Quote:
It has to be wet to stick to the chickens' feet and burn. To disinfect the barn floor during cleanouts I spread it on the concrete and broom it around. There is enough moisture in the concrete and humidity in the air to turn it into a sort of whitewash coating vs the powder that it is in the bag. I then cover it with bedding. Yes, they scratch down to it, but it's generally just a whitewashed floor and they don't get much of it on them, if at all. I don't normally mix it into the litter here because it's against organic regulations to use it to deodorize manure, it creates too much of a nitrogen loss. Even so, I have used it to spot dry a few areas of litter where we've had leaks in the barn, I've stirred it in and covered it with with other dry litter to quick dry an area. It never affected the birds.
In the run, it won't necessarily water into the soil, if there's a lot of it will just cake up. You'll either have to shovel off a majority of the caked lime or turn it into the soil, but you don't need to remove every last trace of it.
Here is a link to Robert Plamondon's poultry pages. He has reposted some writings from the '40s when the use of lime in livestock barns was almost a given. It is noted that it is mildly caustic to the birds' feet and it should be evenly distributed and turned into litter so the birds aren't walking in large quantities of fresh lime.
http://www.plamondon.com/faq_deep_litter.html
It has to be wet to stick to the chickens' feet and burn. To disinfect the barn floor during cleanouts I spread it on the concrete and broom it around. There is enough moisture in the concrete and humidity in the air to turn it into a sort of whitewash coating vs the powder that it is in the bag. I then cover it with bedding. Yes, they scratch down to it, but it's generally just a whitewashed floor and they don't get much of it on them, if at all. I don't normally mix it into the litter here because it's against organic regulations to use it to deodorize manure, it creates too much of a nitrogen loss. Even so, I have used it to spot dry a few areas of litter where we've had leaks in the barn, I've stirred it in and covered it with with other dry litter to quick dry an area. It never affected the birds.
In the run, it won't necessarily water into the soil, if there's a lot of it will just cake up. You'll either have to shovel off a majority of the caked lime or turn it into the soil, but you don't need to remove every last trace of it.
Here is a link to Robert Plamondon's poultry pages. He has reposted some writings from the '40s when the use of lime in livestock barns was almost a given. It is noted that it is mildly caustic to the birds' feet and it should be evenly distributed and turned into litter so the birds aren't walking in large quantities of fresh lime.
http://www.plamondon.com/faq_deep_litter.html
