What bedding do you use? & what are your reasons for it.

[Chick-N-Daddy]

I tried some hemp bedding for the brooder, combined with some pine shavings. Overall OK but kindof expensive compared to huge bags of quality shavings I can get from the local mill super cheap... Sticking with that as I develop the deep litter in/around my run & yards. Real bad soil here, so using the wood chips & chicken poop everywhere. Will certainly abuse / deplete the soil in the short term, but in a few years as I layer greens over the browns, I should have some quality dirt (eventually).

 

[GhislaineDel]

I tried some hemp bedding for the brooder, combined with some pine shavings. Overall OK but kindof expensive compared to huge bags of quality shavings I can get from the local mill super cheap... Sticking with that as I develop the deep litter in/around my run & yards. Real bad soil here, so using the wood chips & chicken poop everywhere. Will certainly abuse / deplete the soil in the short term, but in a few years as I layer greens over the browns, I should have some quality dirt (eventually).

I tried some hemp bedding for the brooder, combined with some pine shavings. Overall OK but kindof expensive compared to huge bags of quality shavings I can get from the local mill super cheap... Sticking with that as I develop the deep litter in/around my run & yards. Real bad soil here, so using the wood chips & chicken poop everywhere. Will certainly abuse / deplete the soil in the short term, but in a few years as I layer greens over the browns, I should have some quality dirt (eventually).

As long as you aren't tilling it into the soil you aren't doing anything different then nature does in the forest when trees drop their leaves and animals come along and poop. Only a very thin bit of soil will experience the nitrogen loss some worry about when it comes to adding various types of mulch to the soil. I would not call it abuse or depletion!

We don't have a tractor that needs bedding. In our coop we use pine shavings as our bedding as the base of our DLM.