I have had lots of people ask me questions about raising chickens. For us it is a very affordable way to get organic range fed eggs and chicken. I am definitely no expert, but my mom is. So, she has been kind enough to type up a ton of information about chickens. It is way too much information to put in one post, so I will break this up into several posts for you guys to enjoy.I will do my best to answer any questions that you guys may have, but I will probably have to defer to my mom. She knows more than I could ever hope to know about chickens. She does mention local stores in these posts, but I am sure that most of you will find similar stores throughout the country.
How do you feed your chickens?
We buy our feed from Tractor Supply because there are no animal products in it, but they are now only going to stock Purina. Supposedly, it will be the same product, but under a different name. There are a lot of ways to feed chickens. Some folks only feed as much as they will eat morning and night. We feed “free choice” This means that a feeder hangs in the chicken house all the time with food in it. They range in our orchard and sometimes in the yard during the day where they eat bugs and seeds. We throw Scratch Grains to them in the morning so the guineas will want to stay and eat bugs in our garden. They are getting to be much better at that now. This helps cut down on our feed bill. We throw all of our left overs and spent stuff from the garden to the birds to help offset cost of feed.
In Raleigh, we ordered a chicken forage mix from a company (you can Google/Swagbucks for it) and planted ¼ of an acre in flax, fava beans, clover and buckwheat. The chickens will eat that instead of the feed. If you have access to raw milk, the chickens love it. We also offer them oyster shell free choice. There are four basic commercial feeds for chickens…..layer pellets or mash, grower/finisher as chicks are growing, starter/grower for new chicks and something called scratch grains that has corn, wheat and sometimes barley. They love scratch grains and eat it like candy, but there are not the nutrients in it for optimal growth.
Now, we try to be as organic as possible. We buy some layer pellets, but try to force them to forage and eat our scraps. Our favorite way of feeding is to raise squash, sunflower seeds, flax seed, barley, buckwheat and spent items from the garden. They love it and it seems to work well, provided we have the whey, scratch grains and meat scraps.
The dilemma for organic farmers is that so much of the corn for animal feed is genetically modified. It takes a long time to get a farm working to the point that you can afford to plant non genetically modified corn and something to shell and crack it with. We’ve been working here for two years and hope to have that ready to go next year. A small backyard flock of chickens would almost have to rely on the genetically modified corn in the scratch grains.
For chickens part 1 – where do you get chickens, click here.
