Horse manure compost pile.... for our chickens?

Hello from Georgia

My dad got a bunch of horse manure from a neighbor and added it to our food scrap compost. It looks really good. However, I've heard of people getting parasites from pig manure in their veggie gardens, can the same apply for horse poo? And say there were a potential for parasites, if I were to throw this good stuff into the chicken run for forage, could the parasites get on the eggshells, and onto our counter top?

Thanks,
Pat

Pigs are omnivores.  But horses are not.  So parasites will be basically no problem for humans.  Whatever parasites they get I don't think are much a problem for humans.  At least not if you compost the manure.

Chickens LOVE to pick apart manure for the bugs.  And for most mammalian parasites they are a dead end host (i.e. they can't survive and reproduce in a chicken).  We got some relatively fresh horse poo from our neighbor.  It sat for just a week or three before we got our hens from my FIL.  Those chickens thought they'd about gone to heaven when the found the pile and they turned it very effectively getting all the earth worms and other bugs from it.

So this past summer, I stumbled across a little old lady who runs a Horse Hotel about 15 miles away.  I went to pick up a load of her stall cleanings, which, incidentally, because they bed with pine shavings, means there is at least a fair amount of carbonaceous material mixed in with the road apples, as my mother used to call them.  

The dung pile was located on the north side of the barn, with the roof slanting N/S... we'd had a pretty wet period, and when I started scooping poop, it was hot beyond the first 3-4", visibly moist, and crawling with worms, sow bugs (roly poly bugs) and other arthropodic critters that the chickens love.  I honestly think, if I could manage to get over there for a "real" load (I was driving an 1993 Ranger at the time, which went south for double my investment in repairs last fall,) say the old Dodge grain truck the landlord has, I would actually set it up so that my birds could easily access it for processing and let it cure with their help.  Manure needs volume to decomp, and you'll lose the reproductive cycles that will replenish the incentivizing food supply in the manure.  

Thank you for the reassurance Andrew and Chris!

I’m new here.  But I spreed both horse and chicken manure fresh on cover crops, hay fields, and pasture. On sloping land I always spreed on the top of the slop. My cattle have a run I shed that I put 6 to 8 rolls of hay in at a time and after they have ate the hay I push it out with the loader and is aloud to set and compost for a year. Then I use it on my gardens and high tunnels.