Hot take: I stopped dumping my coop bedding every month and the smell got better, not worse

Jesse Wilson · 2026-10-11T01:35:04.265701+00:00

For two years I was hauling out every bit of pine shavings in my 8x10 coop each month and blowing $60 a year on new bags, and the coop still smelled like ammonia by week three. Last spring a guy at the feed store in Akron asked me why I was throwing away my best compost, so I tried the deep litter method instead, just turning it with a pitchfork once a week and adding a handful of shavings when it got damp. Six months in, the floor stays dry, the smell is almost nothing, and I got two wheelbarrows of black dirt for my tomato beds in June. The catch is you have to stay on top of moisture, because one leaky waterer ruining the whole base is a real thing that happened to me in February. Anyone else run deep litter through a wet winter, and how do you keep the waterer from wrecking it?

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Hot take: I stopped dumping my coop bedding every month and the smell got better, not worse | Backyard Chicken Keepers - Librear