hmmmmmm the only draw back to the coco coir is the quality, coco coir usually has large concentrations of salt or soduim, and when they wash and wash to try and remove this byproduct it reduces the quality in the coco coir, unless you are growing your own Coconut trees and harvesting your own coco coir, this product for quality could be extremly costly to fill duck pens or if poor quality toxic to ducks, and here in the parts of the U.S we are located, well Amiga, we don't have coconut trees, we have Peach trees and Pecan trees. I tried the long needle pine straw, and my pens became overly strong with toxic ammonia scent, so tried alpha mixed hay, and lord that was back breaking to pitch fork out, so I tried saw dust, that shovel like to have broke my back to turn and scoop out, well we tried sand and peanut shells, and now it did a pretty good job, we went with our full size truck to the block-cement company and bought a ton of sand for say example $25 and the farmer next to us had the peanut husk and hulls free left over in a pile from the peanut hay, the sand again did prettttty darn good, but you know what I come to fail and finally reliazed after having a 1,500 ducks and 50 pens to clean and turn the soil, it is all in the size of the pen, if you are have a mulky mess, you have to many ducks in to small of a area or pens with to much water access for them to splash around and make a mess along with there large poopings, once I figured that out and built bigger pens with down hill slopes for water from kiddy pools, and/or less ducks in my smaller pens with less large water access, the mulky was resolved, oh and another thing that worked well with some of my larger duck poopers, the Jumbo Pekin or Turkeys, my gosh what a pile of POOP, bigger than a golf ball, lol, well I started adding fiber pellets to my feed, yep, the POOP is thinner, they are more regulated meaning not such big piles, and also, we found some timber land like Raynier Timber Managment and they thin there pines yearly, and they will let you have all that pine bark in the thinning spot between there pine managment area, yep, that pine bark, that they strip off the pine trees, is big and chunky, and ususally in one big pile for easy access and it is really light to shovel with a wide barn shovel or snow shovel, and I put per say a gorilla wagon full in a pen with 8 ducks, and I can take my water hose and spray the duck poop away and never have mulkyness. On one of my pens the 50 Jumbo and Standard Pekin pen, I cut a 3 feet long x 4 inch high section out of my back wall wire and sorta framed it out, and placed there drinking water in window box plastic planters on the outside of their pens, their kiddy pools are in the yard, and they are let out daily to breed and fornicate in the kiddy pools.
