Pine Shavings or Peat Moss in the Brooder with Jeff Mattocks
Jeff Mattocks with Ferrell is seen as an expert in poultry in many areas, Find out what bedding he prefers in brooders and why.
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Carey: 0:00
Hi, and welcome to the Poultry Nerds Podcast. I'm Carey Blackmon, and I'm here with my co host for the show, Jennifer Bryant. And we're here to help you figure out how to raise the healthiest, happiest and highest quality birds possible.
Monica: 0:16
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0:37
Mhm.
Carey: 0:45
So in your book, the, I've got the fifth edition in the very beginning of it, you talk about air quality. Yes, sir. Can you elaborate on that? Like how does somebody check it? What are they looking for? What levels? of what should they be searching for in the air quality for their chickens? So the
Jeff Mattocks: 1:07
simple answer is if it stinks, it's bad. So what are you checking for? Look, if you walk into your chicken coop and you can't stand to be in there for more than 10 minutes to do your chores and leave, your chickens don't want to be in there either. They're not enjoying their life. So, statistically what we know is that the human nose cannot detect ammonia smell until you hit 25 parts per million, right? And we know through years and years of research and study and observation, That a chicken's respiratory tract starts to deteriorate, have scar tissue and not function efficiently at anything above 10 parts per minute. So the bottom line is by the time a human nose can detect this, we're already at two and a half times the tolerance level of a chicken. And if people sit back and think about what is the most important thing to sustaining life, it's. oxygen or air quality. You actually have to have air before you have to worry about food and water. So, I always, in, in every presentation I ever give or in any situation, when somebody lets me say it. The three key factors to any creature are air, water, and then feed. And it's always in that order, right? So if the air quality is bad, they're not going to drink enough. If they don't drink enough, they're not going to eat enough. So air is everything. In my opinion.
Carey: 2:48
All right. And we're going to talk about food and water in a little bit. Cause what I'm going to do is. As I read the book for, I think the third time I read it, I started taking notes on things that questions that I had and things that had I ever got the chance to sit down with you, I wanted to talk about. So we're going to go through it. Pretty much in order. The first part of the book, also you talk about brooder bedding and that your favorite was peat moss and you've done some comparisons I've heard you talk about before with peat moss and shavings. And other different things. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Jeff Mattocks: 3:31
By accident, actually, if you want the background story on peat moss, I had a bale here when we had chickens in our backyard. And every day, when, it was chore time, you go out and you're looking around, and there was this one black bantam hen. Who was missing and I was like, I couldn't find any feathers. I couldn't find any dead bodies. There was no nothing, right? So it was really puzzling me. And I'd look around, but every day she would be missing from somewhere around lunchtime till chore time in the evening, four or five o'clock. So sitting beside the chicken coop outside where she wasn't supposed to be was a bale of peat moss. And it had a small enough opening to reach in there with a scoop and get some out. And one day I looked in there because this bale of peat moss that was 80 percent full when we put it there was now only 30 percent full. Looked down inside the bag and there she was she had found and discovered the bale of peat moss and She was buried all the way to her waddles in peat moss So I learned two things one the chicken really liked the peat moss and that began that adventure So then we experimented with using peat moss as brooder bedding, right? And we found the same thing the chicks loved it, right? They way preferred peat moss over anything else Just in that, and we compared it to pine shavings, large flake, small flake, medium flake, whatever. But, we Cornish cross chickens, which are stupid, were already expressing chicken ness by dust bathing in it, in that peat moss, where they're not doing that in pine shavings, right? They're not doing that in any other kind of bedding. They're not, digging in, fluffing themselves, having a good time, doing their dust bath. What we also noticed was we didn't have to add anywhere close to the same amount to control that ammonia smell or to control the smell period, right? It always smelled like peat moss, you know. And we were able to go all the way through brooding 50 chicks. for a field trial on one bale of peat moss, one 3. 4 cubic foot, whatever they sell at the local, hardware store. So then curiosity got us because everybody was, complaining about peat moss and dusty and cost and everything else. So we did a side by side field trial, brooding trial, and we did two groups of birds, exact same size coop, exact same room, exact same Everything, so that hundred chickens showed up and we split them evenly 50 50 on day one. One side was pine shavings, the other side was peat moss. Yeah, we brooded the entire four week period on peat moss. And the same bale. The same bale. Okay. Alright. Now this was an 8 foot by 8 foot brooder. Okay, just to give you a space, 60 square foot. We used one bale of peat moss. And on the other side, exactly the same, 8 foot by 8 foot. For the other chicks, we went through five and a half bales of pine shavings to manage the odor control. Alright, they're in the exact same room, they're side by side, split brooder. Okay, exact same size, exact same height, exact same brooder, heating lamp. Everything was exactly the same. I couldn't have duplicated it any better if I tried.
Carey: 7:13
For me, in Alabama, peat moss is about$25 a bale. And it has gone up a lot in the last few years. A bundle of pine shavings At my local box store is like$7.50 ish, a bale, but if you compare one$25 bale to the six bales that you're going to need to get the five and a half, just round it down
Jeff Mattocks: 7:46
and
Carey: 7:46
call it five.
Jeff Mattocks: 7:47
Even at that you're at$37. 50.
Carey: 7:50
Yeah.
Jeff Mattocks: 7:51
So, when you're done brooding. When you clean the brewer out, if you are using pine shavings, you need to take it to the compost pile and let it finish.
Carey: 8:01
Yeah, you're gonna have to
Jeff Mattocks: 8:02
throw it away or let it finish composting or something. When you finish with peat mos, you can go right to the garden, right to the flower bed, wherever you want to use it. You can spread it on your yard and it disappears, and it's more beneficial to whatever is next. I don't care if you bag it up, box it up, and sell it to your neighbors, right? But you have something of much higher value for the next, after, for the after, for the next step on, on that video.
Carey: 8:32
Essentially, using peat moss, which is better for controlling bacteria and a whole lot of other stuff, and it gets chickens to doing chicken stuff faster.
Jeff Mattocks: 8:43
We didn't even talk about this. The peat moss is naturally, right out of the, right out of the peat bogs, is somewhere around 4, 4 and a half percent, 4, 4 to 4. 5 pH. And, what's really mind boggling, considering where it comes from, It is sterile. So further research as I continued down this pathway with the peat moss and, I stumbled upon some other information. Peat moss is actually, if you're in the woods, you have a major gash or a wound, peat moss is a natural bandage, right? You can rinse off the wound, pack it, wrap it with peat moss. And you've got a sterile bandage at this point. It's highly absorbent. Right. So with shavings you got a place to grow bacteria, right? You know the coccidiosis the bacteria and all that other stuff does not want to grow in that peat moss because it's naturally sterile It wants to go back to that low pH just because of its decaying organic matter It wants to hold it'll continue to do that, you know You do not have to go in and stir it and rake it and fiddle with it nearly as much as you do with pine shavings or other types of bedding, right? It stays loose and friable for the most part. Unless you really screw up peat moss, because the chickens are constantly digging in it and they're always dust bathing in it. They're stirring it up for you. Yeah, the only. Complaint that I really get is from the chicken owners is all the dust, right? And people have heard it before. Jennifer Bryant said the same thing. I had dust everywhere, right? The cobwebs were black, the everything was black. And that is a truthful statement. It is, right? And people worry about it. Is it going to be a respiratory hazard or a respiratory irritant or whatever? I have never, ever seen that be. So for science,
Carey: 10:48
for science, I recently made the dive. I ordered a hundred, a hundred corners cross. And instead of, getting the shavings habit, I went for peat moss. And I think I put about three inches worth in my brooder, which is probably too much, way too much. I probably could have gotten away with two inches, inch and a half inch and a half is usually enough. So, I overkill, but I packed this brooder full of chicks and in one of them, I have a automatic watering cups in my brooder and one of the cups busted and about two gallons of water leaked out inside of it. The only way I knew it is because I saw water dripping out the bottom of the brooder, because when I opened it to look in there, the dirt's dry, which tells me it's doing its job. Fixed the problem and no longer had that issue. And I was able to not have any issues with my chicks had I been using pine shavings and two gallons of water escape as young as those chicks were, that'd probably be dead and that'd probably got too cold.
Jeff Mattocks: 12:14
And it wouldn't have worked out for him, so Pine shavings do not have the same absorbency quality. If you want to prove it to yourself, get yourself a cup, or a pint jar, or whatever you want, of pine shavings and peat moss. And start adding measured amounts of water. And you'll quickly see which one can, has a higher holding capacity for moisture, pine shavings or peat moss.
Carey: 12:41
Yeah. And so with these Cornish, I had them in the brooder for three weeks. And normally when I'm brooding a hundred chickens inside my barn, even with my 20 inch fan pulling air out, it gets rough quick. Because you take a hundred chicks. Couple hundred quail that live in the barn, whatever chickens that I've got, that's not quite old enough in my grow out over here to go outside because I raise chickens year round. I had probably a couple hundred quail, 20 chickens that were four to six weeks old, but I was still seeing 20 degrees outside. So it wasn't time to put them out. I needed them to get a couple more weeks. I brought these hundred broilers in there. It didn't stink. The ammonia never hit, obviously it never hit the 25 parts per million because I didn't smell it. You shouldn't. And the couple times that I did go in there and smell the manure, I kick my fan on, and in about a minute it was back to smelling just peachy. There's definitely a lot of truth in that. I'm, I've been learning a lot over the past year, and I'm seeing that everybody talks about the money, I'm. The peat moss costs 25 bucks, shavings cost 7. 50, same way with feed. Oh, I can get feed for$15 a bag. You can, but by the time you feed them twice the amount of feed, cause that's what they're going to eat at least. And by the time you add stuff to it to get it to the nutrition level, you could have spent$35 on a bag of food. Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they are released. And they're released every week. Feel free to email us at poultrynerds at gmail. com to share your thoughts about the show. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning, and keep it egg citing. This is Carey signing off from Poultry Nerds. Feathers up, everyone.
