Single-producer-scale preparation of warm-season grass for poultry bedding

View the project final report

Commodities

• Agronomic: grass (misc. perennial)
• Additional Plants: Warm Season Grass
• Animals: poultry
• Miscellaneous: poultry bedding

Practices

• Animal Production: animal protection and health, livestock breeding
• Education and Training: farmer to farmer

Producers of landscape-friendly, sustainably-produced warm season grass (WSG) crops face a
market climate with few well-developed, high-value uses for their crops. Poultry bedding markets,
where WSGs have performed well, offer a compelling opportunity; however, the supply chain for
this market involves complicated processing, handling, and transportation issues, which are
especially difficult for small producers to overcome.
This project utilizes existing, accessible, and affordable equipment to process WSG (specifically,
switchgrass) for poultry bedding, with the aim of simplifying processing and transportation logistics
to increase overall operation efficiency and economic returns.
In this project, we will demonstrate, characterize, and compare on-farm methods for producing and
delivering a "ready" poultry bedding product from switchgrass:
*Tub grinder bale grind (3 packaging variants)
a.Supersack –standardized unit packaging
b.Paper baler –densified, standardized unit packaging
c.Garbage truck –densified, large, single-load
packaging
*Hammer mill bale grind
*Forage harvester in-field grind (2 packaging variants)
a.Supersack –standardized unit packaging
b.Supersack –with FormPack higher-density packaging
method
*In-field custom grind
Our goals are to:
*Test the performance of various techniques to process, package, and deliver WSG to poultry
bedding, meeting market specifications of less than 1.25±0.25 inches
*Identify key advantages of each method (process in the field, eliminate baling, etc.)
*Share our findings with other WSG producers to increase the use of sustainably-managed warm
season grass for Northeastern poultry bedding markets
The product demand and crop availability are in place, but improved logistics are needed to help this
market opportunity reach its full potential.

If instead, the warm season grass could be chopped at the time of harvest, dust and crop litter would
remain on the field rather than accumulating at a central processing location, circumventing some of
the safety hazards otherwise presented. But even after processing, moving low-density chopped
bedding material to an end user is difficult for the farmer to do in a logistically and economically
efficient way. Strategies are needed to improve both processing and transportation logistics.
Specialized baling machinery is currently being developed and tested to accomplish in-field
chopping and densification of warm season grasses, but these high-tech solutions may be too
expensive for smaller-scale warm season grass producers. Lower-tech, lower-cost approaches are
needed for those producers to gain footholds in a promising market.

This project will utilize existing equipment that a small farmer would consider accessible and
affordable to process warm season grass for poultry bedding. We will use this work to identify
solutions that not only prioritize in-field chopping for the reasons outlined above, but which also
eliminate the need for baling and streamline the processing logistics. This will reduce the equipment,
time, and labor costs associated with the processing requirements for this market.