Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bryanlarsen 495 days ago
Having dealt with my share of pig shit, chicken sheet and cow shit, I can assure you that chicken shit is the worst.
2 comments

Can you share a bit more? I grew up in a city and never knew the details of the farms (and interested). Thank you.
Not an industrial farmer, but we had chickens, horses and goats growing up.

Chickens suck because they poop on everything, and it dries into a glue-like substance caked onto things. The straw ends up caked in poop, the walls get caked in poop, the floor gets caked in poop, the chickens poop on each other. Getting it off requires a paint scraper, and getting way closer to it than you want. It's also liquid-y. It's a lot like bird poop on your car, but bigger because the bird is bigger.

The horses were less bad. Their poop was fairly "clean" as far as things go. They stayed pretty structurally intact (it's basically a ball of half digested fiber, kind of like a hairball) so it wasn't a big deal to get them with a pitchfork, and they were almost exclusively on the ground. It's not a job I wanted to do, but it wasn't awful. The heat in the non air conditioned barn was honestly worse than the work.

Our coop is off the ground. All I do is bring my wheelbarrow up to the door, open it up, rake it in, and then go dump. From my POV it's one of the easier chores.