Chicken feed: Beyond the basics

When it comes right down to it, the success of a permaculture chicken flock is based on food.  Do you just go out and buy 50 pound bags of milled grain from the feed store, or do you try to make homegrown feeds nourish the flock 10%, 50%, or 100% of the time?

Harvery Ussery's The Small-Scale Poultry Flock includes far more information on feed than I can even tantilize you with in a short post.  However, here are some questions to get you started.

Do your chickens get all three food groups every day?  Ussery suggests that chickens need three main types of food: high vitamin green plants; high nutrient seeds and fruits; and animals (whether that's bugs or beef liver.)

Do you ask your chickens to forage or do you let them act like couch potatoes?  I've talked about several options for enticing your chickens out of the coop, including feeding a daily ration rather than free choice feeding and experimenting with lowering feeding rates until production suffers (then raising the rates to just above this critical window.)  Ussery adds other ways to stretch your feed dollars, such as culling nonproductive birds, stacking grazers with chickens, and buying only quality feed so your chickens waste less.

Speaking of storebought feed, is yours fresh?  For best nutrition (and least picky eating), the kind of feed you buy pre-milled in 50 pound bags should be fed within the first two weeks after the grain was ground, and definitely no later than 45 days after milling.  Older feed actually suppresses your chickens' appetitites --- it just doesn't taste good.  Feed companies have to put the milling date on the tags of their bags of feed, but the companies tend to hide that data quite carefully, so you may need to call up the manufacturer and ask which number is the date and how to interpret their code.

Do you feed your chickens weeds?  If you have a garden as well as a flock of chickens, this is one of the easiest ways (beyond feeding chicken scraps) to nourish your flock for free.  True, all of the weeds from your garden are going to fit into the "green plant" food group, but that's the category that's most often missing from overgrazed runs.  Ussery notes that his flock especially enjoys prickly lettuce, purslane, dandelions, lamb's quarter, yellow dock, and chickweed.

Can you set aside at least one garden bed to grow seeds for your chickens?  I put this tip further down the list because if you're not growing all of your own vegetables, you probably don't want to "waste" that space growing grains for your birds.  But if you've got room, some of the easiest chicken-friendly grains to grow at home include corn, sunflowers, sorghum (Ussery says his flock prefers the ornamental variety called broomcorn), and amaranth.  Most of these grains can be cut stalk and all and strung up on rat-proof lines under the eaves of your chicken coop to dry and store until winter.

How about food from the wild?  Ussery gets into some experimental territory here, running white oak acorns through his grinder to feed the flock.  He cracks wild hickories and black walnuts by hand for his chickens and also suggests (but hasn't himself tried) hazelnuts, chesnuts, and mulberries.  (Our chickens turned up their noses at cracked chestnuts, but yours might be less picky.)

Where can you get cheap, high quality animal feed?  Remember the last food group --- animals?  That's tougher to find for your flock, but Ussery has a few suggestions.  He grows black soldier fly larvae and compost worms and also feeds the flock skim milk and whey; cracked or filthy eggs; offal, liver, and blood from slaughtering; and roadkill opened with a hatchet.  I know some of you will think these options are just plain gross, but chickens are omnivores, and especially in the winter when wild bugs are scarce, they get a real hankering for meat. 

By the way, if you don't want to rush out and buy Ussery's book (although I think you should), you can find a lot of fascinating tidbits on his website, which is also the source of the photos in this post.