt on top followed by about 6-8” of arborist mulch. Been almost a year and nothing seems to have penetrated the ground, about to time to top off with more mulch before fall

 

[Chicalina]

You really cannot prevent them from encountering every hazard. Replacing that much soil sounds overkill, and bloody hard work!!!

And you cannot guarantee the replacement soil would be perfectly free of things they shouldn't eat. Unless you spend weeks sifting it by hand. All the tonnage of it!!

Chickens that are clever enough to survive free ranging, survive free ranging! Nobody goes to soil replacing and sifting lengths when letting their chickens out in the yard to enjoy nature and natural foraging. Just because you are keeping them in a large run, you don't need to sanitise it to the nth degree. Seriously, just relax.

 

[Cebarmlds]

For metal bits you could drag through the dirt with a magnet, I have a magnet on a pole from a hardware store. I wouldn't try replacing all the soil unless it was contaminated with a chemical.