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Join Dr. Joey Bray as he discusses key litter management issues and how to resolve them to create a better environment for birds.

Can’t watch right now? Get the full video transcript here:

Hi, I’m Joey Bray, technical service representative for Jones Hamilton. Today we’re in the chicken house and we’re going to look at some litter and look at some common challenges that we see and how we can resolve those.

Well, we see is we find a lot of caked material along the wall and in the corners. This is a problem, because that can be where we’re harboring a lot of that moisture. We have a lot of extra ammonia coming from that area and potential bacteria growth as well.

So we want to look and see how much carbon is in the litter as well. That tells us how much, shavings have been put in this house. So if we look here, this litter here doesn’t have a lot of shavings left behind. A lot of carbon source left behind. It’s been grown on for many, many flocks. So if I look down and and find that there’s really not a lot of shavings in here, then we need to be adding some carbon source back to this litter.

This is also very fine litter. If you look here on the the lower parts of it, we don’t see much particle size to this litter. This type of litter here can produce a lot more ammonia than higher carbon source litter.

So if you’re going to be windrowing this litter, we want to make sure we have plenty of carbon in this litter. Right now we don’t have a lot of carbon. So we would recommend adding some carbon back to this litter.

Another challenge is making sure that the litter is level. Right here we’ve got pretty thin areas of litter, not much depth of the litter at all. And then we go down and look across the house, and we’ve got areas that are very thin along the side walls and a lot more litter in the middle.

What we want to try to do is get that evened out and level across the house so that we make sure we’ve got a good pad of absorbent material. Looking at this litter, we can tell it’s been decaked or crusted. Coming in here, we can see all the material left behind. The big material left behind. What they’ve also done is come over the top and tilled it, trying to break up some of that material. That’s not a good idea. The tilling will break down your particle size, increase your surface area, and give you a lot of extra ammonia coming out of this litter. So we want to make sure if we’re coming through and decaking, we take out all of this big material, that we see here, left behind.

So when we till litter, we increase the surface area and the particle size in the litter. So what we want to do is always check to see how much ammonia we have coming out of the litter. What we’ll typically use as a draw tube like this., an aspirating tube. We’ll take the material. We can take out our tube here. Make sure you have your tube in the right position. We’ll line up the red lines on the pump here. Open up our breaking area. Break the tips off the ends of the tube. Make sure that we’re putting the tube into the in the proper way. Make sure you twist it. That’ll give it a good seed in that rubber seal there.

Making sure we’re not pulling air through here and we’re only pulling air through the actual tube, lining up our marks here. What we’ll do is we’ll get it close to the litter and we’ll pull. When we pull, the tube should stay out. The pump should stay out like that. Often I’ll set the tube down just like this and allow it to equalize. These particular Kitagawa brands has a indicator on it. It’ll tell you when you’re ready to read your measurement. The indicator button is here.

Okay. Our indicator button has come out. So now we know we are ready to measure our ammonia levels. Right now, coming out of this litter, we only have roughly about ten parts per million

Another way of, checking your ammonia levels is actually what’s called a deep litter ammonia rating. So we’ll do the same process. But instead of taking the ammonia reading right here on top of the litter, what I’m going to do is ease the tube down into the litter a couple of inches most of the time our litter reading is going to be higher. Our ammonia rating is going to be higher. So I’m just going to pull a half tube. So we have 150 parts per million. What we’re going to do is double that number. So we actually have 300 parts per million coming out of this litter.

So now I’m going to check a wet area to see how much ammonia we’re getting out of these wet areas of the litter. Again I’m only going to pull a half a tube here.
Okay, so as you can see here, we’ve got quite a bit more ammonia coming out. We’re at about 240 parts per million. So 240 times two. We’ve got 480 parts per million coming out of this wet litter, compared to 300 parts per million out of our more dry litter. That really shows us that moisture accelerates the amount of ammonia released from this litter.

So to test our litter moisture, what we want to do is use the squeeze method. So if we come down here and look at this litter, we know that it’s fairly dry. If I pick up a handful of this and I squeeze it whenever I release, notice how it breaks open. This tells us that we’re below 25% litter moisture. Let me show you the difference in some litter when we have a lot of moisture in it. So over here we’ve got higher moisture. What I’ll do is I’ll grab some of this when I squeeze this litter. Notice how it binds together. It’s in a ball. So that means we have more than 25% moisture and probably above 30% at this point.

Another good way that you can measure your moisture is with the digital moisture meter. This happens to be a pin style. It’s got two pins on top. What I want to do is take this, put it in the litter, and it will tell me what percentage of moisture I have. This litter is roughly at about 20% right here. So now if we look over here, I’ll go to this wet area. And now we’re getting up closer to 25 to 30% moisture. So this is a very good way to demonstrate how much moisture is in your litter.

So before we get ready to apply the PLT, what we want to do is purge the house. We’ve constantly got ammonia coming out of this litter. And what we want to do is remove the ammonia from the atmosphere so that as we apply the product, we make a barrier, of keeping that ammonia down into the litter and so by having the fans on before we apply the product, we can purge that ammonia out of the air and clear the air out so that we don’t have a reaction of the product with the ammonia in the air. That’s where we see the white fog, after we apply the product, if you’re seeing the white fog, you have not done your purging properly.

Another good test you can do on your litter is your pH. What we need is some sort of clean cup. Take us a handful of litter, put it in our cup. And what we will do is add distilled water to this. We want to use distilled water so it doesn’t change the pH of the litter. We’ll add our water into the litter. We want to try to have about 3 to 4 times the amount of water as you do litter. What we’ll do is let our water set in our litter for just a moment. While we’re doing that, what you need is a pH meter. This is a digital pH meter. You need to make sure that the end of the meter is clean. You want to clean this after every sample, and particularly before you put your meter away. That will keep it measuring properly every now and then. It’s very good to check your meter, calibrate it with some known solution. You can buy solutions that are at a pH of seven or down to three or up to ten. That way you know your meter is properly reading.

What we want to do is put it in our solution and check our pH. Again, most poultry litter that has not been treated with any sort of litter amendment will usually be up around a seven and a half to up to a nine pH. So this litter is reading about 9.4. That tells us that this litter doesn’t have much carbon left in it, and it’s generally pretty old litter when it starts to get up above a nine like this, what we would need to do is add more carbon. That’ll help to bring that pH down. And then again, treat this with the proper amount of PLT to bring that pH down.