The wild chicken's diet
So what do chickens eat
on pasture? I started out my
adventure
assuming that a
pasture for chickens was the same as a pasture for cows and other
ruminants, but I was very wrong, for reasons you'll soon understand.
A
good place to start when learning about chicken nutrition is with the
birds' wild counterparts. Most scientists believe that chickens
were
domesticated from red junglefowl (Gallus
gallus), which
currently live in southeast Asian. There
may have also been a bit of
hybridization between the red junglefowl and their cousin the gray
junglefowl (Gallus
sonneratii)
when developing the domesticated chicken, but we'll stick with
exploring the red junglefowl's diet here.
Neither kind of
junglefowl is a vegetarian. Scientists who cut
open the crops of wild junglefowl discovered that more than half of the
mashed up food therein typically consisted of insects and other
invertebrates (especially
termites). Various plant matter was
also represented, with an emphasis on fruits, berries, bamboo seeds,
nuts, and
young leaves.
Harvey
Ussery sums up this
information in a slightly different fashion in The Small-Scale Poultry Flock.
He suggests that we need to consider three food groups when nourishing
our flock:
Seeds and fruits for a high-energy source of carbohydrates and fats (and some protein).
Animals (whether that's bugs or beef liver) for well-rounded protein.
Sounds a lot like a
healthy human
diet, doesn't it? If you think of
the worms your chickens scratch up as shrimp, the grasshoppers they nab
out of the air as beef, the sourgrass as
lettuce, and the grass seeds as rice, then you'll realize your chickens
are getting a well-rounded meal out of pasture.
| This post is part of our Permaculture Chicken: Pasture Basics
lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries: |
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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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