How to Make a Dust Box for Chickens

Chickens naturally take dust baths as a way to get rid of external parasites. They throw themselves down in a dusty spot and roll around until they get dirt in all their nooks and crannies. Dust baths are very effective but even so, chickens can still suffer from lice and mites. You can soup up your chickens' dust baths by providing them with a box filled with pest repellent materials. Here's how to do it.

Go and get the biggest litter box you can find. 

This giant litter pan is 34.5" x 19.5" x 10". Two chickens could bathe in here at the same time. The depth is the most critical dimension. You want all your bathing materials to stay in the box when the chickens do their thing. (Ever watched a chicken dust bathe? They can go kinda crazy.) 

Adding the first layer of peat moss 

You can fill your dust box with any number of materials. Harvey Ussery recommends peat moss, dried and sifted clay, and/or small amounts of wood ash.  I used peat moss because I had some on hand plus some sand I had left over from another project. 

Food-grade DE. Do NOT use any other type of DE with your poultry. 

Now for the good stuff. You can add garden lime, food-grade diatomaceous earth (DE), or elemental sulfur powder to really sock it to those parasites. Remember to wear a good dust mask whenever you work with DE. It is really fine and you'll breathe it in and irritate your lungs. 

I should mention that Gail Damerow, author of Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, doesn't think you should use DE in dust boxes for parasite prevention. Chickens can be prone to respiratory problems and breathing in DE is not a good thing for anyone. Damerow thinks you should only use DE and other heavy-hitting anti-parasite products when there is an obvious infestation. Herbalist Susan Burek has also been outspoken about her opposition to DE in her articles in Backyard Poultry Magazine. Harvey Ussery, on the other hand, routinely uses a small amount of DE in his dust box. You'll have to decide where you stand on this issue. I do generally use DE as part of my dust box mix. 

I also mix a little DE in with my chickens' feed. Some people claim that feeding DE to poultry will serve as a natural dewormer. Gale Damerow has a negative opinion of that as well. She says that DE only works to kill worms, etc. when it is dry. Once it has made its way through the chicken's digestive tract, it is not dry and no longer has any of the microscopic cutting edges that serve to kill the bad guys. I still do it on the off chance that it will work!   

Peat, sand, and DE, ready to be mixed

The dust box should be placed where it will stay dry. 

If the mixture gets wet, it defeats the purpose. You should place it in a sheltered area or in your coop if you have room. 

That's it! Pretty simple for something that can really improve your chickens' quality of life. 

References: 

1.The Small-Scale Poultry Flock: An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers by Harvey Ussery
2. Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, 3rd Edition by Gail Damerow


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Why do our eggs taste so good? It's all in the feed.

Our family recently made a trip to the National Agriculture Hall of Fame. The highlight of the visit for me was the National Poultry Museum  located on the Hall of Fame grounds.

The National Poultry Museum was opened in 2009

I don't think the museum is worth going out of your way to visit, but if you are a poultry-fancier and happen to be in Bonner Springs, KS, it has some cool things to look at.

A Jamesway Mammoth Incubator from the 1920s

A collection of chicken catchers. At our house, we call these children.  :)
My 6 year old is the champion chicken catcher of the bunch.

One of the rooms is filled with paintings of many different poultry breeds. I was able to show the family some of the new birds we will have next year.

"See honey, they will look like this!"
We are adding pure-bred Ameraucanas to our flock next year for their blue eggs.

I wasn't surprised but I was definitely disappointed at the pro-Big Ag position the exhibits took. One display discussed the prevalence of battery cages in the US without mentioning the ethical concerns associated with the practice.

And then there was this little gem that made me roll my eyes:

Is the modern poultry industry progressive or regressive?  

Without a doubt, poultry feeds today are much more scientific. They have been formulated to give the exact amount of protein, fat, vitamins, and carbohydrates that a chicken needs to grow at a maximum rate. But does fast growth and pushing your hens to lay the maximum number of eggs mean you'll also get great taste?

We don't think so. If you want happy, healthy poultry and delicious eggs, your birds need green feeds. A customer once told me that she was surprised at how dark the yolks and how delicious our eggs are compared to what she had been buying at the grocery store.

An egg from one of our Ancona ducks. Look at that yolk! 

Our chickens do have access to a top-of-the-line natural chicken feed. They have NEVER been fed antibiotics and are given an Omega 3 supplement to enhance the nutritional value of their eggs. But that's not why they taste so good. The real difference between our eggs and those from the store is because our birds are happy chickens and ducks that eat grass and bugs, scratch in the dirt, loll in the sun, and have plenty of homegrown, organic green feed.

This bucket of rainbow chard will make for some very happy chickens, turkeys, and ducks

In addition to our poultry, our homestead also has an organic vegetable garden, orchard, and berries. Our birds benefit from the culled produce from our garden as well as from the crops we planted just for them.

Black oil sunflower seeds are a wonderful poultry treat.

Fresh food does matter! The better the chickens eat, the better the eggs taste. Period.