Category: Chicken feed

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.

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 minuscule 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.