Design, Fabrication And Testing Of A Hand Operated Poultry Deep Litter Waste Removal Machine

ABSTRACT

 The manually operated poultry litter removal machine was fabricated to address the challenges associated with the local method of poultry litter removal in a deep litter system of poultry housing/management applicable to both small and medium scale poultry production farms. The machine was put to test for three different bedding materials (sawdust, wood shavings and rice hulls) conditioned at three different moisture contents 30%, 25% and 28% as that of the poultry dropping plus the litter materials. The machine productivity, removal efficiency, power and cost criterion were investigated to evaluate the machine performance. The results obtained from the physical properties test conducted (moisture content and bulk densities) of the litter materials used showed that sawdust retains the highest moisture and bulk density, followed by wood shaving, with rice hull having the least. Also, there is a significant difference between the machine packing method and the local packing method (using shovel and broom), thus the average litter removal efficiency of the machine of 78% was achieved at the above stated moisture contents,