compost chickens at Vermont Compost Co.
Harvey Ussery and his wife Ellen are modern homesteaders. Their excellent website is a treasure trove of eloquent writing on the new life of the land. They have numerous well written articles on food independence, composting, chickens, bees and cows, and occasional musings on the state of the world. Their website is clear and easy to navigate, not something we can say about every chicken enthusiast site out there!
There is excellent information on raising poultry, organized here, with sections on getting started, feeding, shelter, pasture, etc. We are particularly interested in his views on feeding poultry. In a recently posted article (previously published in Backyard Poultry magazine)
Harvey would like:
to suggest that a whole paradigm shift in the way we think about feeding is in order. We have become so inured to the thought that chicken feed is something we buy, it is difficult to imagine raising our chickens largely, or even completely, without purchased feeds
Does that sound familiar? Out of all of the research we have done he is the most forward thinking with regards to replacing-reducing-supplanting purchased feed. Harvey has been a long-time contributor to Backyard Poultry magazine, with many excellent and helpful how-to articles. Hopefully more of those will soon be available online.
In this article he details the work done by Karl Hammer of Vermont Compost Company (located in Montpelier).
Harvey describes how
Karl has made just such a paradigm shift, and his experience is instructive. As part of his composting operation, Karl raises 1200 layers… If you think his feed bills are astronomical indeed, you’re wrong. Karl doesn’t feed his layers any grain or purchased feed. Whatsoever.
Karl lets the layers range freely throughout the compost windrows, and they scratch and peck their way to a full stomach, without a bag of feed in sight. Now that’s an achievement!
For Sonoma County backyard chicken enthusiasts, it might be difficult to envision the applicability of Karl Hammer’s commercial compost system to your home life, but we think his example is instructive of what is possible. Obviously chickens can be very happy and well fed feeding solely on compost, such a scheme can certainly be emulated on a smaller scale in a backyard.
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