Manure Management

Pigs and chickens and cows, oh my!

Hello fellow animal wrangling Permies!



I wanted to ask a question today about 'How do you manage manure on your homestead?'

I am a chicken tender myself, and I have quite a bit of droppings that have accumulated over the winter. I utilize a deep litter method utilizing shavings that I empty out a few times a year. I am developing a composting system to turn the 'hot' manure into something that can enrich garden beds once I am done.

What do you do with your manure? Is it a resource or a struggle for you? Any tips or tricks?

I let it fall where it may ...

If and when we get a heavy rain it gets washed somewhere useful.

I generally will also move the animals so that they spread it around for me. For chickens in the winter, I use a deep bedding style inside a greenhouse. Great tomato fertilizer and I don't need to clean it out. I got the idea from Joel Salatin. The tomatos help break chicken pest problems and the chickens help break tomato pest problems. Just alternate summer and winter.

It goes directly on the compost pile where it cooks for a year or two.   Or, if it is in one of the corrals I rotate, I leave it in place for a year. It then goes to the garden.

I'm in town. I have a chicken tractor in the front yard (what must the neighbors think?) with 12 Cornish X in it that are 7 weeks old today. It gets moved once a day, and 3 spots ago you can hardly tell there's any chicken dooky in the grass.

I also have 12 layers. They have a coop with deep litter (pine shavings), that gets changed every few months, and stirred every few days. It goes in to the compost pile when I change it. A lot of days, I have them fenced into various areas of the yard, mostly around the house, to keep the weeds down. It's kind alike in-town rotational grazing. That poop just stays there. Their run is my current issue. It's just dirt, and when it rains, its a sloppy stinky mess. My plan is to put down about 4" of wood mulch (i have a free source) and hopefully, it'll kinda sorta compost itself (chicken poop being high nitrogen and wood being high carbon) and get changed out once a year. We'll see how that works. I was going to do sand, but it wasn't free, and I've heard it can also stink when it's wet.

I have rabbits. I let it just collect under the hutch and I muck it out when I need something in the garden. Rabbit manure isn't ho,t so I don't have to age it.

I have rabbit and some chickens.
The rabbit poop and urine enriched sawdust top dresses annual beds year round.

The chicken poop/ leaves goes in planting holes, top dressers beds in the winter, or it goes into the compost pile, to be mixed in with the food scraps and leaves by the chickens.

When we have way too much to use in our own garden, we sell our rabbit poop. It's always interesting how many people buy poop... And how many are somehow surprised when it stinks! 😂 But hey, it pays for the feed.

Alas,
I had to give up my acres in the Missouri woods for the "burbs."  But, I managed to bring enough critters to ensure adequate fertilizer for my roses and future garden.   I am wheelchair bound.  With that I was "forced" to abandon my barn and blackberries.  I did bring my critters to convert kitchen waste to incredible fertilizer.  They even eat my coffee filters and shredded news paper.  Jim   Upstate South Carolina

We have ten horses, so yep, lots of manure. For us it has definitely been a boon. When we moved to our acreage the ground was sandy and alkaline,  growing nothing but drought tolerant weeds. Watering plants was hopeless, the water drained away quickly through the sandy soil or evaporated under our hot prairie sun. Our horses are rotated through a series of small pastures through the summer, where the manure gets trampled back into the earth as a natural fertilizer. Come winter all the horses come home and are housed in a couple of paddocks with shelters. That's when you really get to see how much horses poop! 10 lbs of manure a day per horse, that's a hundred pounds every day until spring.  It sounds overwhelming,  but it has been a blessing. The following spring when the horses have their foals and go back out to grass, we clear the paddocks by pushing all the manure into a big pile in the corner of each pen, which ages into usable compost all by itself under the hot sun. The following spring,  we wheelbarrow the composted manure to a location where the soil needs amending and dig it in. Doesn't matter if it's fully rotted, our soil is so alkaline it needs whatever is available to amend it. We started with the garden area, planting our veggies with fingers crossed... and all the veggies loved it. Then we moved to the backyard and planted berries of various kinds. Then the front yard, and so on. Each spring we address a new area of our land and what started as a cracked, barren acreage is gradually becoming a lush green one. All praise to the manure gods! 😀

My plan is to connect all my concerns into one system. I take my animal waste (dung), food waste, as well as human waste and collect that into a container (barrel or 300 gallon bin) and follow this theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA0l2EC77w8

After this process, you get cooking fuel and very rich fertilizer

good question and great answers! We raise dairy goats and chickens. goats and chickens are on rotational pastures with stationary barns. After animals are rotated the pasture is mowed.
Barns are raked weekly and added to our compost bins. 4 bins made of pallets. When the bins are full we begin sheet mulching. Adding layers of the fresh compost to our seasonal sunflower beds.

We live in wester NC, so things like mites, gnats are plentiful. Moving the poo away from critters seems to work best for us. There are always more places to sheet mulch and create more flowers beds. we love our poop. hahahaaa

Chickens have a chickshaw-style shelter that gets move around, so theirs is spread out. Ducks have permanent outdoor night-time run with deep litter (oak leaves gathered from the suburbs) that gets composted or used as mulch directly in the garden. I remove the litter once or twice per year. I know it's time to do so when the ground gets too high for me to stand comfortably. Geese have sheltered (no rain exposure) deep litter with pine shavings. This stays much drier and breaks down slower than the duck system. It will also get composted or mulched, but I've only had the geese for a year and haven't yet had to remove any bedding. Poopy duck/goose water gets dumped under fruit trees and bushes. Sometimes I feel like I am not maximizing the opportunity represented by the chicken manure.

My quail are in an aviary on deep litter of chopped leaves and wood shavings.  Spot cleaned as needed and big clean out spring and fall. This all goes around our berry bushes and fruit trees. The rabbits were the perfect help for our  Sandy soil. In the winter it's dumped into piles  in the frozen gardens. And forked in in the spring. The rest of the year those magic berries are scratched in or top dressed around everything. I've read think about rabbit droppings as pellets of peat and slow release fertilizer. This spring my seed starting mix was half rabbit pellets wet and let to beak down . Then mixed in to soil Most things loved it but tomato got funny tips from too rich a mix.

In Central Wisconsin, where temperatures can get pretty brutal in the winter, I figured I would not be too happy with the "deep litter" method. I was afraid it would "get away from me" and in the spring, I would have a monumental job cleaning all this up. Depending also  on the number of chickens kept in the coop, I feared ammonia might sicken the birds.
One thing about chickens: they mostly poop while they sleep, which means while they are perched. The rest of the litter on the floor gets more dusty than poopy. I can keep that litter for over 3 months and it is still clean enough to use as mulch.
With this in mind, I decided to  create special perches with a "poop shelf" under them. I sprinkle a little BDT for the smell of ammonia but it is more in case one develops a loose stool.
With my setup, I have 3 poop shelves that I have lined with reusable plastic sheeting [the kind that is used in showers]. Once a week-10 days, I collect the poop in 2 homer buckets [with lids].
With 23 birds, I get about a bucket and a half that I can sprinkle close to my fruit trees/ bushes. Since I don't care to walk all over carrying 2 buckets, I put them in on a sled in the winter or in a little wheeled cart in the summer. That is my weekly walk over the whole property and a chance to inspect/ fertilize, forage, check for mushrooms. A big garden is made to be enjoyed once in a while!
Since this poop is pure gold, when I have a bit too much, or the weather in inclement, I have 2 more ways to use them:
1- I have 6 barrels inside the garden, in the corners that I fill with water once in a while. [ Water, as it warms to the temperature of the environment is kinder on my plants than the ice cold water from the well]. At the bottom of each, I have a spigot to attach a hose and empty the barrels in some beds. The barrels are resting up on top of concrete blocks, laid on their side for ease of attaching the hoses during the watering season. I buy some paint strainers from the Home Depot and fill those with whacked weeds and manure and close them with a sturdy rubber band. After a week or so, the smell can be formidable but the fertilizer is great. [With gloves and a little care, you can remove the rubber band and reuse.]
2- When the barrels are full and the poop keeps coming, I have a big heap of fall leaves that appreciate the help of the poop to decompose over the winter, when the watering season is over. It makes great leaf mold!
If you search the internet for "poop shelves for under chickens", you will get plenty of ideas to make your own. Make sure there is enough room between the poop shelf and the actual perch so that you can pass a long handled scraper. 7-8" is about right. I use 2X4 for the perches, slightly tilted: They wrap their toes on the higher edge so that the poop falls predictably under the lower edge.