Marin Chicken Coop

My good friend Nancy Wiens, PhD, one of the co-creators of the Center for Nature and Christian Spirituality here in Sonoma County, CA, alerted me to a great resource for small chicken coops made just south of here in Marin County, CA. Juan Carlos makes small coops that look like they’d be great for back yards, and are designed to accommodate 2 to 6 chickens.

I like the shaded and fenced area below for the chickens to contact the ground, and the many ways the coop opens up so you can get inside and add litter or grab eggs or tend to a chicken. I also really like how the oval latches on the front that hold the fencing together are made from the ventilation holes above. Details like that make my low-waste loving heart proud!

Here’s how to find Juan Carlos and the Marin Chicken Coops:  http://www.marinchickencoops.com

Harvey Ussery is writing a book

Honest, we’re not a paid front for Harvey Ussery and The Modern Homestead, we just love what he’s doing. And now, with all of his other writing, he has secured a book deal with Chelsea Green Publishing, one of the top publishers of sustainability and small farm related books. From a quick glance at my bookshelf, I have a dozen books from them, let’s see …. Edible Forest Gardens by Jacke and Toensmeier (big and good), Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier (excellent, highly recommended), Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman (excellent, a classic), well, you get the idea. That Harvey will be joining this illustrious crew, he should be very proud. And we’re eager for the book to be out so we can read, review, and learn the latest from this sustainable chicken pioneer.

Congratulations Harvey!

Free Range Chickens by woodleywonderworks

Harvey Ussery, one of our favorite writers on backyard, sustainable chicken raising, has started a new project, called The Home Feeding Project. He shares our goal to become independent of purchased feeds, and is leading this project to compile the best information out there about how to create, yes, more sustainable chicken flocks.

As we’ve mentioned several times on this site, Harvey has an excellent website call The Modern Homestead. You can find the specifics about the Home Feeding Project here. If you’d like to email Harvey with your ideas you can email him here: feeding@themodernhomestead.us, or, if you’re really old school, you can mail him a letter at POB 67, Hume, VA  22639. And hey, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to send him some info, please, mention it to us too in the comments, that would be much appreciated!

Here are the details he’d like for you to note when sending him ideas.

• Some ideas are so obvious and commonly employed (”Feed table scraps to the chickens”) there is no need to mention them. Your unique twist on such widespread strategies may be useful, however. (”I’ve made an arrangement with a local diner to take their food wastes.”)
• It is as easy for us to grow seed crops like corn and small grains as for farmers, though harvesting, threshing, and storing such crops are likely to be obstacles. Are there ways to make such options more practical?
• If you do advocate growing particular crops for home feeds, please specify type (e.g. single-head sunflowers with large seeds, or multi-headed types with smaller seeds) and/or varieties you have worked with.
• Remember to place your practices in context: species of fowl you are feeding, size of flock, management model, etc.
• If you have kept statistics that demonstrate the effectiveness of your practices, please include them.
• Some bright ideas that failed to work out in practice may be worth sharing as well.
• Remember to include your location, and (if you know) your climate (plant hardiness) zone.

I first read about this idea in Backyard Poultry magazine, and most of the details came from Harvey’s website.

Gorgeous photo is from  woodleywonderworks on Flickr.

The problem: 99.4% of all sustainability minded folks (SMF) in suburban settings or on small farms purchase feed for their chickens from the local feed store. The feed however is grown throughout the Midwest and Canada, aggregated, mixed and bagged somewhere else, and then shipped across the country to the feed store, where the SMFs must then drive and pick up the feed to deliver to their hungry chicks. As committed locavores, that just doesn’t seem right. For more on the full set of problems connected to purchased poultry feed, see this post.

Website intent: Present information and resources on how to satisfy the food needs for chickens locally. We will profile best practices from around the globe about how folks are currently supplanting store bought feed, and will share all of our research here. We are looking for more ideas and experiences on how to sustainably provide for chicken sustenance. If you have information on how to create a more sustainable backyard chicken culture, please share your solutions with us in the comments.

This site will also document Christopher Peck and Genevieve Taylor’s on-going experiments with sustainable chicken rearing at their developing sustainable green homestead: GreeningGumview.com, check us out!

Barred Rocks on grass, photo by Thomas Kriese of urbanchickens.net

As we begin this project on relocalizing the source of chicken nutrition, we thought it would be beneficial to post some of our assumptions. These are primarily assumptions we make about you, the people who raise chickens.

• a flock of 5 chickens would be the norm (this also appears to be the legal limit in most jurisdictions), though the techniques discussed here could scale up or down depending on circumstances.
• the enthusiast has sufficient yard and garden space to house chickens and allow them access to the outdoors (no confinement operations).
• the chicken enthusiast is handy and probably also an enterprising gardener.
• you’re not daunted by thinking about nutrition; conversations about protein, carbs, minerals don’t scare you, nor do the details of chicken food preferences make you squeamish (bugs, worms, scratching through poop, etc)
• you share our vision of small flocks of chickens in every backyard, eating grass and herbs and insects and food scraps, with no smell or required medications, and happy people enjoying super fresh, high-CLA, homegrown eggs.

We will likely discuss each of these posts in dedicated future posts, but that’s a good start for now!

Sonoma County Food Share is live!

Looking for an abundance of local veggies you might feed your chickens or yourself? The Sonoma County Harvest Share (SCHS) is now live. A brilliant idea whose time has come, the SCHS is a NING site that is easy to locate, register on, and use. If you haven’t used the NING software technology yet, it couldn’t be easier to set up, and is very easy for the casual user to use. 

From their description: Sonoma County Harvest Share links farmers & backyard gardeners with abundant produce to people who can use it. It’s free & simple to use. What could be better? Get on it and get sharing!

The BioPod turns kitchen wastes into tasty grubs for chickens

As you probably realize by now, I’m mildly obsessed with bugs. I have eaten grasshoppers several times, once in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a couple times in Santa Fe. Crunchy, high in protein, and easy to eat, they’re known as “prairie shrimp” for a reason. But a weird human’s occasional curiosity is a chicken’s bread and butter, or steak and eggs, so to speak. Insects are incredibly efficient at taking resources low on the food chain (poop, table scraps, roadkill carcasses, etc) and turning them into more insects. And insects are prime chicken food. High in digestible protein, live, local, and perfectly designed to satisfy a chicken’s scratch and peck mentality, insects would seem to be a crucial link in developing a sustainable feed system for backyard chickens. But how to do it efficiently? Ideally chickens can forage for insects on their own, when they’re allowed to free range with sufficient space. But that isn’t always enough.

What if there was a simple way to grow and harvest a high level of insect protein, a process that fits into your daily habits without too much extra effort? Well, turns out there is, check out the BioPod.

OK, checkit, this thing is incredibly cool. It’s a new twist on composting, vermiculture, and home grown and sustainable chicken food: a system for turning home kitchen wastes into grubs. It’s very similar to a worm composting system, but faster. You deposit your kitchen waste into their specially designed BioPod, and within 24-36 hours (assuming proper temperature range and other factors) the Black Soldier Fly (BSF) larvae have converted your leftover banana peels and rigatoni into compost and more larvae. The little grubs then crawl out of the BioPod into a collection chamber, which could go directly to your hungry chicks! According to the website:

A working BioPod™ can easily handle the daily food scraps produced by a large family – up to 5 lbs per day. It can even digest pet feces. For every 100 lbs of kitchen scraps you will get 5 lbs of friable compost, a few quarts of nutritious compost tea, and approx. 20 lbs of self-harvesting BioGrubs™ - which are the ultimate fish, herp, and bird food. [I love it when people post actual numbers!]

I don’t know about your family or household, but we easily produce 100 lbs of food scraps in a month, probably twice that in the summer harvest season. That’s 20 lbs of grubs for our chickens to eat each month, and, according to their dry weight calculations,  the grubs are about 40-42% protein. As you remember from this helpful Energy Farms post, soybeans have about 37-40% protein on a dry weight basis, so black soldier fly larvae could easily supplant soybeans in the chickens’ diet. I’d wager a 50 lb bag of organic layer mash that if you laid out a big plate of dried and crumbled soybeans and a big plate of wriggling BSF grubs, the chickens would eat the grubs first, and with relish.

Let’s do some calculations on how much food waste we’d need to convert into BSF larvae to supplant the soybeans in our purchased feeds. If we assume a backyard flock of 5 chickens, and also assume that those chickens will consume approximately 500 lbs of purchased feed in a year, and we assume that 25% of that purchased feed is soybeans, then our chickens would eat 125 lbs of soybeans in a year, assuming it all came from a feed bag. Since it looks like BSF larvae and soybeans have roughly the same protein content, that means we need to provide 125 lbs of larvae for our flock of 5 chickens. According the the BioPod folks each 100 lbs of table scraps yields approximately 20 lbs of BSF larvae. Doing a little fancy math, that comes out to 625 lbs of table scraps to provide enough protein for a flock of 5 chickens for a year. That’s slightly more than 50 lbs of table scraps in a month, a number that’s well within the production capacity of most suburban families. 

My conclusion and why I’m excited: your average suburban backyard chicken enthusiast can produce in their backyard all the protein their small flock requires, from a local and sustainable food source. To reduce any impediment to the excitement this discovery has created, the residential BioPod only costs around $220 delivered. That’s competitive with other backyard composters. 

MAJOR CAVEAT: I have not yet purchased and tried the BioPod, so I do not have first hand experience with this technology. I will have both in the next several months, and will report on what I learn then.

~ A Crucially Important Advisory to the Reader ~

Harvey Ussery's maggot breeding chambers for free protein

Harvey Ussery continues to innovate and add value for all sustainable chicken enthusiasts. The following article originally appeared in Backyard Poultry magazine and is now available online at his website www.TheModernHomestead.us. Some might find this post a little too “ripe” for their tastes, please remember that an open mind is the least expensive path to profitable change!

The article Protein from Thin Air: Breeding Fly Maggots for Poultry Feed is classic Harvey Ussery: practical, innovative, well written, and based on the author’s actual useful experience. He describes his practice of turning trapped beavers (from a neighbor) and roadkill into maggots that chickens love to eat. The carcasses are suspended in 5-gallon buckets within the chicken coop, nested between beds of leaves and litter. Flies find the roadkill carcasses, lay their eggs, and as the maggots mature they burrow downward and out the bottom of the suspended 5-gallon buckets (Harvey has drilled holes so they can escape). The chickens gobble the maggots as they fall. Easy, inexpensive, local and sustainable, it’s a beautiful system.

In the article Harvey discusses the various objections, from smell and odor to disease and handling varmints who might be attracted to the carcass. This strategy is probably only applicable to larger properties in our county, but is exactly the type of strategy I think we’ll need more of as we reduce the amount of purchased feed required for our chickens.

Low cost, bio-available protein packet

As I search and research sources for locally available sustainable chicken food, naturally my mind turns to bugs. Insects. High-density, bio-available protein packets that self-deliver themselves directly to the chickens. It doesn’t get any more local or sustainable than that! Providing protein is the biggest challenge for helping the sustainable chicken’s diet become more local. In the old days milk and various forms of dairy products were the primary protein staple for the farmyard chicken flock. I’m guessing most backyard sustainable chicken enthusiasts don’t have easy access to inexpensive surplus dairy, so we must look elsewhere, hence the quest for bugs. 

If the chickens are on rotation throughout your backyard or farm, they can self forage for bugs (as well as seeds and clover and herbs), reducing costs and as important, reducing labor in chicken care. But what if you have your chickens in a run or a coop? What if you don’t have sufficient or appropriate space to allow your chooks to have free run of your backyard? Can you induce the bugs to come to them? As you are undoubtably aware, if you have chickens, there will naturally be bugs flying about. If you are doing a good job with deep litter and sanitary conditions for your hens, you won’t have a problem with excessive numbers of flies breeding in the chicken coop & poop, so how do you attract extra insects to visit and become food for your chickens? Or perhaps said another way, how can we effortlessly convert insects into eggs?

Ranging about on the web, this post popped up first from “Chickens in Soup” http://www.cityfarmer.org/chicken84.html In URBAN AGRICULTURAL NOTES by City Farmer, Canada’s Office of Urban Agriculture

Flies which are attracted to the ammonia in chicken wastes are put to good use. They are captured in traps and fed to the hens. Some studies have shown that at least a quarter of a chicken’s diet can be flies, another half weeds and other plant wastes, and their egg laying will still continue to equal that of chickens raised entirely on commercial feed.

I’m not certain about the research alluded to here, but certainly self-harvested flies and other insects can provide a significant proportion of the sustainable chicken’s diet. 

Chris Morris of IntoAfrica with his fly trap

I can imagine some simple devices for capturing flies, but who has time to think when a quick Google search can reveal someone else’s careful thought and years of experience in .37 seconds? Chris Morris from IntoAfrica recently posted his fly trap and experience with them. I love solutions that come from folks working in Africa, they’re are always elegant, effective, and extremely inexpensive. It’s essentially a couple of plastic water bottles stung together, nice! Chickens love flies. And I love the dance they do as they are tracking and trying to catch a fly.

You can develop your own technology, there are many examples of fly catchers on the internet, it looks fairly simple to create your own and modify it to facilitate easy harvest of flies to feed to your chickens. Most seem to be focused solely on flies, but I would be concerned if too many other, beneficial insects got caught in such a trap. Try it and monitor for what you’re getting. And let us know in the comments about your experience!

Enticing flies and other insects to become food for your backyard chickens is a seasonal affair, spring and summer see many more insects than fall and winter. So this is a supplemental strategy at best. I will be profiling other low-cost, homegrown protein strategies in posts to come.