Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] cornish x's etc

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Harvey Ussery <harvey@themodernhomestead.us>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] cornish x's etc
  • Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:52:11 -0500

moon@ceva.net wrote:
Harvey,
Thanks as always for your frontline report on meat birds on your site. I grew the 'freedom rangers' this summer on -gasp- organic feed. big bucks in, 1/2 the meat back.hawk scares kept them from foraging. I too am looking for a 'sustainable' bird. cornish x's I found were better when they could follow the lead of other birds. I let them go to 10 weeks and got some very tasty baby hughy's avg 11 #'s. Hard to argue.

A big part of sustainability is how we feed. Current issue of Mother Earth News has my article on furnishing more of the birds' food needs out of home resources. I'll be writing another in the spring for Backyard Poultry.

The second link I sent earlier was to my article on "domesticating" the black soldier fly. My hope is to get 25% of the feed I offer my flock out of that project in the coming season. If I come close to that goal, I'll have a lot more to say on BSF in the future. It's been a fun project and I'm excited about the prospects for a major protein boost in the home feeding program.

As for hawks: They're always a "your mileage may vary" factor. Young birds are especially vulnerable, of course. (Heck, I've even lost young goslings and ducklings to *crows*.) So I'm putting together a mobile pasture pen for protecting young growing birds until they're less vulnerable. I like the separately moved/docking configuration a friend here put together--see the "Cody" part of the page at
http://themodernhomestead.us/article/Small+Pasture+Shelters.html
--and plan to base my design on that.



This year I'm hopping to supplement w/ field grown grains as we have all discussed. starting w/ rye,buckwhet,pearled millet. Shoud I crop out some org soy in there? I thought I would just tote my trailor down w/ electo net to the field. ~Ann Zone 7,Va

That's my plan as well. I'm putting up a butt-kicking deer fence this year, and am making this project the occasion to do something I've long wanted to do: Put half the garden space into cover crops the *entire* year. Every other bed will be in CC's (and of course the cover/harvest crops will switch beds following season). Some will be stuff I can cut, then lay right into adjacent bed as mulches without having to transport it--grain grasses, sorghum-sudan hybrid. (I grew the latter first time last year, was quite impressed with biomass production. Note that I've read there can be alleleopathic effect for some following crops.) Some will be all-season crops that need the time to make big/deep taproots and/or heavy N fixation and deep amelioration of soil texture--sweet clover, alfalfa.

And in some beds I'll be growing grain/seed cover crops allowed to go to maturity. Will make a chicken tractor designed for the new garden design/bed rotations. Will have chickens making far more tractor passes in appropriate beds than in the past.

Seeds already on hand for those uses: Many of the small grains, buckwheat, tartary buckwheat, oilseed radish (also called forage radish), mangels, cowpeas, several varieties of dent corn, oilseed sunflowers (Peredovik). Yet to be purchased (gotta find the right source): the grain type sorghum usually called "milo."

And no, soy is not in that list. Maybe I'm just a cranky old fart, but have developed a "thing" about soy that comes from several directions. I *might* grow it as a N-setting legume cover sometime, but it definitely would *not* fit in my seed-growing-for-self-harvest program--chickens should *never* eat raw soy, and the whole point of my cropping strategy is that the birds will self-harvest without further harvest/process effort on my part.

~Harvey

--
Harvey in northern Virginia
www.themodernhomestead.us





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page