Litter from a healthy flock can feed your maize and vegetables, but only after it has been composted, cured and kept away from young roots.
Halaal Farms Ghana team6 May 2026 · 10 min read
Every keeper who has watched a maize field or a tomato bed take off after a bit of litter has learned the same lesson. The stuff is rich. The birds eat a ration with protein and energy in it, and a good share of what goes through them comes out again in the droppings and the bedding underneath. That is why farmers keep asking about it, and why so many of them put it on the ground too soon.
Fresh litter is strong in a way that works against young plants. It carries a great deal of ammonia and moisture, and while it breaks down it gives off heat. Dig it straight into a seedbed and the roots meet something that scorches them. The leaves go pale at the edges, the seedlings stall, and the grower blames the seed or the rain. The fault is almost always the litter that went in too early.
Fresh litter can also carry weed seed that came in with the feed sacks and the bedding, and it can carry germs from the flock. Composting does not make litter sterile, and nobody should promise a buyer that it does. What a properly worked heap does is break down most of that strength, dry the material out, and leave you something that smells of soil instead of the house.
Litter is the nitrogen side of the heap. On its own it is too wet and too strong for the micro-organisms that do the work, and they need something bulkier to feed on and to soak up the moisture. Those bulky materials are the dry carbon side. You want more of them than you have litter, and you want them clean.
Around Kasoa, the usual choices are these:
The balance is a matter of feel more than arithmetic. Start with more dry material than litter, and add dry material whenever the heap feels slack. Squeeze a handful from the middle. If water runs out between your fingers, the heap is too wet and needs dry material now. If it crumbles like dust and nothing warms up when you push your arm in, it needs litter and a little water.
Keep some things out altogether. Plastic and nylon sacks never break down in a heap, and they come back later as lumps in the crop bed. Cooking oil and scraps of cooked food draw flies and rats. Dead birds should not go in the heap either, so follow your vet's advice on disposal whenever a bird dies of something you cannot name.
Choose the site before you carry anything. Pick level ground that does not sit in the path of run-off after heavy rain. Keep the heap well away from the borehole, the well and any drain, and out of the wind line of the house so the smell does not blow across the birds. A spot the wheelbarrow can reach without crossing mud will save you a great deal of trouble over the months.
Build in layers: a bed of dry bulky material first, then a layer of litter, a light sprinkle of water, and another layer of dry material on top. Repeat until the heap stands about waist high. The water should only dampen the layers. You are aiming for a heap that feels like a squeezed sponge, never one that drips.
Try to build the heap in one push. A heap that grows slowly, with fresh litter tipped on top every week, rots unevenly. The top stays wet, the bottom turns to slush, and the middle never gets hot enough to finish the job. If the house produces litter steadily, keep a second heap ready and start it when the first one is full. That is how most small farms keep a rotation going without a mess.
Turning is the job most keepers skip, and it is also the cheapest quality control you have. Use a fork to move the outside of the heap into the middle and the middle out to the edge. Turn when the heap stops steaming, when the smell turns sharp, or when a layer has gone slimy. Do it before the afternoon rain rather than in the middle of it, because wet compost is heavy and hard to fork.
Each turn tells you something. Learn to read the heap with your nose and your hand:
Keep a simple note in the back of the batch book: the date you built the heap, the date of each turn, what you added and what you noticed. It costs nothing, and it tells you why one heap came out good and the next did not.
Finished compost is dark, crumbly and smells like the ground after rain. It no longer heats up when you turn it, and you cannot find a sharp smell anywhere in it. Do not decide by the calendar. The weather, the mix of materials and how often you turned the heap all change how long it takes, so test each heap before you spread it or sell it.
The simple test is the bag test. Fill a sack with a sample from the middle of the heap, tie it shut and leave it in the shade for a few days. Open it up. If it is warm, stinks or shows damp patches, it is not ready, so put it back and turn it. If it smells of earth and stays cool, you can go ahead.
Before you use it, sieve the compost or pick out the lumps, the plastic and any thick stems that have not broken down. Small feathers that have worked into the mix are fine. Clumps of feathers should come out, because they look bad in a bag and they take a long time to rot in the soil.
| What you find | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Hot in the middle, steaming | Working hard, possibly too dense | Turn it, and add dry material if it is also wet |
| Sharp ammonia smell | Short of dry carbon or air | Add sawdust or chopped stalks, then turn |
| Rotten egg smell | Airless and sour in places | Open it up, turn it thoroughly, add dry material |
| Slimy or dripping | Too wet | Add dry material and cover the heap from rain |
| Dry, dusty, no warmth | Too dry to work | Add litter and sprinkle water until it is damp |
| Dark, crumbly, earthy, cool | Close to ready | Run the bag test, then sieve |
Compost is a soil improver. It does not work like a bag of quick fertiliser, so do not expect the leaves to turn dark green in three days. It feeds the soil slowly, opens up heavy ground and holds water better through a dry spell. Those are real gains, but they show over a season rather than a week.
How you use it depends on the crop:
Ask how much to use, and do not take a figure off a post online. Start with a test strip on one bed beside an untreated bed, watch the crop through the season, and scale up only once you have seen the result. The Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) office in your district can advise on your soil and your crop, and that conversation is worth more than any rate you read.
Most failures come from a short list. Fresh litter goes from the house straight onto a seedbed, which is the big one. A heap is built in a low corner that floods, so the bottom turns to sludge and the goodness washes away. A heap that dries out in the harmattan stops working, and the keeper wonders why nothing is breaking down. Warm bags get sold because the buyer is waiting, and the buyer's crop pays for it. And sawdust from treated timber gets mixed in because it was free.
Make one rule for the whole farm: nothing from the house goes on a crop until it has been through the heap. Once that rule is written on the wall, the workers stop asking whether they can make an exception.
A heap is only as good as the house that feeds it. Litter that stays dry in the pens is far easier to compost than litter that has soaked up a leaking drinker for a week. Our guide on managing deep litter sets out the routine that keeps the floor dry. The one-acre biosecurity guide explains how to keep the heap on the clean side of the farm, so that it does not carry problems back into the pens.
Think of the heap as part of the flock's cycle rather than a separate job. Clear the house, build the heap, turn it, bag it, spread it, and then start the next batch clean. Farms that keep that cycle running are the ones that treat litter as a product from the first day. If you want to see what that looks like as a business, the guide to turning manure into income covers the selling side.
Not on a seedbed or anywhere near young plants. Fresh litter is hot, strong in ammonia and can carry weed seed. If you have no heap yet, build one first and use the finished compost.
It should be dark, crumbly, earthy and cool, with no sharp or rotten smell, and it should pass the bag test. Wear gloves and a mask when you sieve it in the dry months, and wash your hands before you eat.
It helps a great deal on poor soil, but it works slowly and does not replace a soil test or a proper fertiliser plan. Use it as one part of the plan and ask MoFA for the rest.
Yes, once the compost has finished, been sieved and passed the bag test. Mix it into the bed well before sowing, and keep it off the leaves and the young stems.
A heap needs a steady flock behind it, and the flock starts with the chicks. If you are still choosing numbers, our guide to flock size will help you match the birds to your yard and to the space you have for a heap. When you are ready to order, our broiler day-old chicks page and the current price list show what is on offer.
When you are ready, send the order form through our order page, or call 024 915 1503 and tell us the plan. An order starts with a message, not with money. Send the form or call 024 915 1503, and we will confirm the price, hatch date and delivery cost with you before you pay anything.
Written by the Halaal Farms Ghana team. We hatch and import day-old chicks at Opeikuma, Kasoa, and deliver to all 16 regions. This article is general guidance for farmers. For diagnosis and treatment of sick birds, speak to a vet or your district veterinary office.
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