Chickening out
Costs fertilize litter demand, but farmers don't see green
Costs fertilize litter demand, but farmers don't see green

By Adam Wilmoth

Published: June 8, 2007

The demand for chicken litter as agricultural fertilizer has soared in recent months, largely fueled by higher natural gas costs and increased ethanol production.

But chicken farmers like Al and Bev Saunders aren't throwing any parties over the news.

"There's a bigger demand and people are willing to pay more, but I haven't seen a huge price coming back to the farmers,” Bev Saunders said. "The increased prices are being absorbed by transportation costs. Much of that is going to pay for higher diesel prices.”

The Saunders raise nearly 100,000 chickens per flock in five to six flocks per year on their farm near Colcord in Delaware County.

The exercise generates a substantial amount of litter, but rising demand isn't enough to entice the farmers to sell their chicken waste.

"We will use ours to fertilize our own 540-acre cattle farm,” said Bev Saunders, who also is manager of Poultry Partners, a group of local poultry producers. "I'd like to be able to sell the litter and pay for the bedding, but I also need the fertilizer. Using our own saves me the cost of commercial fertilizer, and we get a better product.”

Chicken coups use beddings of sawdust, wood chips, rice hulls or other materials to absorb the chicken droppings.

The cost of the bedding material has soared far faster than the farmers' litter sales prices. The result has eaten even further into the farmers' profits.

Chicken farmers generally clean out their coups annually, although many are waiting as long as they can this year because of the higher cost of litter bedding.

Bedding costs have soared to about $1,700 per poultry house, up from about $1,000 per house a year ago, said Sherry Harren, manager at Arkansas-based Best Management Practices Inc.

The group is a nonprofit organization established by five Arkansas poultry companies as a go-between for chicken farmers and buyers of various chicken products, including litter.

Besides the soaring price of commercial nitrogen, Harren also attributes the increased demand for chicken litter as fertilizer to the industry's recent effort to educate farmers about what it sees as the benefits of using natural fertilizer.

Commercial fertilizers generally are manufactured by stripping nitrogen out of natural gas or other fossil fuels.

Harren said chicken litter is superior to commercial fertilizer because the natural product is less water soluble, and because it contains organic material from the bedding that helps make soil more fertile.

"The nutrients in chicken litter also are released into the soil more slowly and more evenly than with commercial products,” she said.

But natural fertilizer also includes its own challenges.

Tony Robison, who owns Green Acres Fertilizer in Wetumka, said the volume of chicken litter is even more of a factor when transportation costs are climbing as they have been for several years.

Chicken litter also is closely regulated, and it must be distributed by a licensed professional.

Green Acres sells and distributes both natural and commercial fertilizer. Increased chicken litter sales have come far short in offsetting the company's reduced sales of commercial product, Robison said.

It's unclear exactly why the cost of commercially produced nitrogen has soared in recent months. Some industry observers attribute the change to much higher natural gas prices.

Others saw there must be additional factors as well. Robison blames at least part of the price increase on increased ethanol production.

"There's a big push for corn to grow and be converted into ethanol,” he said. "With all this word last fall to plant more corn, nitrogen prices started to grow like crazy.”