Category: Pasturing chickens

Winter is a tough time to keep your chicken flock healthy.  If you’re not careful, their run will turn into a mass of mud which will erode away and pollute nearby creeks.  Meanwhile, the ground will be scratched so bare that your chickens will lack all access to fresh food.

Harvery Ussery suggests various solutions to these winter problems.  First, he recommends that you cull your flock heavily, removing any birds you don’t really need so that the remaining chickens will have more access to wild foods.

Next, how about planting cover crops to give your chickens some greenery deep into the winter?  Our chickens were supremely uninterested in our oat, winter pea, and mustard cover crop in the fall, but by December, they were happily browsing through the green leaves.  If your garden is completely dormant, you can also send your flock through there to clean up weeds and seeds.

If you see bare soil in their run, how about turning that area into a deep bedding/compost pile?  Even a small run can be biologically active through the winter months if you add enough organic matter so that your chickens can go hunting for worms.

Now’s also the time to  augment your chickens’ diets with fresh foods.  Harvey Ussery grows potatoes, sweet potatoes, mangels, winter squash, and chard for his chickens, noting that if you’re willing to cook them, potatoes can replace grains in a chicken’s diet.  Before we gave them free run of the woods, our
cooped up Light Sussex were thoroughly enjoying Tokyo Bekana — the thin leaves seem to be a very palatable green.  Ussery even dries comfrey and stinging nettle “hay” in the summer to dole out extra nutrients to his flock through the cold months.

Most of those winter pick-me-ups require some forethought during the spring, summer, and fall, but you can feed your chickens sprouts for nearly instant greenery.  Rather than buying his grains in pellet or mash form, Ussery buys several grains in bulk and mixes his own feeds.  In the summer, he grinds the larger grains and feeds the smaller ones whole, but in the winter he sprouts all of the grains in modified five gallon buckets.  He uses a five day cycle, soaking the first day, then rinsing daily until the sprouts are ready.  Give the chickens
free choice minerals or sprinkle them on top of the grain and you have a complete diet with extra protein, vitamins, and enzymes.

For more tips on keeping
your chickens healthy on a budget, I highly recommend Harvey Ussery’s The
Small-Scale Poultry Flock.

Although it sounds esoteric, the feed conversion rate is at the heart of raising a sustainable chicken.  Also known as the feed to meat ratio, this number is simply the pounds of feed given to a chicken divided by the weight of the cleaned carcass.

The sad truth is that the feed conversion rate for chickens raised by nearly all backyard hobbyists is two, three, or even four times as high as the ratio for industrial chickens.  Yes, you do end up with a higher quality chicken that lived a happier life if you raise it yourself, but that
chicken will not only take more money out of your pocket than buying one from the store would, your homegrown chicken will also have a larger environmental footprint.  In my mind, that’s unsustainable.

Let’s look at some feed to meat conversion ratios:

• 2 : 1 — what the industry claims they get for factory farmed Cornish Cross.
  (Hard to tell if this is true.  My other numbers come from extension service websites or my own experience, both of which I trust more.)
• 3.5 : 1 — what you can expect to get from pastured Cornish Cross in optimum weather.
• 5.2 : 1 — Freedom Rangers on pasture, again optimal conditions.  (Other “slow” broiler breeds are in the same ball park.)
• 6.2 : 1 — Our Dark Cornish at 12 weeks last year.

You’ll notice that pastured chickens actually eat more feed to reach a certain weight than they would have eaten if they were confined.  (Side by side experiments have confirmed this.)  Although we think of
pastured chickens as getting a lot of their nutrition from wild food,
chickens can’t digest much grass, so what you’re really counting is how many bugs your birds found.  It seems to take broilers more energy to find bugs than they get from eating those bugs, thus the lower feed conversion rate on pasture.

Although these numbers seem very disheartening, I hope they don’t make you turn to supermarket chickens.  As I’ll explain in a later post, I think that homesteaders can grow heritage chickens at nearly the same feed conversion rate that you’d get from Cornish Cross on pasture (and maybe even better) if we’re willing to think outside the box.