Author: Anna & Mark

If you’re considering ducks, The Resilient Gardener
by Carol Deppe contains an excellent counter-cultural explanation of
how to maintain ducks under permaculture conditions.  I
posted over on our homesteading blog a few weeks ago about Deppe’s take
on the pros and cons of ducks vs. chickens, as well as her information
on feeding ducks garden produce.  Here, I wanted to delve a little deeper into Deppe’s thoughts on duck feed, and, especially on pasturing ducks.



The first question I had
when I decided to try out ducklings was, “Can I just feed them the same
food I give my chickens?”  The answer is “Maybe.”  If you’re
keeping ducks in confinement, they need a special food high in niacin,
and ducklings should never be given medicated chick feed.  In
addition, Deppe suggests that ducklings need to eat moistened feed for
their first few weeks.  Despite these caveats, though, chances are you can
raise ducklings on chick starter feed as long as you choose the
unmedicated version.  If your ducklings are allowed to free range,
bugs will provide their niacin (or you can give them extra niacin in
their water or can provide brewer’s yeast as a nutritional
supplement).  And, as I learned, dry feed is perfectly acceptable
to baby ducks as long as they have plenty of water to drink and play in.



So how about pasture
food?  Deppe recommends sowing white clover in pasture rather than
grass if you want your ducks to do lots of grazing.  And even
though ducks don’t scratch like their land brethren, both types of fowl
agree that mulched spots are prime forage.  Deppe likes to keep six
to twelve inches of mulch under her trees, through which her ducks bill
in search of night crawlers, red worms, sowbugs, and slugs. 
Finally, she adds that windfall fruits can provide a good supplement to
ducks’ diets, especially if you plant mulberries.

I’ll be curious to see how our ducks differ from our chickens once the
former are all grown up.  At the moment, the ducklings have given
me absolutely no data on pasture preferences since they prefer to spend all of their time in the water.  Stay tuned for future details!

First of all, before I go
off into my typical poultry geekiness, those of you who don’t read our
other blog will probably want to check out cute duckling photos here and here.  Be warned, though: those posts are going to make you want ducks!

Okay, back to the real topic at hand — duckweed!  A throwaway line in Storey’s Guide to Raising Ducks mentioned that, in the wild, duckweed would be a duckling’s first food.  I was a bit dubious since I’d read that the plant makes good chicken feed, but once I tried it out, our hens turned up their noses at the greenery. 
However this time around, book learning was on the right track — when
I offered duckweed to our ducklings, they went nutty for the wild food.

Later, after I let the youngsters into a little pond, they quickly
consumed every speck of duckweed off the surface (while also going after
water bugs, I assume, to round out their diet).  I now see why
ducks are a permaculture poster child — our ducklings happily spent
entire days in the pond foraging, only eating storebought food in their
brooder once I shut them in for the night.

Of course, every
permaculture opportunity has to be carefully managed.  By their
third day in the pond, our ducklings were spending more time resting on
the bank because the pond food was pretty much gone.  Luckily,
there was enough duckweed off in one corner to allow me to do what I
should have done from the beginning — start another pond going to
allow for aquatic pasture rotation.

We had a little kiddie pool in the barn that we’d once used to soak
mushroom logs, so I filled the pool up with water and seeded it with
some duckweed, snails, and a quart of pond water (for microscopic
life).  Hopefully in a couple of weeks, there will be enough bounty
in the kiddie pool to give the ducklings a few foraging days (and to
give their current pond a rest).

We don’t have the
infrastructure in place right now, but I could see having at least four
small ponds for a handful of ducks, moving their home every week to give
them new aquatic grazing ground.  Ducks definitely seem like
they’re going to be keepers on our farm, so I suspect we’ll expand our
water features in the future — good thing we live in soggy ground!