Preserve an Endangered Species with Heritage Chickens

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Chicken Feed Doesn't Go for "Chicken Feed" Anymore

"Chicken feed" no longer describes a low price. I hark back to the tail end of the Great Depression when feed cost a penny a pound and Ralston-Purina and other mills vied for farmers' business (or their wives; presumably) by bagging it in 100-pound sacks of brightly printed muslin dress-making material. By the time I reached grade school, "She dresses in feed sacks" was a way to insult the country girls—no matter how fine and loving the hand-stitchery, smocking, and flowered embroidery on their little dresses.

To get 25 chicks off to a good start today, though, you'll need most of a nine-dollar, 50-lb bag of fine-milled starter mash—feed that is mildly medicated but essential for bought chicks that can import disease or succumb to diseases that your flock is immune to. Medicated mash prevents coccidi caused by the intestinal protozoan mentioned earlier, which is fatal to chicks once betrayed by bloody droppings. In my experience, hen-hatched chicks don't need medicated mash, but unless you collect and brood them, only about half will survive to maturity.

If you let chicks onto sand or gravelly soil or supply grit, they'll swallow the fine rock which, will stay in their gizzard to grind food ("scarce as hen's teeth" is a truism). After a month you can shift chicks from mash to pelleted feed. Grown birds spray mash-type ground feed around and waste much of it. High-protein broiler gels cost 18 ¢ to 20 ¢ a pound. You can raise broilers to 4 pounds live weight, 3 pounds dressed, for 3 pounds of feed per pound of dressed bird. (3 x 3 = 9; 9 x 20 ¢ = $1.80 per bird or 60 ¢ /lb.—about half the supermarket price, though you can often get wings and necks or leg quarters on sale for less...and will pay double the price for a prime, organically raised bird.)

But if you raise eating birds during the growing/harvest season and replace bought feed with kitchen and canning scraps, garden trimmings, home-raised grain, or native forage you can reduce the cash cost considerably. I routinely raise a dozen 4-pound broilers on 10 pounds of starter and perhaps 50 pounds of grain and pels, harvesting 36 pounds dressed weight for about $10 cash cost—between 25 ¢ and 30 ¢ a pound. The only added cost is time: at most, a quarter hour a day to gather feed or move a mobile pen. (See sister article: "Build a Hen-Powered Garden Tiller" on page 37.) And after every storm, when I go to the ocean beach to collect kelp to enrich the gardens, I'm sure to devote some of the day to feeding this full supplement to the poultry. They attack it with enthusiasm.

Eggs

Your own eggs will cost you from a dime or two to a couple of dollars a dozen, depending on price of feed and percentage of the flock that's setting eggs as opposed to tending chicks, molting, or otherwise eating but not laying.

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