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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >What price do the rest of you get for your eggs?

$2.50

But the produce stand on the way into town sells pretty good brown farm 
raised eggs for $1 a dozen.  The people raising them do it as a hobby and 
don't 
care that they are selling them at a loss.  Most of them come from the 
propietor's aunt and he doesn't even mark them up.

All our chickens are free range.  They get locked into the coop fortress at 
night but roam free through the pastures, woods, and bogs the rest of the 
time. 
  I am always intriqued by the strict account of costs that many do, mainly 
because I couldn't do it if I wanted to.

The bedding and nesting material is planer shavings from the cottage industry 
woodworking.  The chickens follow the big animals and scatter their droppings 
looking for undigested grains, they eat every bug on the place, dine on 
fungus in the woods and lichens by the creek, and eat lots and lots of grass. 
 As 
someone has already pointed out, grass is the key to really good eggs.  When 
we 
do not have pigs in the lot, all the kitchen and garden scraps go to the 
chickens.

Then the chickens are fed a few grains and a little purchased feed that is 
more than offset by a few modest egg sales.  The goal is a total cash outlay 
of 
$0 for us getting all the eggs and meat we want.

If you can't let chickens roam completely free as we do, you can graze for 
them.  Every day (in season) take the scythe and mow down a few armloads of 
grass and weeds and throw that into the chicken lot.  In the winter you can 
sprout 
seeds for them.  The best is whole, uncrimped oats.  Just soak them in water 
overnight, drain in a collander, then rinse them every day until they are 
four 
or five inches long.  You can use just about any grain, legume, or brassica 
seed for this.  Chickens also do very well on grass silage that you put up in 
the summer and on dried green hay.  Some years we put up drying racks (old 
fence line) and without making a career out of it, when passing by cut the 
big 
tufts of clover or sorrel or lamb's quarter and hang them on the rack.  In a 
couple of days they are bone dry and packed into old fiber feed sacks.  In 
the 
winter the chickens gobble it up same as if it were fresh.

I've not done this, but someone I know goes about with a big bucket in the 
fall and harvests the tops of wild yellow dock (very similar to amaranth) and 
uses that for winter chicken feed.

One of my goals in homesteading is to ease off a cash accounting system and 
onto an integration system.  What the chicken operation needs and what it 
yields worked neatly into the other operations until the cash becomes 
incidental, 
if there at all.

James