How much manure a flock produces, how to store and compost it, control flies and smell, find crop farmers who will buy it and use it safely on your own land.
Halaal Farms Ghana team4 October 2026 · 13 min read
A flock of 1,000 laying hens drops about 100 to 120 kg of fresh manure every day. Over a year that is around 40 tonnes, close to the weight of the feed those hens ate, because droppings are mostly water. It will either pile up beside your house, breeding flies and quarrels with neighbours, or it will leave your gate in sacks with money coming back the other way. Which of these happens depends on a few decisions about how you collect, dry and store it.
Knowing the quantity lets you size a storage shed, promise a buyer a realistic number of bags and put a figure in your budget. These are working estimates, and your own figures will shift with feed, water intake, bedding and how dry the manure is when you weigh it.
| Flock | What comes out | Rough quantity |
|---|---|---|
| 1 laying hen in a cage | Fresh droppings, about three-quarters water | 100 to 120 grams a day |
| 1,000 caged layers | Fresh droppings | 100 to 120 kg a day, about 40 tonnes a year |
| 1,000 caged layers | The same manure after air drying | Roughly a third of the fresh weight |
| 1,000 broilers, one cycle | Used litter (droppings plus bedding) | About 1 to 1.5 tonnes |
| 1,000 layers on deep litter | Used litter, cleaned out once or twice a year | Several tonnes at each clean-out |
To turn this into bags, do not assume a sack holds its printed weight. A feed sack filled with dry litter weighs far less than the 50 kg of feed it once carried. Fill five sacks the way you would for a customer, weigh them on a hanging scale and use the average.
As an example, suppose your sacks of dry broiler litter average 30 kg and a batch of 1,000 broilers gives 1.2 tonnes. That is 40 sacks per cycle. If your local farmers pay GH₵ 15 a sack (an example figure only), the batch brings GH₵ 600 from something you had to remove anyway. Put your own numbers into the poultry profit calculator as extra income, but never plan a flock that only makes sense because of manure sales.
Poultry manure is the richest of the common farm manures because birds pass urine and faeces together. The white cap on a dropping is uric acid, a concentrated form of nitrogen. Dry poultry litter commonly contains somewhere between 2 and 4 per cent nitrogen, with useful amounts of phosphorus and potassium, and layer manure also carries a lot of calcium from the limestone or oyster shell in the diet. The exact content varies widely from farm to farm.
A comparison helps when you talk to buyers. A tonne of dry litter at 3 per cent nitrogen holds about 30 kg of nitrogen, which is the same amount as four 50 kg bags of NPK 15-15-15. Only part of the manure's nitrogen, very roughly half, reaches the crop in the first season. The rest is released slowly, and the organic matter improves how the soil holds water, which no bag of chemical fertiliser does.
The same richness is the reason fresh manure damages plants. Uric acid breaks down quickly into ammonia, and fresh droppings are salty. Put against roots or seeds, they scorch them. Fresh manure may also carry Salmonella, E. coli, worm eggs and weed seeds from spilt grain. Drying reduces the burn. Proper composting deals with both the burn and most of the germs.
Nitrogen leaves a manure heap in two ways. It escapes into the air as ammonia when the heap is wet and warm, and it washes out in the brown liquid that runs from a heap left in the rain. A heap that has stood uncovered through one rainy season has lost much of what the farmer would be paying for, and the run-off carries nitrate and germs towards wells and streams.
Good storage is simple:
Much of the work is done inside the house. Litter that stays dry under the birds comes out light, easy to bag and nearly free of maggots, and our article on litter management explains how to keep it that way. In cage houses, droppings that fall into a dry, well-ventilated pit form a cone that crusts over and dries. Droppings that fall into a puddle from a leaking nipple become slurry. How the two systems differ is covered in our comparison of battery cages and deep litter.
Composting is controlled rotting with air. Microbes eat the manure, heat the heap to temperatures that kill most disease organisms, fly maggots and weed seeds, and leave a dark, stable material that will not burn plants. It asks for four things.
Compost microbes need roughly 25 to 30 parts carbon to one part nitrogen. Pure droppings have far too much nitrogen for that, so the surplus leaves as ammonia, which you smell and lose. Add dry, brown material: sawdust or shavings, rice husks, chopped maize stalks and cobs, groundnut shells, dry grass. As a starting point for pure cage droppings, mix one part manure with about two parts dry material by volume. Broiler litter already contains bedding and usually needs little or none.
The mix should feel like a cloth that has been wrung out. Squeeze a handful: it should hold together and wet your palm, with no more than a drop or two running out. Dry broiler litter almost always needs water sprinkled on as you build the heap. Wet cage droppings need more dry material instead.
A heap smaller than about one metre high and one metre wide loses heat faster than it makes it and never gets hot. Build it 1 to 1.5 metres high and as long as you have material. Do not trample it, because the microbes need air, and do not make it much higher, because the bottom will be squeezed airless and turn sour.
Within two to four days the centre should reach 55 to 65 degrees Celsius. You do not need a thermometer. Push a cutlass or iron rod into the middle, leave it five minutes and pull it out. If the metal is too hot to hold comfortably, the heap is working. When it cools, usually after a week or so, turn the heap so the outside goes to the middle, adding water if it has dried. Each turning brings a new burst of heat. After three to five turnings the heap stops reheating. Leave it to rest for a few more weeks.
The whole process usually takes eight to twelve weeks. Finished compost is dark and crumbly, smells of earth with no trace of ammonia, and you can no longer pick out droppings or shavings in it.
If the heap goes wrong: a strong ammonia smell means too little carbon, so mix in more dry material. A rotten-egg smell means it is too wet or packed too tight, so turn it and add dry material. A heap that stays cold is too dry, too small or lacking nitrogen.
If full composting is more work than you can manage, stacking dry litter under cover for two to three months is a useful second best. It will not heat as evenly as a turned heap, but ageing reduces ammonia and many germs, and aged litter is safer on crops than litter straight from the house.
House flies lay their eggs in moist manure, and in Ghana's warmth an egg can become a breeding adult in about a week. Fresh droppings are about three-quarters water, which suits maggots perfectly. Once manure dries to a crumbly state, flies cannot breed in it. So fly control is mostly moisture control, backed by a weekly routine that is shorter than the fly's life cycle.
Fly baits and traps help once the breeding places have been dealt with. Be careful with insecticide sprayed onto manure. It also kills the small beetles and mites that eat fly eggs, and flies become resistant quickly. Ask a vet or agro-chemical shop for a product meant for the purpose and follow the label.
Smell has the same root. Ammonia comes from wet litter, and the rotten smell comes from manure packed wet without air. Dry storage under a roof, enough carbon in the compost and a covered heap remove most of it. What remains is a matter of courtesy and timing. Move manure early in the morning, cover the load on the truck, and do not start a clean-out on the day your neighbour has a funeral or outdooring. In towns, the district assembly's environmental health officers deal with nuisance complaints, and larger farms may have environmental requirements to meet, so ask those offices what applies to you. Home flocks face this most sharply, as our guide to backyard poultry explains.
The steadiest buyers are vegetable growers. Cabbage, lettuce, pepper, tomato, okra, garden eggs and onions are all hungry crops grown on small plots that are cropped again and again, and many growers around the cities and in the irrigated vegetable areas depend on poultry manure. Other buyers include maize farmers, plantain and cocoa farmers, tree and flower nurseries, home gardeners who want a small bag, and some fish farmers who use manure to fertilise ponds.
Demand follows planting. In the south it rises before the major rains around March and April and again before the minor season in August and September. Dry-season vegetable growers under irrigation buy from about November. In the north, the peak comes before the single rainy season. Manure that is dry and under cover can wait for these peaks. A wet heap cannot.
A few habits make selling easier:
Some buyers offer to clean out the house themselves in exchange for the manure. That can suit a farmer short of labour, but work out what the manure is worth before you give it away, and read the next section before letting their crew in.
A manure buyer's truck, sacks, shovels and boots may have been on another poultry farm that morning. Manure movement is one of the ways disease travels between farms, so treat every collection as a biosecurity risk.
The risk runs the other way too. If a flock has died of, or been diagnosed with, a serious infectious disease, do not sell or move its litter until you have spoken to your vet or the district veterinary office. They will tell you how it should be composted or disposed of. More routine precautions are listed in our article on biosecurity for small farms.
If you grow maize, vegetables or plantain alongside your birds, your own land is your first customer.
How much. Common working rates are 4 to 10 tonnes of dry manure per hectare for maize, which is roughly 1.6 to 4 tonnes per acre. Vegetable beds take more, about 1 to 2 kg per square metre. Start at the lower end on land that has had manure before. For plantain, pepper or garden eggs planted in holes, mix one or two handfuls of well-aged manure into the soil of each hole so it does not sit against the roots. Your district agricultural extension officer can advise on rates for a particular crop and soil.
When. Spread raw or part-aged manure on empty land two to four weeks before planting and hoe or plough it in. Left on the surface in the sun, much of its nitrogen escapes as ammonia. Finished compost can go on closer to planting.
Food safety. Germs from raw manure can survive on soil and splash onto low-growing crops. A rule used in organic farming standards abroad is a gap of at least 120 days between raw manure and harvest for crops whose edible part touches the soil, and 90 days for others. For lettuce, cabbage, spring onions and anything else eaten uncooked, use only properly composted manure and never scatter manure over a standing crop.
Too much is a real fault. Excess nitrogen gives tall, soft maize that falls over and tomato plants that are all leaf. Salts scorch seedlings. Phosphorus builds up in soil that is manured heavily every season, and surplus nitrate washes down towards the groundwater that you and your birds drink. If you have more manure than your land needs, sell the rest.
The farms with a manure problem are usually those that thought about it only after the first clean-out. Before stocking, decide where the store will stand, who will take the manure and in which month, and how it will leave the farm without passing your youngest birds. A covered slab costs little compared with a house, and it turns a nuisance into a product you can sell.
If you are still deciding between broiler chicks and layer chicks, the manure pattern is part of the choice: broilers give a pile of dry litter every cycle, while layers give a daily stream that needs somewhere to go every week of the year. Halaal Farms gives free advice to farmers before and after an order, so if you would like to talk through house layout, clean-out timing or flock size, call 024 915 1503 or send the order form with your questions.
It is risky. Fresh droppings release ammonia and salts that scorch roots and seedlings, and they can carry Salmonella and other germs onto food crops. Spread fresh or part-dried manure only on empty land, work it into the soil and wait at least two to four weeks before planting. For vegetables, especially those eaten raw, use manure that has been properly composted or aged for several months.
A well-built heap with enough dry carbon material and the right moisture heats up within a few days and is usually ready in about eight to twelve weeks, including a few turnings and a resting period at the end. It is finished when it is dark and crumbly, smells like soil with no ammonia, and no longer heats up after turning. Heaps that are too dry or too small take much longer.
Flies breed in wet manure, and in warm weather an egg becomes an adult in about a week. Keep manure dry under cover, repair leaking drinkers, remove dead birds and broken eggs daily, and turn the outer layer of a compost heap into its hot centre every week. Covering a fresh heap with a tarpaulin or a layer of dry soil or old compost also stops flies laying eggs on it.
Both are good. Pure layer droppings from under cages are more concentrated when dry and contain extra calcium from the hens' feed, but they are wet and need drying or mixing with dry material. Broiler litter already contains shavings or rice husks, so it is drier, easier to bag and composts readily. Buyers usually prefer whichever is dry, free of rubbish and does not smell strongly of ammonia.
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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