Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Harvey Ussery <harvey@themodernhomestead.us>]

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