Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Aliza" <realfood@wonderfulfarm.com>]

Hi Lynn - you dont have to grow grains for chickens.  If you just overwinter the birds that you are using for breeding stock they can over winter on good legume hay and mangles(14% protein) as well as greens.  When you are growing birds for meat the hens (if you are letting them brood the chicks) will teach them how to forage throughout the growing season and you will have good healthy meat with no grain imputs - they will find their grain in the wild in the late spring - fall as the grains mature but mostly will grow large and meaty on insects and greens.  You cant use the mutant cornish crosses for this however.  You will have light fryers in the summer, coq au vin in the fall and stewing birds in the winter time when you would want it anyway.  I had a hen raise some banties for me.  She raised them all on the lawn in the summer and by the fall they were all laying away on just what they found outside plus the extras from the kitchen. I got 4 or 5 eggs a day from 6 bantam hens.   Perhaps Harvey will pop in on this topic as he has developed a few different methods for raising birds with maggot buckets and earthworms.  His web addy is www.themodernhomestead.com.

 

By the way the mangles will work for feed for the milking stock to improve winter production and help maintain weight on cows/goats/sheep.  Grains are nice but they are not the end all. 

 

Aliza

 

We desire to have chickens here, but need to prove we can grow their food, so there is an immediate reason for trying these.