After harvesting the sunflowers and hanging them up to dry for a couple of weeks, I decided to split the crop with our chickens.  I brushed the seeds out of the biggest sunflowers by hand while the heads were still malleable, and set the seeds aside to dry for next year's planting and to make oil.  The smaller heads were earmarked for our flock.

I took Bethany's advice and hung one sunflower plant upside down in our oldest hens' tractor.  When I came back to check on them an hour later, the seed heads were nearly bare, but one hen kindly went back to work and posed for the camera.  Clearly, the sunflowers in their natural state are no problem for keen chicken beaks.

Our forest pasture is abnormally quiet at the moment.  Mama hen is brooding four eggs that I'm 99% sure are unfertilized, and her chick likes to hang out in the coop with her even though he's mostly grown. 

Our kitchen scraps are quite voluminous at this time of year, as I cut up garden veggies to go in the freezer and discard tops and bug-bitten areas.  I toss all of the scraps into the pasture every morning, then bring in a wheelbarrow load of garden weeds in the afternoon, feeding our two pastured chickens no storebought food.  They certainly don't seem hungry --- half of the kitchen scraps are still lying around, and our cockerel rarely even comes out to greet me when I bring him treats.

My goal is to have our flock eventually whittled down to a level where we're feeding them only our scraps and homegrown grains/worms/black soldier flies.  It looks like at this time of year, we could probably raise about four chickens on our scraps alone (as long as they had enough room to catch bugs and add protein to their diet.)  Once we get a spare moment, we'll add some nest boxes to the coop and transfer two or three of our laying hens into the pasture to clean up the tomato and peach bits currently going to waste on the compost pile.

A week ago, Mark and I went to visit Missy and Everett from Living a Simple Life.  They kindly took us on a tour of their new homestead, and we snapped a lot of photos of their automatic chicken feeder.

Their turkey and chickens run free most of the time, but now and then Everett and Missy like to leave home and shut the flock in to protect them from predators.  They installed two of our chicken bucket waterers to keep the poultry hydrated, then constructed their own automatic chicken feeder so the birds will never go hungry.

The feeder is simply a collection of sections of PVC pipe and elbows that allows chicken feed to fall by gravity into a trough at the bottom.  If you fill up the entire pipe with feed, you can go out of town for several days without worrying about your flock.

In the turkey pen, Everett has a slightly different setup --- he placed an elbow on the bottom of the vertical pipe so that the turkey can stick in her long neck and peck up the feed.  However, when Mama Turkey hatched out a chicken baby, the new chick just wasn't big enough to poke its head in the elbow and find the food.  Instead, Everett turned the elbow downwards.  So that side of the coop no longer has an automatic feeder, but it does have a handy shoot through which Everett can drop cups of feed without having to walk into the turkey's pen.

I spend a lot of time reading up on homesteading topics over the winter, and this year I fell in love with buckwheat in the abstract.  But as I experiment with the crop in real life, the scales are falling from my eyes.  In our vegetable garden, buckwheat failed as a cover crop in our dense clay soil, and I'm not all that impressed with its progress in the grain half of the chicken pasture either.

I opted not to irrigate in the forest pasture despite a moderately dry summer since I want to eventually grow trouble-free crops that can be planted and then forgotten about.  The buckwheat doesn't enjoy this decision --- every afternoon the plants wilt and look very sad.  They bounce back overnight, but the chicken pasture buckwheat's growth is slower than that of the later-planted buckwheat in the irrigated garden, even though the chicken pasture soil is a well-drained loam enriched with copious chicken manure.

Unfortunately, our old field corn seed didn't even come up, so our droopy buckwheat and some beans are the only plants currently growing in the grain paddock.  In retrospect, I wish I'd planted the whole area with oilseed sunflowers --- next year!

We're growing a little patch of sunflowers this year so that we can experiment with pressing our own oil, and one of our readers mentioned that she likes to tie the sunflower heads in the coop for winter entertainment:

After reading Bethany's comment, I looked up the protein content of sunflower seeds --- 26.3%!  That's three times as much protein by weight as you'd find in corn and more than two thirds as much as you get from soybeans.  Clearly I've been thinking too much inside the box when it comes to growing our own chicken feed.  Perhaps sunflowers are the way to go?  They are certainly easy to raise, and our honeybees love them.

We butchered another third of our cockerels last week, and I decided to crunch the numbers on these 16 week old Dark Cornish.  You might remember that at 12 weeks old, our cockerels weighed an average of 2.25 pounds per dressed carcass, which came out to a cost of $2.51 per pound.  Our 16 week old birds weighed 3 pounds apiece, and the new weight cost us $4.33 per pound in feed.  Clearly, letting our cockerels get older makes the feed to meat ratio worse, not better.

The 16 week old birds were also considerably spunkier.  I thought it was cute the first time I saw the cockerels roosting on the coop roof, but now I'm wondering how we're going to capture the last 9 birds before our last butchering day.  Even worse, when Mark went into the coop to catch his first chicken on our kill day, the chickens were so big and vigorous that one accidentally gave him a big scratch across his face.

I had been considering keeping a breeding pair of Dark Cornish to experiment with next year, but I've changed my mind.  I've decided we don't need --- or want --- a predator resistant breed, and would instead prefer something sedate and docile.  So the last 9 broilers are slated for slaughter this week, and next year's experiment is simmering on the back burner.

Our chicken forest pasture is still very much in the experimental stages, but one part has been a whole-hearted success already.  I've been dumping garden debris in a lazy compost pile in the pasture, and the chickens immediately come and pick through the plants (adding a bit of nitrogen to speed up the decomposition process at the same time.)

By keeping an eye on their excitement levels, I've discovered what our chickens do and don't like.  Our lazy cockerels turn up their noses at run-of-the-mill weeds, but are quick to gulp down clover leaves.  When I tossed in several big wheelbarrow loads of gone-to-seed snow peas (after picking out the best seeds for next year, of course), the chickens scratched at the pile for hours.

Of course, chickens like protein, so their love of legumes is no surprise.  What did shock me was their favorite garden food of all --- broccoli leaves!  As I tossed broccoli leaves over the fence, our chickens tore them into little bits and gulped the green stuff down as fast as I could throw it in.  In fact, when given the choice between cabbage worms and broccoli leaves, the chickens unanimously chose the latter.  What do you think broccoli leaves have in them that makes the greens so tasty?

With the first paddock of our chickens' forest pasture as bare as it was going to get, we turned the flock into the larger paddock and started preparing for the winter.  Mark and I pulled out the few living plants still visible, then hoed and shoveled out the worst of the roots.  Finally, we planted the bare area in field corn, beans, and buckwheat, with red clover seeds scattered in the pathways.

Although I'd like to wean our chickens off grain as much as possible, homegrown grain still feels a lot more sustainable than storebought feed.  I haven't decided yet whether we'll harvest the grain in the fall for winter feeding, then turn the chickens into the paddock to clean up missed kernels, or whether we'll just let the chickens graze the ripe grain, gorging until they're done.  I'm pretty sure chickens won't overeat in the latter situation, but I'm not sure if the grain would spoil as it sits out in the weather for a few weeks.  Like every other aspect of this experiment, I plan to play it by ear.

We decided to try out Dark Cornish cockerels for our first broiler experiment since they are supposed to be good foragers and very predator resistant.  It turned out that predator resistance wasn't really necessary in our instance, and our cockerels seemed to be lackadaisical foragers.  The meat will be a bit better for us than storebought since the chickens did consume some greenery and insects, but we clearly spent more than we would have on grocery store meat, or on raising Cornish Crosses.

Here are the stats on the 12 week old birds, which averaged a mere 2.25 pounds dressed weight apiece:

Big producers focus on the feed to meat conversion ratio, which in our case was about 6:1.  This is double the average for Cornish Cross broilers, meaning that our chickens actually consumed twice as much grain as a similarly sized Cornish Cross would have.  That's the precise opposite of the goal of our forest pasture experiment, so we'll be moving on to a different breed next year.

Meanwhile, we still have two thirds of the cockerels bulking up for another month or two.  I'll let you know if their figures are any different, and how the 12 week old birds compare in taste to older birds.  Stay tuned!

Mark bought a flock block on a whim the last time he was at the feed store.  The flock block seems to be a new way of feeding pastured poultry --- the food is all glued together with molasses, so the chickens peck off a bit at a time as they need it.

The chickens adored their treat, and their normal feed consumption went way down.  However, I'm not all that impressed by the product.  First of all, it costs twice as much per pound as traditional feed, and has only 8% protein.  (I've still got the cockerels on 20% protein, although many people would have switched them to 13% by now.)  I don't know if it's a coincidence, but our cockerels stopped their relentless growing while nibbling on the flock block and have held a pretty steady size for the last couple of weeks.

I think that the flock block's real purpose is to prevent boredom and the resulting feather pecking.  You all know where I stand on that --- our automatic chicken waterer is the best solution I've seen for giving chickens something to do.

Has anyone else tried the flock block?  What did you think?

As you know, I'm on a quest to find out cheaper ways to keep our chickens fed.  Robert Plamondon provides unlimited access to whole corn kernels, and finds that the cheap corn cuts down on chicken feed costs.  While corn isn't a well-rounded diet for chickens, feeding corn can definitely cut costs if your chickens have access to plenty of range.  They should get enough protein in their diets by catching bugs and scratching up worms, with the corn acting as a carbohydrate boost.

Plamondon notes:

Sounds like I should plant a bit of field corn along with buckwheat in the grain portion of our forest pasture.

Our forest pasture experiment has finally begun!  Mark finished up the first pasture on Friday and let out our cockerels to poke around.  We plan to let them eat this pasture down to bare earth, then rotate them into a pasture on the hillside.  Once the chickens have moved on, we'll sow a combination of clover and buckwheat in the first pasture to prepare the ground for a do-nothing grain rotation.  When the buckwheat is ripe in the fall, we'll rotate the broilers back into the grain pasture to fatten them up for slaughter.

Although they're not built yet, we plan to have two additional pastures on the hillside.  We'll rotate the chickens between these two pastures at intervals, making sure that they never stay in one paddock long enough to kill all the plants.  We're not quite sure how big these two pastures will have to be, yet --- hopefully, we'll figure that out over the next few weeks as we see how long it takes the cockerels to scratch up their first pasture.

Rotation will be pretty simple since the coop is at the junction of the three pastures and has a door opening into each one.  At night, we can close the chickens in the coop, then open up whichever door we please to let them into a new pasture the next morning.

Meanwhile, we're putting in some perennials so that the pasture will provide even more chicken feed in the years to come.  An Illinois everbearing mulberry is supposed to provide all of the food a flock of chickens needs for two or three months in the summer; ours should start bearing in a couple of years.  We also planted two Nanking cherries and an unidentified bush cherry to provide more summer fruit.

We'll continue to feed our chickens while they're on pasture until I work the kinks out of our plan --- I certainly don't want them to be malnourished.  But hopefully the access to greenery and bugs will start cutting back on our feed costs.

Our current batch of chicks is the first set we've ever ordered from a hatchery, so I wasn't prepared for all of the options.  Specifically, the hatchery asked if I wanted to spend a couple of bucks to get my chicks vaccinated against coccidiosis.  I said yes, but now that I've done the research I probably won't vaccinate my next batch.

Coccidiosis is a disease caused by a protozoa parasite that lives in the chicken's gut.  The protozoa are present in most environments where chickens are raised, but they often cause no problems.  However, pack your chickens into an enclosed space, add in damp litter, and your birds will begin to eat enough of their own poop so that the protozoa will multiply inside them to an unhealthy level.  If your flock is malnourished, the chickens will not only sicken but may even die.

Chickens are most likely to contract coccidiosis between four and sixteen weeks of age.  Initially, your sick birds will just seem a little off, hunkering down rather than feeding.  After a few days, you'll see blood in their droppings.  Eventually, the chickens will either die, recover completely, or go through recurring cycles of illness.

The best way to prevent coccidiosis in your flock is to maintain healthy conditions.  If your chickens are out on pasture from an early age and have an automatic chicken waterer to keep their litter dry, chances are they won't get sick.  If you must raise your chickens in improper conditions, the best way to keep them healthy is to give them medicated feed.  The coccidiosis vaccine has dubious efficacy and has only been introduced recently as a way of letting organic growers protect their chickens against the disease in crowded conditions.  (Most organic certification processes will allow vaccinated birds to count as organic, but not those given medicated feed.)

If you do choose to vaccinate your birds, you shouldn't give the chicks medicated feed.  The vaccination requires several cycles of infection, which the medicated feed will prevent.  Your chicks won't be harmed, but you will have wasted your money since the vaccine will be nullified.

Even though we keep all of our chickens on range, there's a limit to how much greenery they can find in late winter and early spring.  Before grocery stores entered our hollers, Appalachian folks lived the same way, eating primarily canned vegetables through the winter.  By this time of year, they were dying for the first fresh produce --- a spring tonic that boosted their immune system and drove away the winter blues.

I think our chickens deserve the same kind of treatment, so I take care to hunt out greenery for them as early in the year as possible.  As I've posted in the past, chickweed starts growing very early and is a chicken favorite.  A bit later, creasies turn into the new succulent leaf of choice.  If you don't have either of these available, why not sprout a few extra seeds while planting the peas in your garden?  As long as you don't buy treated seeds (covered with a pink powder), your sprouted peas are a tasty and nutritious treat for your feathered friends.

Of course, greenery is nice, but any chicken will tell you that bugs are best.  If you stumble across any grubs while digging in the soil this spring, put them in a cup and toss them to your hens --- the chickens will go crazy over the nutritious treat.

In our quest for good foraging chicken breeds, I started to wonder --- is foraging ability in chickens learned or is it innate?  The answer seems to be a little bit of both.

Pecking is an innate chicken behavior.  In one study, scientists placed a window in a developing chicken egg so that they could study the chick's behavior in the shell.  The chicks pecked even before they hatched, clearly proving that pecking is ingrained in their genetics.

While pecking is innate, foraging is learned.  You can see chickens learning to forage when you give day old chicks their first food dish.  It may take a few minutes for the chickens to discover the food, but when one bird finds it, all of the rest soon follow.  So I continue to think that it's important to get our broilers out on pasture ASAP so that they can learn more foraging behavior.

Even if you don't plan to raise your chickens in a forest pasture, it's useful to understand the root of pecking behavior.  Chickens in wild conditions spent up to 90% of their time foraging, which equated to 15,000 pecks per day.  When placed in a confined space with high quality food that is consumed in a matter of minutes, though, chickens often misplace their foraging behavior into pecking at each other.  The result --- called feather pecking --- can be bloody and disturbing.

We've discovered that our automatic chicken waterer solves this problem since it gives chickens something to peck at other than their neighbors.  We also like to scatter our feed on the ground to give our chickens more foraging time, and to raise them in chicken tractors where plenty of plants and bugs are present for supplemental food.  Giving your chickens a more positive outlet for their pecking behavior seems to work well at preventing feather pecking in even a confined flock.

If you've been meaning to learn more about Black Soldier Flies as a possible feed supplement for your chicken flock, then you should consider checking out an excellent interview Frank Aragona produced earlier this year.

It's free to download like all his past shows, and he really goes into some depth with black soldier fly expert Jerry from blacksoldierflyblog.com.   

We've already made plans for a homemade bio pod container to be installed in the new pasture chicken coop later this spring.

Black Soldier Flies are noteworthy for being easy to propagate. The long term goal with this project is to provide enough supplemental sources of food for our egg production hens, which means we could stop paying over 11 dollars a bag for laying pellets.

Photo credit goes to microponics.net, a great place to go for more information on BSF's.

Ever since I stumbled across it on the internet, I've been intrigued by the idea of feeding duckweed to our chickens.  We don't want to build any fancy infrastructure until we know whether duckweed will work, so I just got a start of duckweed from my mother's pond and put it in a kiddie pool full of water.  I know from experience that duckweed reproduces very quickly, so I hope to be harvesting some of the leaves within a month or two.

Meanwhile, I dropped a bit of duckweed in one of the chicken tractors.  Disappointingly, our hens seemed quite uninterested...probably because I'd just fed them laying pellets then a bunch of grubs I dug out of the garden.  I'll have to try again when they're actually hungry.  I may also try drying the duckweed to make it more palatable.

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.

Along with black soldier fly larvae and growing our own grains, duckweed is at the top of our list for this year's chicken feed experiments.  This little plant was a ubiquitous part of my childhood since it grew wild in the ponds I played in.  I transplanted some into my own backyard water garden by the simple method of scooping a few leaves up into a quart jar and emptying them into their new home.  Given full sunlight and still water, duckweed will grow like crazy until it coats the surface of a pond and has to be scooped out to make room for other plants.  Suffice it to say that duckweed is easy to grow and doesn't need much infrastructure after the original pond-building.

What I wasn't aware of at the time is that duckweed is extraordinarily high in protein.  You'll remember from my chart of protein content in chicken feed ingredients that corn is 9% protein and dry-roasted soybeans are 37% protein.  Well, depending on who you talk to (and presumably depending on the species of duckweed, since there are several), duckweed is 30 to 50% protein.  Wow!  I've read that duckweed can make up to 40% of a chicken's diet, with 25% being more optimal --- that means we'll be paying 25 to 40% less for chicken feed once we get our duckweed operation up and running.  One study suggests that duckweed may be best fed dried and I can envision drying stations where I just scoop duckweed out of the pond and toss it on a table in our hot summer sun.

Duckweed likes high fertility water, but that's pretty easy to achieve.  Some folks take the graywater coming out of their kitchen sinks and channel it into duckweed gardens --- the duckweed cleans the water while producing free chicken feed.  In my backyard water garden, I just threw several goldfish in the pond and the fish poop was sufficient to keep the duckweed growing like crazy.  If you are able to get your fish to reproduce (which mine did after a year or two), then you could even give your chickens a fish now and then as an even higher boost of protein.

Speaking of water and chickens, don't forget that your hens need clean water.  Our automatic chicken waterers are full of clean water to keep your chickens healthy.

Harvey Ussery, my role model in the chicken permaculture world, uses earthworms as a handy source of protein for his chickens.  I'm unlikely to follow in his footsteps since the infrastructure demands are quite high, but I wanted to share his process in case some of you are keen to give it a shot.

Harvey has a big greenhouse, in the center of which he has sunk worm bins into the soil (surrounded by cinderblocks to keep the worms in place.)  He puts big sheets of plywood on top of the bins so that he can use the worm bin area as an aisle to walk down.  The bins are full of horse manure from a neighbor along with the typical redworms you'd use in the worm bin under your kitchen sink.

The worms decompose the manure and breed like crazy in the process.  At intervals, Harvey scoops out five gallon buckets full of castings and worms and tosses the whole thing to his chickens.  The birds scratch through, eating up the worms and working the compost into the soil.  Free protein and soil amendment all at once --- what could be better than that?

Want to keep your chickens healthy?  Check out all of our innovative chicken feed ideas, or our homemade chicken waterer that keeps water clean.

If you want to feed insects to your chickens, black soldier fly larvae are probably the easiest and cheapest option.  Unlike mealworms, you won't need to buy storebought food for the insects, and you won't need to buy pheremones every year like you would for Japanese beetles.

What are black soldier fly larvae?  The little grubs are the larval stage of a flying insect that is naturally found in U.S. zones 7 to 10 (and maybe a little beyond that --- we're in zone 6 and I've found them in my garden.)  The adults look a bit like miniscule wasps, but they don't sting.  The larvae look like dark, flat grubs.

I first saw black soldier fly larvae in my outdoors worm bin when I added too much wet, high nitrogen waste at once.  The adult black soldier fly lays its eggs in rotting fruits and vegetables, manure, or meat scraps, and within two weeks the eggs have hatched and turned into mature larvae.  Then the larvae crawl out of the feed so that they can pupate in the ground.

If you want to go the easy route, you can buy a special bin (the Bio-Pod) for $180 which will make your black soldier fly operation completely painless.  The bin is just a spot to put your rotting fruits and vegetables, with a ramp that allows the larvae to crawl out into a collection container.  All you have to do is add food waste then take the larvae to the chickens once a day.

We don't want to pony up that much cash, so we plan to try to build our own bin this summer.  Check out this article for information on what a good bin looks like.  Meanwhile, consider making one of our homemade chicken waterers to round out your chickens' healthy diet with clean water.

Japanese beetles are invasive insects that defoliate roses, grapes, cherries, and many other garden plants.  Although they're terrible in the garden, the beetles are one of our chickens' favorite foods.

I go into the garden on cool summer mornings when the Japanese beetles are slow-moving, place a cup of water below the bottom edge of a leaf, and give the plant a sharp tap.  When startled, cold Japanese Beetles let go of the plant they are eating and drop to the ground ... or into my cup if I've placed it correctly.  After my cup is full, I toss the contents, water and all, into a chicken tractor and watch my hens go crazy.

Of course, this method of catching Japanese Beetles isn't going to cut it for large scale feeding operations.  If you're willing to buy some Japanese Beetle pheremones, you can create a trap like the one shown below which will capture these protein-rich insects for you.  The pheremones are sold in many garden stores to bait Japanese beetle traps in a misguided attempt to lure Japanese beetles out of folks' gardens.  (In practice, the traps more often lure the beetles right into your favorite rose bush.)

I'd love to find a method of capturing Japanese beetles that didn't depend on storebought scents --- if you've got any thoughts, please leave a comment!  Last summer, we had great (if accidental) luck capturing June bugs by hanging some of our automatic chicken waterers up in the garden, partly full of water and with the lids off.  The June bugs tried to land on the slippery sides, but soon descended into the liquid at the bottom of the containers, where they drowned.  If anything, our chickens considered the June bugs even tastier than the Japanese beetles, so we may have to work on developing a real June bug trap this summer.

Recently, I've overloaded you with masses of information about how to make grain-based chicken feeds.  This is the traditional route, but if you remember from the very beginning of this series, wild chickens would primarily be eating bugs and worms.  Is there a way to keep our flock healthier by providing them with a more natural diet?

Some chicken keepers feed their birds mealworms, which are basically the larval stage of a beetle.  The Sialis website gives lots of information about raising mealworms, but it all comes down to giving the larvae some kind of grain or grain byproduct to eat.  If you have access to a bunch of bran (for example, if you grind your own grains into chicken feed), this could be a great use of the "waste", turning it into a high protein source that your chickens will go nuts over.  However, if you're buying the mealworm food, feeding mealworms to your chickens would be very uneconomical.

The next option we present --- Japanese beetles --- looks more enticing.  While you're waiting, check out our automatic chicken waterers, great in coops or tractors.

One of the reasons we've held back from growing our own chicken feed grains for so long is that we were a bit scared of the processing step.  But it sounds like there are two options that are suitable to the backyard scale.
Some grains can be fed whole, but nearly all grains are more digestible if they are ground.  If you're grinding grain into flour for yourself, you can use the same hand-cranked mill to grind a bit of grain for your chickens.  On the other hand, if we really get into growing our own feed we'll probably find a way to make or buy a better mill.

Old timey farmers knew that sprouting was even better than grinding.  If you're willing to put in a little extra time, you can sprout all of the grains you feed your animals, a process that makes them even more nutritious.  This would probably be our processing option of choice, especially in the winter.

Stay tuned for several less conventional chicken feed options in upcoming posts.  Meanwhile, check out our homemade chicken waterers that provide clean water for your hens.

This year, we've decided to start growing some of the grain for our chickens' feed.  We'll be starting small to figure out what works well on the backyard scale, first trying hulless oats, buckwheat, amaranth, and quinoa, and then probably expanding out in later years to include wheat, field corn, rye, barley, and millet.  In the long run, we'd like to grow all of our own chicken feed, which is estimated to be about a bushel of grain per chicken per year.

In Small-Scale Grain Raising, Gene Logsdon explains that you can plan your garden so that your animals (and you) eat nearly fresh grains throughout the year.  Rye and barley are the first grains to ripen in early summer, then wheat, oats, buckwheat, and sorghum are ripe in the fall.  In the winter and spring, you can feed the easily stored corn and soybeans.  Check out our homesteading blog for more tips on how to grow and process grain.  We'll be updating over there on how our first season goes as the weather warms up.

Meanwhile, if you're going to keep your chickens healthy by formulating your own chicken feed, why not go the extra mile and keep them happy with a poop-free chicken waterer?

Every winter around this time, I rediscover my hens' love for chickweed.  Common chickweed (Stellaria media) is a weed on my garden beds, and by February it has often spread out in large masses across any bare ground. I rip it out by the roots and toss handfuls into the chicken tractors.

In the summer, our hens could care less about chickweed --- they get enough lush, green growth picking through the weeds under their feet.  But in the winter, they're mostly scratching through brown grass, and chickweed is much appreciated.  I filled up the wheelbarrow and spread the contents between our three tractors --- by the next morning, I couldn't see any hint of chickweed left.  It had all gone down my girls' gullets!

Unfortunately, the USDA doesn't provide nutritional analyses of common backyard weeds, but various sources report that chickweed is a dynamic accumulator of potassium, phosphorus, and manganese.  I can just feel our hens shaking off those winter blues!

Don't forget to start your homemade chicken waterers to prepare for spring!

Of course, protein isn't the only factor your should consider when formulating your chicken feed (although it is very important.)  You'll notice that our recipes for chicken laying feed and chicken starter/grower feed contain additional vitamins and minerals.  What should you add to your grains and beans and why?

First of all, laying hens need extra calcium to keep their eggshells strong.  Most people add some combination of aragonite, ground limestone, marble, bone meal, or oyster shells to their feed, but on a small, backyard scale, you can feed eggshells back to the hens.  Just be sure to crush the shells well so that your girls don't realize that the eggs they're laying are food, and be aware that just feeding the eggshells back isn't quite enough.  Luckily, calcium sources are pretty cheap --- drop by your local feed store and chances are you can find one of the sources for a little over a dollar a pound.  Many people who mix their own feeds simply offer one of the calcium sources in a separate trough to their hens --- the girls will eat as much as they need and no more.

The other additive to feeds is either salt or poultry nutri-balancer (which is a combination of calcium, phosphorous, salt, and trace minerals.)  If your chickens live in chicken tractors, like ours, and have access to forage every day, chances are you can get by with just feeding some salt to your birds --- which is a good thing because nutri-balancer is seriously expensive!  If you feel like your birds have a deficiency, you might consider growing some dynamic accumulators to feed your hens, keeping them naturally healthy.

While you're at it, give your birds an automatic chicken waterer, because a hydrated bird is a healthy bird.

So you want to make a homemade starter/grower feed or a homemade layer feed, but you want to be able to mix and match some of the ingredients in a similar category.  For example, you'd like to swap oats for wheat or fish meal for soybeans.  How do you know how much protein the finished feed contains?

The chart below lists the percent protein in each of the main ingredients of chicken feed:

It's easy to determine the percent protein of your finished feed using this chart.  For a 100 pound recipe, just multiply the percent protein of each ingredient (as a decimal) by the pounds of that ingredient in your recipe.  For example, if you add 30 pounds of oats you would multiply by 0.14 and come up with 4.2.  Add up the resulting numbers for each ingredient, and you have the percent protein of that batch of chicken feed.

If the percent protein in a recipe is too low, maybe you should back off on the ingredients at the lower end of the chart and increase the ingredients at the upper end of the chart.  For example, cut back on corn and increase your soybeans.  Soon you'll be making your own recipe using the ingredients on hand!

Once you've got the right proportions of food for your chickens, be sure to keep them healthy with our automatic chicken waterer.

Once your chicks grow up and start to lay, you want to change them off the homemade starter/grower feeds and onto laying feeds with 16 or 17% protein.  Once again, I'm listing several choices so that you get an idea of how to put together your own feed recipe.  The numbers in the chart indicate a percent of the recipe by weight --- to make a hundred pounds of feed, just pretend those numbers are in pounds.

Stay tuned for the next post about protein content --- this is the one that will really help you make up your own feed.  Meanwhile, check out our poop-free, automatic chicken waterer.

Here are several different recipes for homemade chicken starter and grower feeds.  The numbers indicate a percent of the recipe by weight --- to make a hundred pounds of feed, just pretend those numbers are in pounds.

I know this chart may seem a little daunting, but I thought it would be useful to take a look at a bunch of different feed formulas reported on the internet.  First of all, notice that many of the recipes don't actually fit into the protein recommendations for starting chicks --- 18 to 20%.  The lower protein feeds should be considered grower rations.

Next, notice that the components can be broken down into grains for carbohydrates; fish meal, wheat meal, alfalfa meal, or soybeans for protein; and alfalfa meal, aragonite, ground limestone, oyster shells, poultry nutri-balancer, yeast, milk powder, salt, bone meal, dicalcium phosphate, and whey for vitamins and minerals.

Of course, we all know that we're healthier if we eat a lot of different types of foods, so it's easy to draw the same conclusions about chickens.  Feeding them a constant mixture based primarily on soybeans and corn (like the commercial feeds) isn't going to be as good for them as mixing it up and tossing in different grains and ingredients in different batches.  If you live on a farm, chances are that some ingredients are easier to come by than others at different times of the year --- be willing to change your formula over time!  In a later post, I'll list the percent protein of each ingredient so that you'll know how to keep your percent protein steady while changing ingredients.

Stay tuned for homemade chicken layer recipes.  Until then, check out our automatic chicken waterer that provides the other essential ingredient for healthy birds --- clean water.

The first thing to understand when you begin to formulate your own chicken feed is that there are different types of feed out there.  Basically, chickens of different ages or types need a different ratio of protein and calcium in their diets.  Here are the top three types of chicken feed:

• Starter.  The starter ration you buy in the store is a high protein diet (usually 18 - 20%) that gives your chicks a jump start on life.  Feed this to young chicks for their first six weeks.
• Grower.  When raising chickens for meat, you should feed slightly different amounts of protein as the chickens age.  After six weeks, lower the protein to 17%, and then lower it again at 15 weeks to 14%.  Of course, you can keep feeding the starter ration to your birds, but it costs more to feed the high protein diet, and your chickens may get fat.
  
• Layer.  The layer ration is for adult, egg-laying hens.  These girls can get slightly lower proportions of protein than chicks (usually 16 or 17%) but will need calcium added to their diets to replace the nutrients used up while making egg shells.

Of course, different breeds of chickens also need slightly different formulas.  In addition, time of year can make a big difference --- many sources recommend feeding more carbohydrates (mostly corn) in the winter to give your chickens the energy to stay warm.

Stay tuned for homemade chicken feed recipes.  Until then, check out our poop-free chicken waterer, because copious, clean water is essential to your chickens' health!

Now that our introduction to chicken tractors series has wound down, I'm going to turn my attention to chicken feed.  Most backyard chicken keepers probably go the easy route just like we do and buy commerical chicken feed at the store.  This grain-based feed certainly isn't the cheapest option, and I wonder if it's the healthiest.

Before delving into traditional homemade chicken feed formulas and modern alternatives, I wanted to take a look at what chickens would eat in nature.  It turns out that Jungle Fowl (the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken) feed primarily on insects.  Scientists who cut open the crops of wild Jungle Fowl found that half or more of the mashed up food in there was typically insects and other invertebrates (especially termites.)  Various plant matter was also represented, especially fruits, berries, bamboo seeds, nuts, and young leaves.

The upshot is clear --- if we want to wean ourselves off a dependence on store-bought chicken feed, we shouldn't be planting rows of wheat and barley.  Instead, we need to find ways to provide our chickens with copious insects, or at least some sort of feed high in protein.  Stay tuned over the next few weeks as I highlight the options.

Meanwhile, check out our automatic chicken waterer, the other key to healthy chickens!