[Jacob-list] chicken droppings

[gordon johnston]

<<Some people also recomment feeding DE to chickens because it remains intact through their digestive system and will kill flies and other things that feed on their droppings.>>

Surely that is counter-productive in an organic system - in any system in fact - because you want the droppings to be broken down into material useable by plants, which requires the various micro-organisms, insects etc to be very much alive.  This is one good reason not to use Ivermectin-type drugs, which kill everything in the soil, including earthworms, and in the droppings so that no decomposition takes place. (We discovered this when we imported a load of manure from our neighbours dairy farm, where they do use Ivermectin - the pile took several years to decompose instead of one or two, and there were no signs of life in the heap at all, not even brandling worms for the first two years).
If it is the droppings in the poultry house which are attracting unwanted flies, surely it's easiest to muck it out, rather than causing the hens to produce 'sanitised' droppings.
Juliet in Scotland
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