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Trash as chicken feed

Trash as chicken feed

March 4, 2010 Posts 4 Comments
Vermont compost company raises chickens on food scraps

The most intriguing
chicken-raising operation I’ve ever read about entails running chickens
free range through a compost facility.  Vermont Compost Company
raises 1,200 laying hens, feeding them no feed other than the food
scraps and the insects that naturally grow in their mounds of
compost.  The roving poultry spend their days turning the compost
and laying eggs — isn’t that the perfect chicken life?



Although we probably
don’t want to move to an industrial-scale compost facility, many urban
chicken-keepers use this idea on a much smaller scale to supplement
their chicken feed.  Some restaurants or grocery stores are
willing to keep a bin of discarded food as long as you promise to pick
it up every day or two, and the scraps are often enough to provide all
the feed your chickens need.  We live too far from anywhere to put
this idea into practice, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has
turned trash into chicken feed.



This post is the last in
our current series on homemade chicken
feed. 
I hope that you’ve enjoyed seeing the cornucopia of options, and I’ll
be sure to keep you updated as our experiments progress over the
year.  Meanwhile, check out our homemade chicken
waterer, great for
use in any chicken coop or tractor.

This post is part of our Homemade Chicken Feed series. 
Read all of the entries:

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About The Author

Anna & Mark

Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton are a pair of back-to-the-landers who have been homesteading for over a decade.

Latest Comments

  1. Darren (Green Change) March 4, 2010

    We have to keep our chickens penned much of the time due to predators and unfenced vegetable gardens. We let them out when we’re in the garden, but not when we’re at work during the week.

    We’ve essentially turned their run (a generous 50 m2 for 7 chickens and 2 ducks) into our own little composting facility. Grass clippings, kitchen scraps, weeds, garden waste, raked leaves, etc are all dumped in there in a big pile. The chickens sort through it and eat stuff, and I occasionally turn it over with a fork to mix and aerate it.

    It works great – gives the chickens something to do, supplements their feed, incorporates their manure into the compost, and provides me with large quantities of lovely black compost for the garden for relatively little effort. It also stops their pen from turning into the smelly lunar landscape that so many backyard chickens live on.

    It’s not exactly on the scale you’re talking about, but it’s a lovely symbiotic arrangement.

    Reply
  2. anna March 4, 2010

    That’s actually exactly what I thought about when I read about the composting place with chickens. We just don’t seem to have enough waste to do that (or maybe we have too many chickens for the two of us?) How many chickens do you have and how many people are in your household? What percent of their food do you think they get from the composting operation?

    Reply
  3. Lena Green March 26, 2012

    So if I feed no actual chicken food but all the veggies and bred they want, my hens will get enough of every thing to keep laying to their best? I am able to get all the veggies and bred I want for free. Please let me know.,
    Thanks

    Reply
  4. anna March 27, 2012

    Lena — Veggies and bread sounds like it would be too low in protein to keep your flock entirely healthy. That said, if you use some of the free food to grow worms and black soldier fly larvae, you’d have very happy chickens! I suspect that a lot of what the chickens are eating in the compost facility here are the insects attracted to the composting food scraps, not necessarily the food scraps themselves.

    Reply

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