SUSTAINABLE CHICKEN

One of our primary strategies for helping make your chicken flock more sustainable is allowing the chickens access to your backyard or farm. Assuming you have sufficient space (more on that shortly), this is a great strategy. Here’s what Robert Plamondon in Oregon has to say on chickens foraging for food from : http://www.plamondon.com/faq_feed.htm

More comments  below the quote.

Do I have to feed free-range chickens, or can they find their own feed?

Chickens can find their own feed, but each chicken needs a lot of room if this is going to work. Chickens can’t find feed that isn’t there, and the more chickens you have, the less feed there is to go around. You have to match the number chickens to the feed supply, or nature will do it for you through poor health and starvation. How it was done in the old days. A farmer of 100 years ago might have kept a dozen hens and a rooster through the winter, and allowed the hens to hatch a brood of chicks each in the spring, giving, say, 72 chicks plus the original 13 chickens, or 85 birds total. The old rooster would be sold after the chicks had hatched. The old hens and most of the young chickens would be sold in the fall, and one cockerel and twelve pullets would be kept through the lean months. By having 85 chickens during the fat months and only 13 during the winter, the amount of supplemental feed needed by the chickens would be minimized.The old ways always involved manlnutrition. A flock of 13 chickens might survive all winter on the grain spilled by a cow and a team of draft horses, plus some hay and whatever else they could find. This winter diet would be nutritionally poor (both vitamin- and protein-deficient) and the hens would lay no eggs, but they’d recover in early spring and the cycle would repeat.Malnutrition increase with the number of chickens. I’ve heard estimates that you can support 1-2 hens per acre with no supplemental feeding, though probably not during the winter. As you add chickens to the farm, they first exhaust the supply of high-calorie feeds such as seeds, then the supply of high-protein feeds such as bugs and clover. Finally, they use up the supply of high-vitamin feeds such as green grass. Except for the last stages, when all the green plants disappear, you can’t tell what stage your forage is in.

In the bad old days, when people didn’t feed their hens at all, much of the hen’s diet was provided as a side effect of poor sanitation. People threw their garbage out into the street or the barnyard. The cows and horses spilled grain. Manure was everywhere and was full of yummy maggots. Even with all the natural bounty provided by stone-age sanitation, the number of hens that could be supported without supplemental feeding was very limited. Flocks of over fifty hens were unusual before chicken feed was invented.

In practice, though, it always pays to provide a complete diet. The increased production always pays for the increased feed bill.

There are a few circumstances where the diet can be adjusted to reflect reliable forage ingredients, such as old-fashioned “range rations” which left out the vitamins that were provided in abundance by green feed. But enough dry days in a row browns off the grass and makes it unpalatable to the chickens, so this method has its risks. Also, many of the things hens eat are so tiny that we can’t see them — tiny seeds, tiny bugs, tiny worms. If we can’t see them, we can’t estimate how much the hens are finding, and we can’t know how much supplemental feed they need on a day-by-day basis.

Fortunately for the frugal farmer, hens prefer fresh, natural feeds to dry, processed chicken feed, and will eat natural feeds in preference to store-bought feed whenever they have the chance. This leads to a foolproof strategy:

Offer the chickens as much (balanced, high-quality) chicken feed as they want, and settle for whatever amount of foraging they discover on their own. This will maximize production and profitability. Sure, if you’re an expert and are always very careful, you can get some eggs out of a flock you don’t feed at all, without actually crippling your chickens through malnutrition, but you won’t get very many. It’s a mug’s game.

My experience at Golden Nectar Farm corroborates this. We had our chickens in a mobile coop that we would open during the day. The chickens would range about the farm, eating whatever suited their fancy. They had unlimited access to a balanced ration, all organic, purchased at our local feed store. When the chickens had ready access to the farm, they ate very little of the purchased rations. They ate bugs, seeds, grass, lots of worms, and they grew plump and happy. There’s very little more satisfying then watching a small flock of chickens roaming around the farm (or backyard) clucking, scratching and pecking. And of course the eggs are excellent, feed costs are very low, and the feed is as local and sustainable as you can make it.