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How To Never Clean Chicken Poop Ever Again
The trick to not having to clean chicken poop is using a mobile coop, and there are basically only two principles involved with this. The first principle is that every horizontal surface in your coop will get poop on it. So you need to get rid of every solid, horizontal surface and make it out of hardware cloth or chicken wire. If you are successful with this, the poop will simply fall on the ground. The second principle then is to move the coop away from the poop that is now on the ground. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.
There are a couple different ways to implement these two principles. One way is to use a chicken tractor. Typically these don’t have a floor at all, so the chickens just do their thing directly on the ground. This works really well for meat birds. It’s easy to put a lot of chickens in them and since they’re getting processed within 8 to 12 weeks (depending on the breed) you don’t really need to worry about pampering them.
However, laying hens are a little more complex. First of all, they need a place to lay their eggs. While chickens can and will lay directly on the ground if they have no other choice, they really need a dark, cozy and safe place that they can keep coming back to day after day. Also, since they will hopefully be around for a few years, they will need good shelter and protection.
The best mobile chicken coop out there is Justin Rhode’s ChickShaw. It’s basically a box with roosts and egg boxes that’s on large wheels with a handle on the other end that you use to pull it around the yard. Like a rickshaw, hence the name, it is an extremely efficient design for easily “transporting” your chickens where ever you want them to go. It’s hard to really appreciate this aspect until you see it in action. The trick is to keep the waste from building up and needing to be cleaned. Even if it’s on the ground build up can still be a problem, so you need to be able to easily move the coop to a new spot every day or so. Piling waste in one spot is a hazard. Spreading waste around a yard or pasture is fertilizer.
This really is a game changer. Not only are you eliminating the worst chicken chore imaginable, you’re turning a waste product into an input that benefits the land.
