I’ve posted before about
how
much land you need to pasture your chickens, but what if you wanted to
become totally chicken self-sufficient and grow your own feed
too? For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use Joel
Salatin’s feed recipes,
and will assume you want to keep buying the ingredients other than
grains and soybeans. (I’ve also included all of my math so you
can correct me if I’m wrong.)
Let’s start with laying
hens. How much corn, soybeans, and oats does a single bird eat
per year? (Keep in mind that these figures assume your hen is
getting no nutrition from pasture, so hopefully your actual feed usage
will be a bit lower.)
| Ingredient | Pounds/hen/day in summer |
Pounds/hen/day in winter (coldest areas) |
Total pounds/hen/year (assuming 120 day winter) |
| Corn | 0.12425 | 0.1988 | 54.29725 |
| Soybeans | 0.077 | 0.1232 | 33.649 |
| Oats | 0.02725 | 0.0436 | 11.90825 |
Now, let’s convert that
into land area. In the following table, bushels per acre will
depend on your climate and the quality of your land — I’ve used U.S.
figures from factory farms. What I haven’t factored in at all is
succession planting — you could potentially grow a winter grain then
soybeans in the same field during one year. So, if anything, I’m
overestimating the acreage you need to feed your flock.
| Ingredient | Pounds/bushel | Bushels/hen/year | Bushels/acre | Acres/hen/yr |
| Corn | 56 | 0.9696 | 150 | 0.00646 |
| Soybeans | 60 | 0.5608 | 40 | 0.01402 |
| Oats | 32 | 0.3721 | 63 | 0.00591 |
Based on my math, a
single hen would consume the harvest from 0.02639 acres of corn,
soybeans, and oats. Our current flock of eight hens and a rooster
would need just shy of a quarter of acre to feed them — not too bad!
How about our
broilers? Our
first batch of broilers in 2012 ate 11.9 pounds of feed apiece during
their three months of life:
| Ingredient | Total pounds/broiler |
Bushels/broiler | Acres/broiler |
| Corn | 6.188 | 0.1105 | 0.00074 |
| Soybeans | 3.451 | 0.0575 | 0.00144 |
| Oats | 1.309 | 0.0409 | 0.00065 |
So, our broilers needed
0.00283 acres apiece to produce their feed. Since we’re planning
on raising around 45 broilers this year, that comes to about an eighth
of an acre to feed the meat flock. (Keep in mind that my
heirloom broilers
are very different from Cornish Cross. You’d probably raise half
as many mainstream broilers to match the same amount of meat we get
from our Australorps, but would feed roughly the same amount or a
little less.)
That means our total
acreage to keep two people very well fed with chickens and eggs for a
year is:
| Land use |
Acres |
| Pasture | 0.1371 |
| Feed for 8 hens and a rooster | 0.23751 |
| Feed for 45 broilers | 0.12735 |
| Total | 0.50196 |
Giving two people all
the white meat, eggs, and bone broth they need from a quarter of an
acre apiece seems like a bargain! If you aren’t sick of math, you
might also like to read my
math on the total land area we use to grow the rest of our food. And please do let me
know if you check my numbers and they don’t come out straight.
Raising my first heritage broilers this year so I really appreciate this post! Growing grain for the chickens is probably a way off for me since I’m just growing corn for the first time this year. Have you raised cornish x broilers in the past and prefer the taste of heritage birds? Or is it getting away from hatcheries?
Dave — Taste is hard to be objective about — since we grow them ourselves, we think the heirlooms taste better, but who knows? 🙂 The real incentive is to be more self-sufficient — to breed birds that do well on our farm and that don’t have to be bought in every year.
Thank you so much for posting actual numbers–they are hard to find and rarely mentioned.
I was wondering about your crop yield numbers: are those for the weight of the whole corn/oat/soybean harvest, or just the part that the chickens can eat?
I’m using a less common (although high yielding) form of agriculture and so my yield numbers come out a bit different than most people’s.
thanks very much,
Paul
Paul — Unfortunately, my memory isn’t too great, and I wrote this post about a year ago. I seem to recall that I got information from USDA’s agricultural data, so it’s for very mainstream, industrial farming. I’m pretty sure the weights were for the whole seed. I hope that helps, even though it’s vague!
Hi Anna,
Thanks for your reply. I did my numbers and ended up with similar ones to you–about 1,000 sq ft per hen, although as little as 600 sq ft per hen for people who can get “advanced level” grow biointensive yields. I’ve put my calculator up for anyone who wants to use it:
http://thegroundview.com/?p=1584