The Deep Litter Method??

[BFG Central]

I was wondering what people think of this idea?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOOJPFXibDM
Not sure i would want to leave it for 12 months but the heat from the composting waste would keep the birds warmer in the winter.
It also means you have an extra compost pile to dig into the garden come the spring time.

[Scythe13]

So the eggs from the chickens will just sit there in the chicken poo? I'm not a fan of that, but they would easily wash off.

Looks like it would take less than a year to fill up, but I'm not hugely knowledgeable on this sort of thing.

All I can say, give it a try and report back to us how it went.

[Mortblanc]

Eggs will lay in the poo!!!

Never ceases to amaze me...

Where do you think eggs come from?

The chickens will lay in the nest boxes you provide if you line the nest box with straw. All of my hens share a nest box and I never remember needing to go one an "egg hunt" since they began laying.

"Back in the day" hen houses were built as minimal shelter with dirt floors. They were cleaned out once a year when the garden was plowed.

All these purposeful ideas are the invention of hobby farmers with nothing to do but play with a chicken. I do not know a single chicken raiser that cleans a coop once a week, or one with more than two or three chickens that uses one of those cute little "Mother Earth News" type tractors.

[Steve]

(12 August 2013, 17:16)Scythe13 Wrote: So the eggs from the chickens will just sit there in the chicken poo? I'm not a fan of that, but they would easily wash off.

You should avoid washing the eggs, they are covered with a protective membrane that stops the egg going bad.

[BFG Central]

Well you keep the eggs clean by changing bedding in the laying boxes once a week.
It may need doing more often if you have a lot of rain but even then you can guard against this with gravel on the ground and a tarp over the first 3-4 ft of the run from the chicken coop.
That way the chickens feet stay mud free.
Iv spoken to a friend that keeps chickens commercially and its common practice to leave the mess down and cover over with sawdust.

Its true that my chickens get cleaned out when it starts to look really messy and not before.
The wood floor is covered with vinyl flooring which is great for when your cleaning out. It also means it can be hosed out and disinfected and the wood does not rot or have anything nasty lurking in the cracks.

[Highlander]

This is the system that most egg/chicken farms work on anyway, I used to drive a truck that collected the eggs, and often watched as they started the once yearly clean out, when the muck was several feet high,... there is nothing new to this

[Kenneth Eames]

In the old days before mechanisation, this was the norm. There weren't enough hours in the day to do all of the work that needed doing. This applied especially to Northern Britain, with its many hours of darkness in Winter. If a Survival situation arises, you will realise how lucky we are today! Deep Litter, you'll be up to your knees in it. Kenneth Eames.

[MaryN]

Well, I'm going to buck the trend. We clear our henhouse out once a week and replace the sawdust at that point. Muck goes on the compost heap. We've found that doing it regularly keeps the smell down and the damp under control. We do the same in the horse housing. I can see the point of deep litter to save time, but it does increase the chances of bacterial infections, and for our horses we like to keep their feet clean and dry.

[Wolfpup]

I only have 5 hens - but the coop and nest boxes are cleaned daily with fresh litter (soft sawdust type) in the nest boxes and the bottom of the coop has a fresh liner with the old one chucked in the compost.

Their fox-proof section of the run is hosed down daily (different sections of gravel/concrete/brickwork) - and bleached/disinfected once a week - the rest of the run is gravel over soil - and they tend to sort that out themselves when scratching for bugs and worms.

I have thought about the deep litter method but in our rainy north of England climate I think it would cause more problems than its worth.

[bigpaul]

always makes me laugh, when I was dry stone walling on Dartmoor I worked on a farm that we were asked to clean out the house as the tenant had given up and left. in the Dairy/cold room there were 3 trays of eggs so that's about 90 eggs in all, no body else would touch them, "yuck, their all covered in hen poo" they said, I took them home washed them off, we didn't have to buy eggs for ages.