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In agriculture, poultry litter or broiler litter is a mixture of poultry excreta, spilled feed, feathers, and material used as bedding in poultry operations. This term is also used to refer to unused bedding materials. Poultry litter is used in confinement buildings used for raising broilers, turkeys and other birds.
Chicken manure is the feces of chickens used as an organic fertilizer, especially for soil low in nitrogen. [1] Of all animal manures, it has the highest amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. [2] Chicken manure is sometimes pelletized for use as a fertilizer, and this product may have additional phosphorus, potassium or nitrogen added. [3]
Horses mainly eat grass and a few weeds, so horse manure can contain grass and weed seeds, as horses do not digest seeds as cattle do. Cattle manure is a good source of nitrogen as well as organic carbon. [3] Chicken litter, coming from a bird, is very concentrated in nitrogen and phosphate and is prized for both properties. [3] [4]
Liquid manure is a mixture of animal waste and organic matter used as an agricultural fertilizer, sometimes thinned with water. It can be aged in a slurry pit to concentrate it. Liquid manure was developed in the 20th-century [ 1 ] as an alternative to fermented manure.
Therefore, manure is required to be composted which will ideally kill any seeds or pathogens and reduce the ammonia content. [9] A large commercial compost operation. Chicken litter, which consists of chicken manure and bedding, is an organic fertilizer that has been proposed to be superior for conditioning soil for harvest to synthetic ...
The 2003 rule established "non-numerical best management practices" (BMPs) for CAFOs that apply both to the "production areas" (e.g. the animal confinement area and the manure storage area) and, for the first time ever, to the "land application area" (land to which manure and other animal waste is applied as fertilizer).
This had the undesirable side effect of turning the chicken manure from a valuable fertilizer that could be used profitably on local farms to an unwanted byproduct. This trend may be reversing itself due to higher disposal costs on the one hand and higher fertilizer prices on the other, making farm regions attractive once more.
The manure is usually stored in slurry form (slurry is a liquid mixture of urine and feces). During storage on farm, slurry emits methane and when manure is spread on fields it emits nitrous oxide and causes nitrogen pollution of land and water. Poultry manure from factory farms emits high levels of nitrous oxide and ammonia. [108]