What is The Best Bedding for a Chicken Coop?

I have been keeping chickens for years. Each year my operation gets bigger, and so we deal with more and more poop. In order not to get buried in crap, Mom or I clean out the coop weekly. If we don’t it just gets so gross.

We have used the following types of bedding materials:

• Straw

• Pine Flakes

• Pine Shavings

• Pellets

• Wood Shop Shavings

• Leaves

• Grass Clippings

We find that we have two different needs when it comes to the coop vs. the run.

Our coop is quite large - the floor inside is 10ft x 6ft and it is 8 feet high at the lowest point. We have a linoleum floor there to make for easy cleaning.

Our contained run is about 30’ x 7’ with a dirt floor. We close this run at night because it is predator proof. During they day they have access to a back run and to the garden all fall and winter so the contained run doesn’t get too gross. We clean this out about every 5-6 weeks just for our own satisfaction.

This past year all of our local suppliers ran out of straw, so we have been experimenting with different bedding types for all of our animals.

Our top three bedding choices for the chicken coop:

1) Pine Flakes

2) Straw

3) Grass

Pine shavings and woodshop shavings are too small and dusty and very messy. The pellets are a pain in the butt becuase you need to wet and dry them first, which we cannot do easily inside the pens - water and feces is bad - nor do we have an efficient way to do this elsewhere, maybe we are missing something. Leaves are great for the run, but not absorbent enough for the coop and they break down and get very dusty.

Flakes are absorbent, soft on their feet and pretty easy clean up - just sweep them out.

Straw is second - it does not absorb much, so the poop just falls through and sticks to the floor. It covers it really well though, so while the poop is more difficult to clean because it sticks to the floor, the coop doesn’t look gross as fast.

Grass is good if the clippings are long enough, but we don’t always go long enough between mowing to get any good ones. When we mow the field, the grass is great. It is like using hay. It goes in really nice when it is still damp and then dries up and is pretty good for absorbing and cleaning out, and the chickens love to dig through it.