Composting chicken manure is a good idea, but the scientists at Virginia Tech came up with a more unique solution with a lot of potential.  They're experimenting with turning poultry litter into biochar, which will make it easy to move the valuable fertility out of regions with a glut and into areas where the nutrients will be appreciated.

I've embedded a video in this post that gives all of the nitty gritty information on poultry litter biochar.  Over on our homesteading blog, I've been posting more basic information on biochar all week.  If you aren't already familiar with the concept, you might want to check out that introductory information before watching this video.  Then come back here to see a real innovative solution to an environmental problem.

Just outside Abingdon, Virginia, the smell of chicken waste wafts from huge fans lining the walls of an industrial chicken facility.  I'm sure the neighbors don't think so, but this is the scent of sun-ripened tomatoes, brilliant bell peppers, and outstanding okra --- or at least it will be in a few weeks after the resulting compost mellows in my garden soil.

Spike meets us in a warehouse-type building next door.  Inside, mounds of chicken manure, horse bedding from a nearby college's stables, and grass clippings from a neighbor's lawn meld into award-winning compost.  Spike explains that he usually mixes two parts hardwood horse bedding (mostly sawdust with some manure --- the carbon source) with one part chicken manure (the nitrogen source.)  The grass clippings and other bonuses are irregularly added as they materialize.  I could tell that Spike was a guy after my own heart --- he knew that no organic matter is waste.

We've been sampling all of the local compost producers, and Spike is by far our favorite.  Although his compost is a bit too dry for my tastes, it is extremely high in both nutrients and organic matter, with an N-P-K ratio of 3-4-4.  For the record, Steve Solomon's pricey complete organic fertilizer is 5-5-1.

Except for needing to wet the compost well before using it, the only flaw with Spike's compost is shared by all other producers of poultry compost --- high phosphorus content.  Many organic gardeners apply a poultry manure every second or third year, alternating with a more nitrogen rich manure that contains less phosphorus (from horses, cows, rabbits, or just about anything other than poultry.)  We get horse manure from a nearby farm to round out our compost needs, keeping the phosphorus from building up to toxic levels in our soil.

We'd be willing to pay more for such high quality compost, but Spike keeps the prices reasonable --- $25 per cubic yard.  His cubic yards seem to be on the large side too, with this overflowing truckload costing only $50.  After several truckloads this year, our soil is already starting to take on the dark color of good loam.  To pick up your own load of compost, give Spike a call at (276) 356-9357.

I know that most of my readers have chickens at around the same scale I do --- two or two dozen birds to feed our families eggs and perhaps meat.  At this scale, chickens are an integral part of any permaculture system, mowing the "lawn", fertilizing the garden, and even eating bad bugs.  But what about the larger chicken operations that provide most of the developed world's chicken meat and eggs?  Do we harness the enormous fertility coming out of these factory farms for good or for evil?

Unfortunately, the answer is often the latter.  As with any concentrated animal feeding operation, industrial chicken facilities produce so much chicken poop that it quickly reaches the waste category.  The high phosphorus content that helps your plants develop fruits in the garden seeps into surrounding lakes and rivers and causes disastrous algal blooms.  Here in Virginia, the Chesapeake Bay is highly polluted by just such chicken farm runoff.

While I believe that the long term solution to this environmental catastrophe is to put our families' food production back into our own hands, there are solutions at the industrial scale.  Last week, we learned about two intriguing uses for chicken waste --- high quality compost and biochar.  Stay tuned for a post on each topic later in the week.

If you like chickens you're going to love the wonderfully warped humor of Doug Savage.

This guy takes chicken satire to a whole new level. His website is a great place to stroll through years and years of this daily peek into a parallel universe where chickens talk to each other and travel through time.

Ed from Texas emailed to let me know that he'd put together a video of his chickens drinking from his brand new bucket waterer.  He also mentioned that his birds had been a bit afraid of the waterer at first, even though he tempted them closer with cheerios, spinach, and finally a plate of water underneath.  He wrote:

Last year, we had several people return their waterers claiming that their chickens couldn't figure out how to drink.  This year, though, people seem to trust us more, and are willing to give the waterer a second shot even if their chickens are more recalcitrant than the average bird (who usually picks the new watering method up in less than an hour.)

Thanks for giving it another go, Ed!  Your chickens will thank you too --- but you have clearly figured that out already, since you already ordered another homemade chicken waterer kit.

After harvesting the sunflowers and hanging them up to dry for a couple of weeks, I decided to split the crop with our chickens.  I brushed the seeds out of the biggest sunflowers by hand while the heads were still malleable, and set the seeds aside to dry for next year's planting and to make oil.  The smaller heads were earmarked for our flock.

I took Bethany's advice and hung one sunflower plant upside down in our oldest hens' tractor.  When I came back to check on them an hour later, the seed heads were nearly bare, but one hen kindly went back to work and posed for the camera.  Clearly, the sunflowers in their natural state are no problem for keen chicken beaks.

We got a note from Julie in Colorado last week.  She emailed to say:

I hope that others have found our homemade chicken waterer kit inspiringly simple.  I remember the feeling of power I got the first time I used a drill.  Maybe we've turned Julie into a life-long DIYer?

Our forest pasture is abnormally quiet at the moment.  Mama hen is brooding four eggs that I'm 99% sure are unfertilized, and her chick likes to hang out in the coop with her even though he's mostly grown. 

Our kitchen scraps are quite voluminous at this time of year, as I cut up garden veggies to go in the freezer and discard tops and bug-bitten areas.  I toss all of the scraps into the pasture every morning, then bring in a wheelbarrow load of garden weeds in the afternoon, feeding our two pastured chickens no storebought food.  They certainly don't seem hungry --- half of the kitchen scraps are still lying around, and our cockerel rarely even comes out to greet me when I bring him treats.

My goal is to have our flock eventually whittled down to a level where we're feeding them only our scraps and homegrown grains/worms/black soldier flies.  It looks like at this time of year, we could probably raise about four chickens on our scraps alone (as long as they had enough room to catch bugs and add protein to their diet.)  Once we get a spare moment, we'll add some nest boxes to the coop and transfer two or three of our laying hens into the pasture to clean up the tomato and peach bits currently going to waste on the compost pile.

2010 is currently on track to be the hottest summer on record, with July already beating out the scorching Dust Bowl summer of 1936.  We've felt the heat on our farm, and are keeping a careful eye on our flock.  Heat exhaustion is nothing to mess with, as we discovered during our first year of chicken-keeping when two of our birds succumbed to the heat.

How do you know if your birds are too hot?  In an effort to cool down, they will pull in their feathers, stick out their "elbows", and start to pant.  That's your cue to make sure your flock has access to shade and water at all times.  If you're worried, throw some ice cubes in your homemade chicken waterer --- your chickens will adore the cool treat, and the ice water will help lower their body temperatures.

Chicken tractors can be dangerous at this time of year since chickens are confined in a small space.  Turn the tractor the wrong way, and your hens will have no shade to retreat to during the blazing afternoons.  We are careful to situate our chicken tractors so that the protected side is aimed toward the sun on summer days, and when temperatures soar into the mid 90s, we add a tarp to provide extra shade.

I have to admit that this year I counted the days until the dog days officially ended on August 11.  It's all cooler from here!

I've had a lot of emails lately about keeping chicken waterers from freezing, so I thought I'd share some heated waterer information to help us all prepare for the cold months ahead.  First of all, if you haven't already, you should read my tips for winter care of your Avian Aqua Miser --- simply taking the waterer in at night when you collect the day's eggs then putting it back out with the morning feed is often feasible if you have a small flock.

But bucket waterers are too bulky for daily carrying.  Is there a better solution?  Our homemade chicken waterer customers are ingenious, so I wasn't surprised to find several tips in my inbox:

• Build your own heated bucket waterer --- This old blog post gives instructions for using a light bulb to turn your bucket waterer into a heated waterer.
• Keep the coop above freezing --- If you have several chickens in a relatively small coop, you may need no more than a light bulb burning at night to keep the air temperature above freezing.  The light will have the bonus effect of increasing egg production during the winter months.
• Add a stock tank deicer to your bucket waterer --- Barbara emailed to give me some facts on her experience with using a Model H-49 Submergible Bucket De-Icer from Farm Innovators.  She says, "I paid $49.69 for it.  A bit pricey but well worth it!  The only issue I have had was the metal coil around the power cord rusting in the water.  It is to prevent animals chewing the power cord.  Not a problem with the guinea fowl so I just removed it."

The photo in this post, by the way, came with Barbara's email about her deicer.  She noted: