The pigs have been eating well and leaving lots of waste. The daily chore is to go out and pull the litter away from the electric fence wire and ruffle up the beading as to cover up any poop on the surface. Read about the back ground of trying this bedding system
here. This has been working well to cover up the poop smell but I have noticed a growing ammonia smell.
I decided to dig the manure fork in further and really churn things up. That only made the ammonia smell stronger. Time to hit the Google search engines and see what I could learn. Lots of academic research to read on the subject. Chose not read that, too much like the day job... I found the chicken raising message boards the most encouraging. Ammonia smell is bad. Earthy smell is good. If you smell ammonia you need to add more carbon. I added two bales of straw and fluffed it up really well. We'll see if that helps with the ammonia smell, it sure did initially!
This method of deep litter bedding is more similar to chicken type systems I have read about, adding litter so you end up with a deep litter The pig systems I have read about seem to focus on starting with a lot of carbon and keeping it fluffed up. I wish I could smell things over the internet to see what these other barns smell like!
This blog entry for example!
This is a good clean out story and how he prepares his barn for the next round.
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| After churning up |
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| Straw touching hot-wire |
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| Churned up, but moist and stinky |
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| New straw on top |
Joe,
ReplyDeleteI have used the "deep litter" method for my ducks. One of the things I have learned about odor control is that the litter needs to drain/stay dry. If it is wet and smells like ammonia you can add a variety of things to control the odor, but the most effective one I have found is charcoal. Nothing fancy, just lump charcoal. Food for thought...
When my cousin raised pigs for 4H, he found that doing a bottom layer of shavings with straw on top offered more scent absorption than just straw heavily churned. You can pretty easily pull off the top layer of straw with a rake and get to the wet stuff (ammonia), then replace with dry shavings in those spots, and recover with the straw. If you're looking to recapture those nutrients, you can pile them in the open yard I guess, but otherwise that combo worked really well. We use a variation on that for our hogs and sheep at Kelsey Creek. The only issue there is that shavings can be expensive in the amount you may need them (at least, they're expensive in King Co.).
ReplyDeleteThe other thing that we use at KC is PDZ which is a lime-based deodorizer. It can be sprinkled on the "base" of stall flooring and works on cement, wood or even dirt as means of absorbing additional dampness (read: urine) and deodorizing existing parts of the area that are muy potente. I don't know about the cost on that one, but you wouldn't need much for your purposes and it can be used sparingly to great affect (about the density of powdered sugar on beignets). It's perfectly harmless for animals because it's only lime, clay and diatomaceous earth.
My chicken's deep litter bedding got a pretty powerful ammonia smell to it (particularly when worked up), but I soon discovered that water was seeping in from underneath, keeping it damp and therefore, stinky.
ReplyDeleteIf you can rule out water seeping in, then I'd try wood shavings in addition to your straw. Straw isn't nearly as absorbent as shavings, so the shavings ought to help keep the smell down.