What’s the Best Bedding for Chickens? – Chickens in a Minute Video
Learn Which Bedding to Use in Your Chicken Nesting Boxes and Coop
Promoted by Standlee
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Join Backyard Poultry magazine in our video series, Chickens in a Minute, as we answer frequently asked questions about how to raise a healthy backyard chicken flock. In this video, we explore what’s the best bedding for chickens. This is an important choice because good bedding provides comfort for your chickens, helps you keep your coop clean and contributes to a flock’s overall health. Chosen properly, bedding can make a chicken keeper’s life easier.
What’s the Best Bedding for Chickens?
A popular choice for chicken bedding is pine shavings. Pine shavings are inexpensive, found at several farm supply stores and come in lightweight bags. They are very absorbent, and when spread generously on the floor of a chicken coop, last around a month.
A word of caution: Do not use cedar shavings, they are bad for a chicken’s respiratory system.
Also high on the list is straw bedding which is inexpensive and readily available. Straw is the hollow stems and stalks from grains and sometimes comes with bonus kernels left at the tips. A lucky find for your flock!
Other choices are sand, which has pros and cons as well as shredded newspaper, which is inexpensive but can become slippery. Grass clippings and hay are sometimes used, but more as treats than actual bedding.
At Standlee, we believe our dedication to the lifestyle we share is what sets us apart and binds us all together. It’s why our family built a company dedicated to supporting, enriching and nourishing the animals we love.
Learn more at StandleeForage.com.
These videos are a great reference for both new and experienced chicken owners alike. So feel free to bookmark them and share!
We love to hear from our fans. What additional questions would you be interested in seeing answered as a Chickens in a Minute video?
how about wood chips
for the floor of the coop?
I think sand is best but I use pine shavings in my nesting boxes.
Biggest problem with coops is during rainy season. Pine chips break down quickly, hay causes poop to stick to it and creates a horrible odor and is hard to clean up when wet, it clumps and has to be shoveled out. Sand gives puddles of poop soup. Best option i have found is pine bark mulch(undyed)it doesnt decompose quickly so our hens arent walking in mud. Hay and pine shavings in the nest boxes work well. Regular dry season i use hay pine chips and yard clippings and mowed grass in the coop.
I am a relatively new chicken keeper. I only have 7 hens. I built a nice coop and laid shower pan material in the floor of the coop and put about an inch of river sand. There is a “board” running under the roosts to catch poop and I use shaved aspen in the nesting boxes. I keep PDZ on the poop board and use an anti mite herbal blend on the sand floor. After a year in the Georgia sun my coop has no or little odor. I clean poop off board every 3rd or 4th day and rake the sand and use a kitty litter shovel to sift. This takes me about 7 minutes, I place all waste in a bucket that stays in the coop and when half full it goes to one of my barrel composters. The aspen mats have also been there for about a year with little wear, I will replace them in January. The river sand keeps everything dry and is fairly low dust. I will change the sand in March when I do a thorough coop cleaning.