Avian Aqua Miser: Automatic, poop-free chicken waterers

Forest pasture carrying capacity

Hybrid cockerelOur forest pasture is abnormally quiet at the moment.  Mama hen is brooding four eggs that I'm 99% sure are unfertilized, and her chick likes to hang out in the coop with her even though he's mostly grown. 

Our kitchen scraps are quite voluminous at this time of year, as I cut up garden veggies to go in the freezer and discard tops and bug-bitten areas.  I toss all of the scraps into the pasture every morning, then bring in a wheelbarrow load of garden weeds in the afternoon, feeding our two pastured chickens no storebought food.  They certainly don't seem hungry --- half of the kitchen scraps are still lying around, and our cockerel rarely even comes out to greet me when I bring him treats.
Compost piles in the forest pasture
My goal is to have our flock eventually whittled down to a level where we're feeding them only our scraps and homegrown grains/worms/black soldier flies.  It looks like at this time of year, we could probably raise about four chickens on our scraps alone (as long as they had enough room to catch bugs and add protein to their diet.)  Once we get a spare moment, we'll add some nest boxes to the coop and transfer two or three of our laying hens into the pasture to clean up the tomato and peach bits currently going to waste on the compost pile.

Our homemade chicken waterer makes the forest pasture entirely work-free.  We fill up the five gallon bucket waterer and forget about it for weeks at a time.


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