FREE-RANGE CHICKENS
(Page 7 of 9)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
First come kitchen leavings, stale baked goods, carrot peelings, outer cabbage leaves, and such, which are put in a shallow wooden tray and chopped small with a regular hand-held four-blade food chopper. The birds won't ingest pieces larger than a quarter inch around, and smaller than that is better still: Chickens' gullets can't handle larger material, so they either scratch the big chunks into their litter or carry it around, squawking and playing "keep away" with each other before they lose it. Winters, vegetable roughage is important in keeping birds from becoming crop-bound (a potentially fatal condition in which dry feed hardens in the storage pouches in the birds' necks). The fresh food is then in short supply, so I feed the chopped scraps in metal chick feeders—trays with covers containing chicken-headsized holes—so the birds won't waste any. In the summer, kitchen scraps get tossed on the ground in the henhouse dooryard, along with all the garden wastes. It's a good idea to feed this the same time each day to keep the birds coming home regularly. Dusk seems best.
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Now, should you buy or raise the rest of the supplementary food (something around a half ton of dry feed each year for a home flock)? First of all, commercial feed (chick starter for young birds, layer pellets for hens) is a complete ration that costs a little more than a dime a pound. At $10 per hundredweight, that comes to under $100 a year to buy what dry feed our flock eats. Right now, since I'm starting up a new homestead, time is short, and I find it easier to sell eggs and buy feed. I have raised it pure and all-organic in the past, though, and likely will again.
If you want to raise feed for a couple of dozen hens yourself, you should know that it takes at least an acre and a half-divided in thirds and planted in a three-year rotation schedule-just to grow the corn organically and without ruining your soil in a few years' time. Then there are the problems of finding the mineral supplements and grinding, mixing, and storing the feed. To start, you need a good barn to keep grain dry and free of mice and mildew. Then, unless you have the time and inclination to tend a cornfield with a tiller and garden cart, you'll need a full set of farm machinery. I'm not poor-mouthing, but I see little justification for investing megabucks in a tractor and implements (and an equipment shed, etc., etc.) for less than $100 worth of chicken feed a year. In a while, perhaps with more available time and free cash and a good excuse to buy the machinery (heck, a bad excuse will do), I'll surely get back to raising all our chicken feed. just saving a few dollars isn't what it's all about, is it?
Here's what I'd aim to grow or otherwise obtain, using layer mash formulas based on research published recently by the University of Maine at Orono and by the University of Maryland in the 1940's. Looks to me as though chickens haven't changed much in the last 40 years. A lot of the supplements are common gardening supplies: Fish meal and bonemeal are organic fertilizers, and ground limestone is a soil sweetener we all use in the Northeast to combat our acid (rain?) growing conditions.
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