Chicken Coop Deep Litter Method

By Harvey Ussery
Updated on September 12, 2022
article image
by Pixabay/MiZie

Learn manure management for chickens using the chicken coop deep litter method while building better chicken health and reducing labor. 

Repugnance for what comes out the far end of an animal is not merely cultural conditioning — our senses are warning us of potential danger: Feces can be a vector for disease. Joel’s quote above implicitly advises us to trust that repugnance: If it smells bad, it could be dangerous. But it also implies that there are ways to manage manure so it doesn’t stink, giving us our most important hint that its threat to chicken health has been neutralized. Properly handled manure, in other words, is not a danger.

How Compost Works

Many folks have already experienced the transformation of things yucky into not only something pleasant, but a valuable resource: the alchemy of the compost heap, which starts with manures and rotting vegetation and ends with compost, smelling as sweet as good earth, ready to fertilize the garden. The compost heap is our model for making the same transformation in the henhouse.

You assemble a compost heap from nitrogenous materials such as manures and spent crop plants, mixed with carbonaceous ones such as leaves and straw. Coarse materials will eventually compost, but if you make the effort to shred them more finely, the composting process speeds up considerably. Inconceivable numbers of microbes multiply in the pile, using the nitrogen in the manures and fresh green matter as a source of energy to break down the tough, fibrous high-carbon materials into simpler components. The ideal balance of carbon to nitrogen in the mix is 25 or 30 to 1. Too much nitrogen is signaled by the smell of ammonia, meaning that some of the nitrogen — a potential source of soil fertility — is being lost to the atmosphere. (Ammonia is a gas of nitrogen and hydrogen, NH3.)

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