Making the Most of Waste Hay
Hey, everyone. So today I’m going to talk to you a little bit about how I use waste hay to bed my chicken coop and save money on my chicken bedding. What typically happens when you have a bunch of hay is as you take hay from the big stack and bring it down and then end up opening up bales and everything you end up with a lot of loose hay on the ground.
So with this loose hay, you can sift through it and see if usable. I mean, if it’s dry, if it’s not dirty, obviously if there’s nothing gross in it, some of it can be fed still.
So you sort of have to just filter through and see the stuff that’s too gross or packed down or looks soiled. That’s what I bring down to the chickens so that they get this for their bedding.
I’m going to start by scooping up all of the loose hay in the stall and then also sweeping up the whole barn floor so that we get all of those little specks of hay down to bed the chicken coop.
Now that the cart’s full, we’re going to take it down to the chickens. I’m going to do the chores – so feed and water them – and then we’ll spread out the new bedding.
Good morning, chickens. The Speckled Sussex are always the first to come out. They’re the ones that have learned to roost. They’re just the brightest birds of this bunch, for sure. Ruby, such a good girl, she stays watch make sure nobody gets out of the coop. But she doesn’t come in.
Okay, Let’s bring in the fresh bedding for these guys.
How Do You Know It’s Time to Add Bedding?
It Starts to Smell in the Coop
How I know what I need for bedding in here is number one. If it smells, you know you’ve gone too long. If it gets starts to get that nasty chicken coop smell, it’s time to put down more carbon. When I’m using old hay like this, it tends to come packed. And so it’s really hard for the chickens to fluff and scratch.
For that reason I do really like using wood shavings or wood chips. However, when you have old hay like this, you want to use it for something. I added a pretty good layer in here and I still have some hay left I’m going to put it in the run cause we also bed are run deeply and it definitely needs some more.
So that’s what I’ll use the rest for. So I really am quite pleased with how the chickens are doing. The fall chick thing so far has been a success, I would say. I would do it again. They haven’t had any problem acclimating to the outdoors. I slowly raised their heat lamp over the course of maybe, I don’t know, a couple of weeks.
And thankfully we’ve had a pretty mild Minnesota winter, so it’s only gotten really cold a couple of times. So yeah, I’m really pleased with how it’s going so far.
Final Thoughts
And so that’s how I like to use waste heat to cut down on the bedding costs for my chicken coop. It really is a win-win because it takes something that really is a pain to deal with in the barn and turns it into something that’s so beneficial for the chickens.
Thanks for following along today and I’ll see you again next Sunday.
