Author: Anna & Mark

Around the middle of
January, I decided our broccoli plants weren’t going to make anything
else edible for humans.  The plants had served us well, providing
a big head apiece and then lots of little side
shoots for late fall
suppers.  But now, nightly lows were getting cold enough to nip
back any new side shoots before they could develop.

I figured I might as
well give the chickens whatever remained of the plants.  I’ve had
chickens peck up broccoli leaves quite happily in the past, and if
nothing else, the plants will add to the deep bedding in the
coops.  I’d originally planned to cut the broccoli off at soil
level, but that as much more difficult than yanking out the main root
bundle with a twist and pull.  I even hunted down some nice clumps
of chickweed for dessert.

My timing was good
because it set in to rain soon thereafter, and then to snow.  Our
flock didn’t want to leave the coop, but the garden goodies gave them
something to peck through during their spare time.

What
the Cluck?! by
Andrew and Jennifer Ayers is a chicken-keeping memoir, detailing the
couple’s life with a backyard flock.  While many parts of the
ebook were geared toward the beginner, I was intrigued by the Ayers’
feeding campaign.



The Ayers subscribe to
the Paleo diet, and their own dietary choices made them wonder whether
buying bags of grain to feed their chickens (who then fed eggs to the
family) might not be a good idea.  So they came up with an
alternative.  The chickens free range widely; are given all the
family’s food scraps; get special treats of on-sale dairy products,
tilapia, fruit, and vegetables from the grocery store; have access to
free-choice oyster shells; and then get a mixture of cooked rice and
beans as their main staple.



I emailed Andrew to ask him
for more information on his rice-and-bean chicken feed since I’m always
looking for cheap and healthy ways to feed our flock.  The Ayers’
egg yolks are the first ones I’ve ever seen that are oranger than ours,
so I figured they were doing something right.  Here’s Andrew’s
recipe for one week of feed for twelve chickens:

• 4 c. pinto beans
• 4 c. rice
• 7 c. cracked corn

The Ayers cook up the
beans and rice just like you would if feeding them to people, then they
scatter the uncooked cracked corn on the top of each day’s
portion.  The concoction clocks in at 15.6% protein, just a hair
less than you’d get in laying pellets from the store.

Although the percent
protein looks great, once I really crunched the numbers, I discovered
that the Ayers’ recipe is probaby only providing about a fifth of the
chickens’ diets.  Each hen in his flock receives about 72 calories
per day from the beans-rice-corn concoction, versus 371 calories per
hen per day for a chicken getting their recommended
daily allowance of
0.25 pounds of dry layer
feed.  In the
Ayers’ situation, the other 80% of the flocks’ feed is clearly being
made up of wild food and on-sale grocery store items, which is probably
why their eggs’ yolks are so amazingly bright.



What this means for
those following in the Ayers’ footsteps is that you either need to copy
their whole feeding campaign, or increase the feeding rate of rice,
beans, and corn to five times the amount given in the recipe
above.  I’d recommend the former approach, since the latter is
unlikely to give you such brilliant egg yolks, and will definitely cost
a lot more than a bag of chicken feed.