Last winter we used the deep bedding system for the first time in our new barn. It was great all winter since we never had to clean it out, and as long as we kept up with putting down new bedding and nothing stirred it up, we had pretty much no bad smells in our barn. In this blog I will share how to implement this system on your farm.
What is The Deep Bedding System?
The basic idea behind the deep bedding system is to keep nitrogen (from manure for example) and carbon (from straw for example) in the correct balance by frequently adding carbon (the animals will add the nitrogen for you) and to only clean it out once a year. By doing this you essentially create a compost pile in your animals housing which in turn will generate heat to help keep your animals warmer.
The repair of a loose sheet of metal on the side of our barn gives you a chance to see a cross section of the deep bedding system. This photo was taken after about six months of using the deep bedding system. You can see the clean bedding on top and the "compost pile" that is created underneath.
Also, by keeping those two elements in the correct balance you can virtually eliminate the smells typically associated with animal housing. If you can't tell already this system is really only ideal for cold weather use as the heat it generates would become problematic. One exception would be a chick brooder which should pretty much stay dry and thus not generate heat.
Benefits
If done correctly there are numerous benefits to the deep bedding system, including:
Not having to clean out animal housing in freezing weather
Keeping your animals warmer
Practically eliminating bad smells
Providing a clean dry area for your animals to stay during cold, wet, or windy weather
Grows bugs for chickens (research done in the 1950's indicated that if at least a foot of bedding with the correct C:N ratio was maintained in a housed flock of egg laying hens they could obtain all the animal protein the needed from the bugs that would grow in it)
Getting Started
When you first start with the deep bedding system, depending on what animals you are using it for you may feel like you can't keep up with how much bedding you have to put down. After a while it will all start to compact and decompose, and you won't have to put as much down.
The depth of bedding you should start out with depends on what kind of animal it is for. For large animals like cows, donkeys, sheep and goats around 12"-18" should be good. For smaller animals like chickens and ducks, about 6" should work. After that you just keep adding bedding whenever it starts to smell or look dirty or wet.
What Bedding to Use
We primarily use straw as bedding for our goats since it is the cheapest option for us and also insulates well. For chickens and ducks, you can use straw, however wood shavings are more absorbent and tend to work better especially for ducks since they are so messy. The shavings are also easier for chickens to scratch up which helps to keep their housing cleaner.
Cleaning it Out
This is the worst part, but thankfully you only have to do it once a year, and hopefully you can pick a nice day to do it. We just finished cleaning our barn out this past Saturday (we waited way to long, we'll try to do it sooner next year!), we had started cleaning it out by hand, and in several hours only got maybe a tenth done.
Then we decided to try to use the tractor...and we were done in about an hour!! We hadn't used the tractor before because we didn't know if it would fit in the door. It did, but just barely!
You should clean it out once the weather is pretty consistently warm, both in the day and night. For us that would be probably sometime in May. Although, if you take your animals out of their winter housing when the grass starts to grow and don't put them back until it stops, you can clean it out as soon as you take them out.
You will need to be able to keep your animals out of their house while you clean it as everything under the top layer has been composting anaerobically (except for in chicken and maybe pig housing) and won't be very healthy for them to be on. If you aren't able to get it all cleaned out in a day and you need to put the animals back in it put down a light layer of bedding over any exposed dirty areas.
Most of the bedding you take out will have decomposed quite a bit by now, however, since it has likely been doing so in the absence of oxygen it will probably not look like something you would want to spread in your garden.
To do that you will need to let it sit for a while so it can fully decompose now that it has oxygen from being all stirred up as you were cleaning it out. How long it has to sit depends on whether it has the right amount of moisture, and how often you stir it. It is ready to be used when most of it looks like dirt.
We have such a big pile from our barn that we will not be able to stir it unless we use the tractor, which we will probably not do as we won't really need it until next spring.
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