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  • From: Harvey Ussery <boxwood@nelsoncable.com>
  • To: undisclosed-recipients: ;
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Need ideas for dealing with high costs of poultry feeds
  • Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 13:36:54 -0400

Hi All,

I am starting work on an article for Backyard Poultry magazine, for which I am a regular writer. I am looking for input for my next contribution.

As we all know, feed costs are heading for the moon, and that trend is likely to continue. I'm wondering if there are homestead/small farm "flocksters" who are dealing with the rising prices using creative strategies on the home place for providing more nutrition for their birds aside from purchased feeds or feed ingredients. If so, I'd love to hear from you. I'll pull together all the ideas you are experimenting with, and write an article I hope will be of help to other flock owners dealing with this dilemma.

If you are interested in being part of this project, here are some parameters and some questions to open the conversation:

* This will not be a "making your own feeds" article. I have been making all my own poultry feeds for years, but I'm getting hurt by steeply rising prices as much as anybody. I cannot simply keep paying whatever the market demands for my base feedstocks--I have to come up with more nutrient payout for the birds right here on the homestead.

* On the other hand, strategies which rely on *enhancing* purchased ingredients would be of interest. For example, if you buy small grains but routinely *sprout* them to enhance nutrient content, that is a strategy for dealing with rising costs. (The more low-labor your sprouting practices, the better.) Another example: Folks have told me about soaking rolled oats in cultured milk/skimmed milk, and feeding that as an enhanced (we could say value-added) feed.

* Is a cow (or are goats) a major productive asset on your place? If so, are you making extensive use of excess or skimmed milk, buttermilk, whey? Do you culture? Results?

* Of course we can all grow grain crops like oats, wheat, and corn (and non-grain feed crops like legumes) as well as the big guys. The problem is that conventional handling of harvested grains (threshing and storage) at the home level, without expensive equipment or facilities, quickly becomes too labor intensive or otherwise impractical. I'd like to know if you've found a way around this conundrum--e.g., letting the birds self-harvest small grains used as a cover crop and allowed to mature their seeds. Ways to save mature seed heads (small grains, corn, sunflowers) without threshing or other processing, and strategies for storage and feeding to the flock.

* Are there non-grain crops you are raising for poultry? Pumpkins? Sunflowers? Mangels? Anybody using potatoes as a significant addition to their feeding program?

* Pasturing the birds is of course one of the major ways to increase the flock's access to live, natural, *free* food. I will of course say so in the article, but it's so obvious and so widely used an option, there is no point in mentioning it (unless you've found some clever new wrinkle on this application).

* On the other hand, I'd like to know about managing poultry in *woods*. If you're trying that, let me know the results, and the main benefits in terms of self-foraged wild feeds.

* Multi-functional efforts you use that yield other benefits as well as more free feed--poultry for insect control, geese to clean up dropped orchard fruit, chickens as shredder-composters who reap a harvest from the critters who take up residence in organic debris heaps, etc.

* Is anyone else feeding their poultry worms from vermicomposting bins set up for manure management and fertility recycling? Have any of you joined the Madman of Hume and started generating fly maggots as poultry feed from carrion or food wastes?

* Backyard Poultry is primarily oriented toward the family flock, and my own writings are mostly addressed to "homestead" needs (as opposed to those of the farm). However, I think the home flock owner can learn a lot from small farm producers producing at the lower end of the scale--those producing, say, hundreds of broilers per season rather than the tens of thousands of a Joel Salatin. So if you are producing for a small market and have creative ideas to boost flock nutrition while reducing costs, please let me hear them.

* I'm not only interested in chickens, but in other domestic fowl as well. Are you successfully using ducks for slug patrol? Geese as weeders? Ducks and geese to "mow your lawn"?

* Is anybody having success feeding their birds *entirely* by free-ranging them over enough biologically diverse ground? (My grandmother came awfully close with her flock, but she had a lot more ground to offer them than I do.) If so, how much ground are you finding is required? Anybody finding that their free-ranging turkeys can feed themselves entirely?

* Are tree crops a major part of anybody's feeding program? Dropped fruit of mulberries and persimmons? Autumn's acorns to fatten turkeys?

Please understand that this is *not* a request for *theoretical* ideas or speculations on how to offer our flocks sufficient nutrition while becoming more independent of the feedstocks market. I'm only interested in practices you are actually using right now. (If there are interesting ideas you've tried and found flawed or impractical, that would be useful as well.)

If you would like to help out, please be in touch with me directly at
boxwood@nelsoncable.com
You will have my sincere gratitude, and that of all who may benefit from your ideas. Thank you.

~Harvey

--
Harvey in northern Va
www.themodernhomestead.us

"Science without ethics is sociopathology." (Bill Mollison)





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