Hot shit

I have about 3 cubic meters of hot compost sitting right under the roosts in my chicken coop, it's about equal parts chicken poop, straw and wood chips. It's managed to keep my chicken coop above freezing for much of this winter, which has been amazing because I have had very few frozen eggs. Despite being limited to only collecting eggs between 2pm and 3:30pm for the last 6 weeks. This is in Saskatchewan and we did have a 2 week period in here with storming and regularly hitting -20C recently.

That's brilliant! It reminds me of the deep straw/manure pads that kept cattle happy through our winters.

I'm curious, how did you build this heap? How were the ammonia levels in the air? Did you do anything special (biochar) to control ammonia levels in the coop (ammonia being nitrogen fertilizer, if captured)?"

It basically is a deep bedding system, except that every weekend I have been going in with a pitch fork, throwing most of the bedding under the roosts, and then adding another wagon load of straw/wood chips. Of course every time I add more bedding the chickens go crazy scratching it up so there is a very even mixture of manure and bedding.

The ammonia has been mostly ok, it froze for a couple weeks in January, after it thawed it smelled for a bit so I added a few scoops of wood pellets. (Compressed saw dust used in pellet wood stoves, they are great at absorbing ammonia). Since then, it smells like healthy compost, not offensive to those used to being in a barn.