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["Lynn Wigglesworth" <lynnw1366 AT hotmail.com>]

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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