Chickens for bug control and food recycling.

[Beekissed]

Bee, why is there a type of tray underneath the roost on the left of the first picture? Is it to catch the poop? At first I thought it was some type of feeding tray but the roost above it would cause poop to fall in the feed. So I don't think that's what it is.

Mary

That's not a roost, Miss Mary. That's my feeding trough and that branch across the top is to keep feed hogs from walking in the feed and dominating it and also a handy handle for me to lift the big thing and move it when I need to.

They don't roost there at all and no poop goes in the feed. My flock are outside all day unless they come in to lay, eat or go to the actual roosts, so no one is sitting around on top of the feeder. It's a poo free zone!

 

[buckabucka]

I have a hoop coop, which is open air in the summer. The chickens do get a few kitchen scraps in there, and lots of leaves in a the winter, but it is not deep litter.

My question: have you ever had any trouble with rats? I have rats tunneling in under the hardware cloth, which lies on top of the ground to keep out fox or other surface diggers. They turn their nose up to the poison and come in for the feed. Right now, I am burying hardware cloth into the ground vertically along the edges about 2 feet down, hoping they don't go down quite that far (our soil is sand).

This summer, in our other coop, I dug up all the soil in the run and lined the whole floor with hardware cloth. They were tunneling down 16 inches and up into the run. It has stopped them, but I'd hate to think I'm going to need to do that in the hoop coop. They are also eating our carrots and beets.

We've seen fox and coyote on our game cam, but they do not seem to come into the yard for the rodent buffet...

 

[so lucky]

@buckabucka, can you remove the feed at night? And maybe just have the poison down at night, when the chickens are locked up? (assuming they are)
I wouldn't be above baiting the rats with something they couldn't resist (and poison) away from the chickens and garden, if I could make sure it was not accessible to other critters.
I have little critters burrowing and tunneling into my coop area too. I think it is voles. I haven't done anything about it yet...need to practice what I suggest, right?

 

[Beekissed]

I saw one once...wasn't a rat but seemed to be a vole. If the chickens had seen him he would have had a short life.

I don't leave feed out continuously...I just feed in meals and only what they will eat right then. I also feed FF, which may not be as attractive to them as dry feed.

Then, I have the dogs living outside and around the coop 24/7/365 and Jake is still quick enough to catch mice and voles, even at his age. I saw one he'd caught that had been digging into my spare pen, presumably for the feed particles to be found after the broody and chicks had been kept there.

Rodents are just part of the landscape wherever a person has feed, so this is something to look for and control, either naturally with the use of your own predators~dog and cat~or with poison. In the past I have poisoned rats with the use of JustOneBite, a poison that comes in the form of a hard cake that breaks into bars. VERY effective.

Take a gander at this vid...will give you the all overs! I assume this is a sort of deep litter in one of their cattle sheds.

 

[buckabucka]

Wow, that dog video is crazy! We don't have dogs or cats anymore. I do leave feed out, -it is in big deep troughs, so maybe I should not put as much out each day or use smaller dishes that I can put in the metal trash cans overnight.

It is not the first time someone has recommended JustOneBite to me and I still never got around to buying it, so I think that might be my next course of action.

The only bad thing about eliminating rats from the coop is that then they move into the compost pile and garden, but with some carefully designed poison stations (to keep other animals out), maybe we can get a handle on them. Last year I lost all my winter greens to some kind of rodents.

 

[Beekissed]

You'll be surprised at how much money you save by not leaving feed out continuously. Just feeding out what they will eat each day saves money, there is no wasted feed(they don't bill through it as much if they are hungry enough to actually eat it all, even any spilled feed), and you never have to "train" your chickens to come to the coop with scratch and treats.

Think of all the disease vectors that endless feed supply attracts...birds, squirrels, mice, rats, flies, etc.

 

[Rhodie Ranch]

I loved feeding leftovers to my chickens. Even when we rented out the ranch, like we do with this home, I would go thru the renter's trash bags and pull out so so so much food for my chickens!

 

[Beekissed]

I have dogs and chickens to feed on scraps, so I usually save all the meat, bones and bread for the dogs and the salad and other scraps for the chickens. Sometimes it's impossible to separate and then the chickens get the more dog like meal things, which matters not one bit. It's all deposited into my DL in the coop where it gets buried and the worms and bugs do the rest.

Then I get to scoop out finely composted, dry litter and screen out the larger particles, leaving a fine dust of composted material from the dry portions of the coop...the chickens obligingly move it from the back to the front of the coop for me all year. All of that gets deposited right on the garden...it has no smell, is easy to spread and is just part of a never ending cycle of food into food.

Right now I really need to scoop that compost...my head is touching the top of my hoop. That's a good 4-5 inches of material that needs removed from the center/front of the coop so I can start the process all over again when I rake leaves into the coop next week.

 

[Nyboy]

I think thats what I miss about chickens, I have to throw a lot of food away now. My dogs only eat their food, so cleaning out fridge a lot is trashed.

 

[Beekissed]

That's a shame. Do you have a compost pile where you can at least feed it to the worms? Some folks even keep a worm bucket under their kitchen sink and place scraps there....don't know that I would do that nor have the room for it but it's done.