Silly Rabbit and Chicken Question

[Oceanrose]

Ok, my rabbit area is 8X24 or about, a little wider in places. My cages are all hung with the tops 4' above the ground, and are covered with PVC roofing panels. The sides are 6' tall cedar, or else 12' tall privet trees.

I am thinking a couple hens could live in there really comfortably. I have room for a night coop/nest boxes on one side where there is an edge of the porch. The run isn't covered, except about 80% of it is cages (so fairly water proof).

My dumb question is: do the chickens eat the rabbit poop - or merely the spilled food/grains/hay? I do not have a deep bedding system under the cages, it is 3+ year old mulch on top of sand (Everything here is sand). I scrape out underneath the cages every 2-4 weeks or so. I don't mind cleaning up after chickens too, but I am curious as to whether they'll just destroy the rabbit manure or merely scratch it up looking for bugs. Do they help the odor some?

I am mainly thinking about it, because my compost heap is a failure, we simply have too many wild critters who pick through it. Yes, I would lock them up at night, but in reality, the entire setup is directly off of my back porch, and my bed is 15 feet away from it. It's also lit with a floodlight all night. Anything that touches them, the dogs or cats are going to hear. I am thinking that maybe it'd work to basically change to chicken composters underneath the rabbit cages.

We don't eat eggs, we're primarily vegan, we do cook with a few, and I have a neighbor who would love them. I am thinking 3 hens max, and large girls, better to till up the garden with in the winter time.

 

[Mickey328]

Rabbits and chickens get along very well. The chickens will sometimes eat a bit of the rabbit poo, if there's still some food value left in it. But it shouldn't be a big issue as long as they have plenty of food of their own. If you want them to really work the soil for you, turn the chickens loose on that compost pile...they'll scratch and turn it over and add their own fertilizer to it, LOL. During the summer, we have ours in a portable coop and move it around the yard so they are always on green grass. Once the garden area is all harvested in the fall, we set the coop over there and put a temporary fence (made of electrical conduit threaded through the wire and pounded into the ground) around it. They spend all winter churning it up. Come spring we move them off again, rake it over and plant.

If you wanted to you could make smaller compost boxes near the rabbitry area where the chickens could work it for you. You wouldn't get the big volume of a "pile" but it would work well, I think. We plan on raising a small (5 or 6) batch of meat chickens (LOL, no vegetarians here ) a couple of times a year and will house them in our rabbitry area. They won't do much in terms of turning compost because they'll only be out there about 6 weeks, but we'll put together a small A frame for shelter during the nights, and be able to clean their manure and the bunny berries every couple days and toss it in with our regular compost. The rest of the time we put the bunny berries directly onto the garden since it won't burn the plants.