Home to Roost Helping city folks raise chickens!

A raku pottery box that I made in pottery class

So chicken poop can be amazingly stinky! Why is that? Well, the basic chemistry is that there is a lot of ammonium in there. As you’ll recall (or not) from high school chem class, ammonium is NH₄ –four hydrogen atoms around a nitrogen atom. Through chemical processes not to be expounded upon here, but which you can read at your leisure (there will be a test later) here, that smelly poop is a great source of nitrogen for your garden and compost heap.

There is also the idea that chicken poop might be used as a biofuel through a technology called pyrolysis (from the Greek pyro “fire” and lysis “decomposition”). The resulting product is called biochar, and it consists of chicken droppings that have been cooked in an anaerobic environment (that is, without oxygen – sort of like the reduction environment needed to make really nice raku pottery – but the end results are not nearly as aesthetic). Cooking the poop in an anaerobic environment prevents release of carbon! et voila! We have a fixed-carbon fertilizer!

Now before you go out and raku fire your chicken poop, you might find this article to be informative about the biochar process.

And, there, I’ve just incorporated 4 of my favorite topics (chickens, chemistry, art, and linguistics) into one post!