When chicken manure goes to waste

I know that most of my readers have chickens at around the same scale I do --- two or two dozen birds to feed our families eggs and perhaps meat.  At this scale, chickens are an integral part of any permaculture system, mowing the "lawn", fertilizing the garden, and even eating bad bugs.  But what about the larger chicken operations that provide most of the developed world's chicken meat and eggs?  Do we harness the enormous fertility coming out of these factory farms for good or for evil?

Unfortunately, the answer is often the latter.  As with any concentrated animal feeding operation, industrial chicken facilities produce so much chicken poop that it quickly reaches the waste category.  The high phosphorus content that helps your plants develop fruits in the garden seeps into surrounding lakes and rivers and causes disastrous algal blooms.  Here in Virginia, the Chesapeake Bay is highly polluted by just such chicken farm runoff.

While I believe that the long term solution to this environmental catastrophe is to put our families' food production back into our own hands, there are solutions at the industrial scale.  Last week, we learned about two intriguing uses for chicken waste --- high quality compost and biochar.  Stay tuned for a post on each topic later in the week.