Question anbout chickens

[MontyJ]

We are getting chickens this spring. I know we are getting 25 cornish X, and probably 10-12 barred rocks. I'll keep them seperated and all of that, but what I really want to know is how much chicken poop can I expect? I have lost both of my cow manure suppliers over the last few years (one sold all his cows and retired, the other bought a new manure spreader...the dirty dog). I need to supplement the compost piles and was hoping the chickens would help out some. I know the chickens won't produce the tons of manure I'm used to getting from the cows, but will there be enough to maybe run one small pile? Say one cubic yard of lawn materials? If I could expect enough chicken poop, I might be willing to go back to the horse stables. I'll never have 20 yards of that delivered again, but I could get a yard or two if the chickens doo their job...

 

[ducks4you]

You will probably have about 1-2 wheelbarrows full of manure/month. I own 40 chickens right now. Chickens and rabbits produce the most valuable manure. I moved to the country to have my horses in the back yard, and the chickens came later. So, my manure handling is from what you do with horse stall soiled bedding--you pile that up to kill parasites and start it degrading from the heat. Therefore, I just pile manure from both together, then let nature break it down for at least 4 months before the planting season starts and I can till it into my gardens.
You should be on BackYardChickens.com--a sister site--and study up. Mostly, the best chicken bedding is pine shavings. Pine shavings in a pile take a full 5 years to break down on their on. BUT, you could use a rake and try to separate the manure from the bedding.
If you haven't owned chickens before, I can tell you that an unkept coop hits you with a wall of...filth. NOTHING is worse, even a dirty kennel is less offensive. (NOT my personal experience with my birds, but I've smelled it before!) Most people like to use the deep litter method, where you put down ~4 (3 cubic foot size) shavings in the start of the winter, then rake it often to get the poo that is old, and dried, to fall to the bottom. Then, you strip the bottom of the coop in the Spring and use it for gardening and for mulching (the shavings.)
I've owned chickens for about 6 years now, and I started with one hen. You're really taking the plunge. My 15 (5-9 month old) young hens are producing 9-13 eggs/day. Watch the Cornish X. You MUST remove their food for 1/2 of every day, or they will overeat and can break their legs. I replace my layers every year, now, and I butcher all hatched roosters and my old hens. They meat is outstanding, large roosters produce a LOT of meat, even though they are meat birds, and I can always fill their food and water, and leave it "free choice." Just some thoughts. Some folks cannot get enough of their Cornish X's, but they aren't always the easiest to care for.
I currently have 6 butchered/dressed/frozen birds, waiting for my next chicken dinner. YUMM!!

 

[Smiles Jr.]

You will be surprised at the amount of poo you get from 36 chickens! When we had that many my daughter got a full 2 gal. bucket full every morning. That's every day!!! We had four compost piles and dumped one bucket full on each pile every fourth day.

If you plan to free range the layers you will not get quite as much as if you keep them penned up. Those meat birds will provide so much poo you'll be amazed. They are eating machines and probably only turn 5% of their food into meat.

I now have 10 layers and one roo. I dump one 5 gal. bucket full of poo on the compost about every 8 to 10 days.

 

[MontyJ]

I'm a member of BYC, but I prefer to be here. I have done a lot of studying there, but I really don't want pet chickens. I'm planning on butchering several of the cornish X's at 2-3 weeks old for game hens and the rest will go to 8 weeks or so then off to freezer camp. The rocks are for eggs, of course. I want to try to avoid pine shavings as bedding if at all possible because of the composting issue. If I have to use pine shavings, I'm right back to where I started with having to add additional nitrogen. Even if I ran it all through the chipper/shredder, it would be no better than going back to the horse stables. Oh well, at least I will have meat and eggs I can trust.

 

[Ridgerunner]

A lot of it depends on how you are set up. If they are foraging in open ground, you're not going to get any of that. And you are right on the wood shavings or anything else you might use as bedding, such as straw. It's high carbon.

They poop a lot when in the roost at night. What I suggest is a droppings board or some way to catch that poop. Some people put plastic tubs under the roosts, maybe with a screen on top to keep the chickens out. I think those screens are overkill. I did something like that without the screens and the chickens did not get their itsy-bitsy teen-weeny cutesy feet dirty in it. I understand some people treat their chcikens as pets but I don't.

A droppings board is a flat board maybe a foot out from each side of the roost. It will catch most of the poop they drop at night. Some people put linoleum down to give a good slick surface, but mine is just wood. It's actually the top of my built-in brooder. I scrape it off using a garden hoe with a broken handle so it is not long enough to break my window when I get careless with it. Some people scrape daily but I clean it every two weeks or so. Doing this, you'll get plenty more than you need of pure manure for that compost. You'll need at least two compost heaps to collect in one while the other is working.

I use wood shavings on my floor. My coop is plenty big enough that I don't have to clean it out, especially with the droppings board catching most of the nighttime poop. I cleaned mine out last November for the first time in four years, not because I needed to but because I wanted that stuff on my garden. It has already pretty well rotted in.

I've never done those Cornish X but I've heard they are true pooping machines. You'll probably need to clean that poop out. It could build up enough to really stink or it might even make them sick.

Something else I've done that maybe you can use. I made the bottom of my brooder out of 1/2" hardware cloth and elevated it. I get a good draft guard by draping plastic cloth all the way to the ground and laying boards on it to keep it in place and keep the adult chickens out from under there. Remember, my brooder is in the main coop. Then I put plastic containers from Walmart under there to catch the poop. I don't know how well that would work with those Cornish X pooping machines but the poop from the regular chicks falls right through.

I do the same thing in my grow-out coop. The poop falls through until those chicks are maybe 12 to 14 weeks old, then it is big enough it starts building up on the wire. That's why I'm not sure about those Cornish X. They grow so fast and get so much bigger, that poop might start to build up on the wire at a much younger age.

 

[baymule]

My coop is 8'x7' with a dirt floor. I toss in pea hulls, corn shucks, corn cobs, grass clippings, garden trimmings, leaves and other organic matter. What the chickens don't eat, they scratch apart and poop all over it. I dig out the coop twice a year. When I do, I sprinkle lime, NOT the hydrated cause it burns, but plain lime on the floor of the coop bacause it will be dampish and might smell. I wait a week or two before I start over. The dampness sometimes attracts buffalo gnats, and they are terrible on the hens! I wait until the hens have gone to roost and spray them with vanilla. I pour vanilla in a spray bottle and mist them real good with it. I also spray the floor of the coop. It keeps the gnats and flies away. (in fly season, I hang several of the yellow Christmas tree auto vanilla scents in the coop)

I put the coop poop in a wire basket for further composting. I make a circle with a length of welded wire and stand it up. Fill with coop poop and nature will do the rest. I let it set until I clean out the coop the next time. I have been guilty of dumping it from the coop to the garden.

I recently added a 12'x8' run because I wanted more chickens. My DH and I filled the run 2 1/2 feet deep with raked up leaves right after Thanksgiving. It might be 4" deep now. It is time to scoop the coop poop! Then I'll rake the back yard and toss all the leaves in the run.

You want to know how much to expect? I put sawdust in the coop (8'x7') last winter. I had 8 hens. I used sawdust because a friend with a tablesaw and lots of projects gave me bags of it. All winter I just dumped more in on top. Last spring, I dug it all out. I got 9 dump wagon loads. So I got 9 loads from 8 hens and several bags of sawdust. Here is a link to the dump wagon I used.

http://www.tractorsupply.com/groundwork-reg-garden-dump-cart-600-lb-capacity-3502213

I know lots of people have coops with floors in them, but I don't. I like the dirt floor because I don't have to clean it all the time. My coop does not smell, attracts very few flies, the girls love the dirt and they make me compost!

 

[catjac1975]

If possible set up your coup so that they can forage in the garden in the off season. They will eat bugs, larvae and weed seeds, scratch and loosen the soil, and of course leave a trail of manure.

 

[MontyJ]

Thanks for all the info so far. In an attempt to reply to all at once here goes:

I cannot free range my chickens at all...period. The predator population is way too high. Besides an over-active Border Collie/Blue Heeler mix, we also have coons, fox, hawks, coyotes, cats, neighbor dogs, roaming teenagers, and others. Letting them run through the garden is simply not practical. The garden varies in size from about 3600 square feet to about 8,000 square feet each year depending on what I am growing.

The coop is 8x10. It's an old storage shed that has seen better days. I'm renovating it into a chicken coop with added ventilation and roosts, etc... The run looks like this:

Since we will be getting the meat birds and rocks at the same time, the meaties will have the entire run to themselves for most of their lives since the rocks will be in the brooder for most of that time. If I need to put the rocks out, I can fence off the 20 foot section for the meaties and give them some cover while the egg birds take the covered run and coop. The meaties will be in the coop for a short while until it's safe to let them out for good.

Having a dirt floor and poop boards appeals to me. I can get plenty of leaves, dried grass and assorted other things to throw in. My compost piles get rather large during the summer. I don't fence them in. It's easier to just pile it up and run the horse tiller through them, then pile it back up. The chicken poop mixing with the non-wood bedding is an instant start to a compost pile. I like that. I will probably have to shift to wood shavings during the winter when alternative bedding materials become scarce.

Famous last words...I like chicken, I like eggs, I like poop...what could go wrong?

 

[catjac1975]

I am unsure of what you just said. Are you planning to leave the meatbirds indoors for the whole time? You will see that they grow at least 4X faster than any hen. I think they need to be outdoors during the day for good health. All they do is eat and poop. If you do plan to keep them indoors I would not have them during the heat of the summer. Mine are in a fenced garden not really free ranged. We have predators but lock them inside of the chicken house at night. We have only lost a few chickens during the day from hawks.

 

[journey11]

We raise the Cornish X. Oh my goodness, they put out a ridiculous amount of poo...mostly because they do nothing but eat and poo all day long! They are not normal chickens. They don't even roost. They don't forage. They don't run and play. They just put on tons of weight really fast and make for some tender and juicy chicken. Some people don't like them, but they still taste WAY better than store-bought. We tractor ours and move it once or twice a day. Even at that pace they will still flatten your grass (but it will fertilize the grass once it starts to bounce back again.) Leave it more than a day and you won't even see grass...just a poopy, muddy mess. If you have a garden plot to fallow, it would be ideal to tractor them over that.

I had mine in a PVC-framed pen with PVC arches supporting a tarp over top. That worked well enough for the past 3 seasons, but here is some pics of what I'm going to build for my next batch. Pretty simple, just a 2x4 frame for the bottom, light guage cattle panels for the arch overhead and covered with a tarp, chicken wire and/or welded wire for the sides and a bit of a wooded framed door to access for feeding/watering.

Here , here , here and here are some ideas.

You'll want it lightweight enough to move by yourself or with two people because you'll be moving it a lot over 8 weeks.

Here's some posts on my blogs detailing my experiences with them, including a cost analysis, some tips, and a pic of my old tractor set up. Also BYC has a lot of good info and people who can advise you over in the Meat Birds forum.

Now your dozen barred rocks, those will be the ones to give you a nice pile of manure from the coop to toss on the compost pile. I had 20 black stars that would fill up my 3x12' roost pit nearly a foot deep within the space of a year...that's including the wood shavings mixed in too though. Still, chicken poo is some powerful stuff! Your garden will thank you!