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  • From: "Lynn Wigglesworth" <lynnw1366 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Chicken Feed Quest.
  • Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 10:14:40 -0500

I have the problem, also, of the local family store undercutting my egg prices. When I raised my price to $1.50/doz, they charged $1.25. I know that they have penned chickens, so they must be buying food and selling at a loss. They went up to $1.75 by the end of the summer. Now neither I nor they have any extra eggs to sell. In fact, last time I was in that small store, they had NO eggs, commercial or local.

My hens are free-range, too. I don't lock them up at night. I don't seem to have a preditor problem here; they roost on top of the stalls and things in the barn at night. I feed a couple handsful of layer pellets a day in the winter, but they find their own food in the summer. They also find my garden (who knew that chickens loved tomatoes?). I'm glad that they are so industrious in finding food, but I won't share my garden with them...they take a bite out of every tomato and squash, and pull up the bean plants. This year, it's either fence the chickens or fence the garden. The garden is easier to fence.

Lynn Wigglesworth
Tioga Co. PA
----- Original Message ----- From: <Clansgian AT wmconnect.com>
To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 10:00 AM
Subject: Re: [Homestead] Chicken Feed Quest.




>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
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