Cleaning the Chicken Coop

This is a pic of the access area at the back with the two doors open. We open these two doors to clean the roosting area which is just above the nest boxes. When the chickens sleep on their roosting bars at night, they generate a lot of poop. Their poop falls through the welded wire floor which is about 12 inches below the wooden roost bars and it settles on top of the river sand that is at the bottom of the 8-inches high green box. There is a hook attached to the ceiling to hold the welded wire floor as seen in the picture above. The ceiling over the roosting area is covered with a plywood.

In cleaning the coop, we first take off the wooden roost bars from their slots. The slots are made of metal and the wooden bars are made to fit snugly in them. The roost bars are about 4-inches high above the welded wire floor.

Then we lift off the entire wire floor and hook it up on a wire that is attached to the ceiling just for this purpose. This gives us the space to reach out to the farthest part of the box to clean the poop.  

Then we use a sifter such as the one that my nephew Jim is holding to separate the chicken manure from the river sand. The sifter is actually a kitchen utensil that is used for taking out the food when doing deep frying. Their poop is usually concentrated in one spot and fortunately for us, it is always near the two doors so it's easy to clean it up.

I have been doing a lot of research on the Internet about the kind of litter to use in the chicken coop and run. Finally I settled to using rough river sand in the chicken run and wood chips as litter over concrete floor in the chicken coop. We also use river sand underneath their roosting bars. The river sand dries up the poop and these can be easily scooped up with a strainer.  We put the poop in a covered compost container. When the container is almost full, we bring this to the big garden on the hill where they are dried before being used as fertilizer.  Since this is now the rainy season here in the Philippines, we could not dry the manure so these will have to be stored in the compost bins for four months or until the weather improves. There are no houses over at the hill garden so it's the best place for us to dry the chicken manure, that way no neighbors will have to complain about the odour.  Besides, this hill garden is where we will be using the chicken dung as fertilizer for the coffee trees and banana trees that are planted there.