Litter in the Coop

This is the chicken coop with the door open. The bottom of the front wall about 1/4 of it is covered with scrap tin materials over a concrete base. The rest of the upper wall is made of 1 x 1 inch wire mesh material so it is very airy inside and this serves as the coop's ventilation. 

This pic is inside the coop with wood chips as litter over the concrete floor.

We use wood chips as litter on the floor inside the chicken coop which we sourced out from a furniture shop along the National Highway in La Trinidad Benguet. The owner is giving these away for free as long as we do the bagging ourselves because his workers were busy with their own work. He said that we just missed some people who were there ahead of us to get some wood chips since they too are using it as litter in their pigsty. So I bought three empty feed sacks from across the street and filled these up with the wood chips. Luckily for me, my young nephew Jim was with me so he helped me in bagging the wood chips. The only expense we made was for the cost of the 3 feed sacks at 12 pesos each or a total of 36 pesos and the expense for the taxi which amounted to 60 pesos from La Trinidad Benguet to our house in Baguio City.

When we arrived home, we spread out the wood chips over the concrete floor inside the chicken coop. The three sacks of wood chips just about covered the whole floor at 2-inches deep. I wish I had taken more wood chips but then again, the ones that we did not bag were really more of a saw dust and I read on the Internet that this is not good for the chicken's lungs which is why we did not bag all of them. We have been getting a lot of rains lately because this is the rainy season now in the Philippines and the litter was getting damp. However, it's been sunny for the past two days and the litter on the floor dried up fast. This is what I like about wood chips, it's capacity to dry up fast. Anyway, I will have to get more wood chips to top off the litter because it looks like it could use another inch or two. To make the wood chips friable, we throw cracked corn on the floor and the chickens love to scratch and this loosens up the wood chips on the floor. I read somewhere that some people use Diatomatous Earth or DM over the litter in the coop but I am not sure if we have that here in the Philippines. I'll have to ask around the agricultural shops if they carry this product.