Chicken forest pasture experiment: Year 2
When
we got started with chicken-keeping, we were what I'd call chicken
enthusiasts --- we loved the eggs, thought the idea of getting chicken
manure for the garden was cool, and didn't consider whether we'd break
even with the endeavor. We spread our laying hens out in a few
chicken tractors and enjoyed the healthy eggs, but I eventually
realized that our
style of chicken keeping would require us to buy chicks every couple
years and chicken feed every couple of weeks. We also weren't
really making use of all that copious chicken manure either. Was
there a way to tweak our
system so that we were raising our own chicks and feeding them some or
all of their food from on-farm ingredients while making sure more of
the manure went to the garden?
Our
first
experiment with becoming sustainable chicken-keepers was
starting a chicken pasture system last year. The most successful
part was using deep bedding in the coop to capture half
of the day's
manure --- I've got a pile of chicken manure mixed with leaves
composting right now and waiting to go on the fall garden. Our
pasture also cut
feed costs quite a bit during late summer with our
laying flock, but our
broilers were far too lazy and the pasture too
small for them to get much feed from the pasture.
This year, I've got
another ambitious pastured poultry experiment
planned out. This one is even more complicated than last year,
but I hope it will bring us closer to chicken independence! Stay
tuned for all of the facts and figures in this week's lunchtime series.
| This post is part of our Chicken Pasture lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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