How to Process Chicken Manure into Organic Fertilizer

Chicken manure contains high nitrogen, a good amount of potassium and phosphorus and balanced nutrients, which makes it have the highest nutrient among all livestock and poultry dung. However, if not composted properly, chicken poop is also dangerous to crops and plants because it could damage roots and

and flies, and the ammonia is not healthy for your chickens to breath. What’s worse, chicken manure with excess nutrients run off the land or leach into ground water, affecting the quality of local surface and groundwater. To obtain maximum economic value, social benefits and ecological effect, poultry dung should be processed and composted into organic fertilizer without pollution. Fortunately, as a good source of organic material for composting, fowl dung processed to fertilizer through chicken manure compost and granulation can help to solve the problems of flies, maggots, odor and other pollution.

The feed intake of chicken is relatively high but due to its poor digestive ability, feed can only stay for short time in its digestive tract, so the output of chicken manure is very high. Statistically, each adult chicken may produce 130g-180g per day, meaning 55kg-60kg per year, thus it can be seen that a poultry farm with ten thousand chicken can produce about 1500kg fresh manure per day. According to the relevant investigation, the planet was home to over 21 billion living chickens up to 2014, thereinto China ruled the global roost with the largest total number of chickens almost 4,540 million, followed by the USA (1,983 million). The large quantities of chicken manure are very valuable by-product with a potential gross value of more than $60 million.

How to Make Chicken Manure Fertilizer

During the feeding process, chicken cannot digest and absorb the feed completely, which leads to about 40% – 70% nutrients expelled from body, therefore, fowl manure is the best type manure among poultry dung and livestock manure to use as fertilizer . Compared with horse, cow or steer manure, organic fertilizer made from chicken dung can provide more Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium to soil and plants. According to the testing of relevant department, fresh chicken manure contains about 70% water content, 25.5% organic matter, 1.63% nitrogen, 1.54% phosphorus and 0.85% calcium, which makes chicken dung suitable to be used as raw materials of organic fertilizer production. Moreover, with high nitrogen content and relatively lower carbon content, it is necessary to add rice husk or straw to increase C/N ratio and reduce moisture when making chicken manure fertilizer. Meanwhile, people should also add humic acid to fix ammonia-nitrogen as ammonium humate, reducing nutrient loss and enhancing fertility and soil improvement during the process of fermentation.

Taking making 1 ton organic fertilizer for instance, Whirlston will introduce a method about how to process chicken manure into organic fertilizer:

• Mixing 800-900kg fresh chicken dung with 50-100kg rice hull and 50kg humic acid uniformly, then adding 5-10kg rice bran (or wheat bran, corn meal and so on) for mixing, evenly spreading on fermentation raw materials, and then stirring equably for pile composting. If you have large amount of materials waiting to mixing, it is better to use professional equipment – horizontal type organic fertilizer blender for fast and even mixing.
• For fertilizer fermentation, C/N ratio should be adjusted to 25-30:1 and PH value should be adjusted to 6-8ph. Due to fresh chicken manure with high moisture, people should add 20% – 30% straw, haulm or mushroom residue together into raw materials, so as to adjusting water content. It is very crucial to control moisture during making fertilizer, not too high and not too low, and there is a way to judge water content appropriate: grasping materials tightly, water is visible but without dropping down, and materials can disperse when falling to the ground. Remark: if farmers do not want to reduce water content quickly, solid-liquid dewatering machine is a quite good solution for separating the solid chicken dung from the liquid, accelerating the decrease of moisture in manure.
• Creating fermentation pile: the pile should not be too small and too low, which may affect compost effect. Usually, for better fermentation effect, the height is about 0.8m – 1.5m, the width is around 2m, while the length should over 4m.
• Composting the material piles when the temperature of pile is up to 65 Celsius. As we all know, ventilation is an important factor affecting compost temperature and fermentation effect, and the purpose of composting is to improve aeration condition within piles, promote the reproduction of beneficial microorganism under high temperature, and accelerate the conversion of ferment materials, thereby achieving homogeneous mixing, consistent heating and coincident composting. Here, adopting compost turner machine to turn over the materials (turning once or twice per day during the fermentation process), control chicken manure compost temperature and supplement oxygen required by ferment.
• Normally, it takes about one week to finish composting and fermentation, after that, chicken manure would realize complete deodorization and play a role in sterilization and deinsectization at the same time. For better packaging and good market, people can proceed to granulating process with disc pan granulator so as to make granulated organic fertilizer,choosing the suitable granulator depending on raw materials quantity and requirement for production.

Successful Case:
In Vietnam, one of our customer – Mr. Nguyen has a poultry farm with over 20,000 chicken, producing a good deal of poultry dung each day. Before using Whirlston organic fertilizer machines to process these chicken manure, he was very upset because these manure without proper processing were stink to high heaven, heavily polluting the surrounding environment and the residents living. What’s worse, the smelly chicken manure would generate harmful bacteria that had a strong impact on breeding environment of poultry farm, leading to quite high sickness rate and death rate. Afterwards, Mr. Nguyen sought help from our website, and after receiving our solution and suggestion, he decided to use professional equipment – small-scale organic fertilizer plant to process chicken manure organic fertilizer. Since then, poultry farming environment has been greatly improved and foul smell has reduced dramatically. Above all, fertilizer made from chicken dung has high fertilizer efficiency, and is easy to absorb without burning the root and seedling, not only playing a very significant part in the increasing yield and revenue of crops, but also creating additional high income from organic fertilizer sales market. These fertilizers can increases the soil’s moisture-holding and nutrient-holding capacities, producing excellent soil for vegetables and crops to grow bigger and healthier, which makes them enjoy great popularity among fertilizer market.

   Comments1