Thursday, June 6, 2013

Grow your own chicken feed?

Growing my own chicken feed for winter, because I'm a tightwad and don't like to spend money!

note, part 2 is available here: http://backyardbiointensive.blogspot.com/2014/04/grow-your-own-chicken-feed-part-2.html


Drying dandelions on the chicken tractor.


Chickens are a key piece of my self-sufficiency model. They provide food, fertilizer for the garden, and I will use them next spring to clear and till ground for a new garden. They dispose of scrap food and help keep grasshoppers in check. Feeding them during the summer is pretty easy. Even if there isn't enough food in a chicken's paddock, run or tractor, there are dandelion, clover, alfalfa, berries and other things they love to eat growing just about everywhere. As of now, I've got my layers in an 8 foot by 8 foot tractor which is moved every day. They graze on the dandelions, grass and other plants, and dig for bugs and worms. In the tractor is also a hanging maggot feeder that provides necessary protein for laying eggs. The chickens also get fish scraps when we fillet walleyes, they get kitchen scraps, and once a day I chop down whatever other good stuff I find growing while I'm picking wild asparagus or just driving home from work. This combination allows me to reduce the "purchased" feed to about 1/4 pound per day for all 6 chickens. That "purchased" feed is a mix of corn and black oil sunflower seed. I feed about a handful of this once a day, that's all.

Storing enough feed for winter is a different story. Because chickens are so important to me, I want them to be in the best health and produce the best eggs that they can. To me, this means not feeding commercial chicken pellets, or other commercial feeds. As I said, feeding them in the summer is easy, there's food everywhere. But how to provide a diverse, balanced, proper diet for them in the winter?

One method would simply be to go to your local feed store and have them mix up a batch of high quality organic grains and nutrient supplement. As far as the health of the chickens goes, this would be a great diet for them. It's also expensive. One of my goals is to have everything that I grow be a net contributor to our diet or finances. If I spend more to feed my chickens than it would cost me to buy fresh, free range organic farm eggs, then my chickens are not a net contributor. I'll even take it a step further and say that I want them to cost me nothing. And, I think it's possible. I'm not going to address paddock shift designs or free ranging or anything related to summer feeding. Here, I'm only going to talk about how to store enough high quality, free or nearly free feed to get your chickens through the winter. Oh, and did I mention this is my first year attempting this?

What to grow?

So, first things first, we should have a list of things that we know chickens like to eat. This is a list I copied from somewhere and pasted into my chicken notes file. I can't remember where it came from, so I can't give credit for it, but thank you whoever you are.


alfalfa
american persimmon 

apple
apricot
barley
black locust??
blackberry
borage
brassicas
buckwheat, grain
caragana sp.
cherries
clover
comfrey
corn
dandelion
day lily
elaeagnus
elderberry, blue
forage pea
hairy vetch
hickory nuts
hulless oats
lamb's quarters
lentils
medic
millet
milo
moringa
mulberry 

nettle
oaks (acorns)
oats
oilseed radish
pasture grass
peanuts
plum
purslane
quinoa
raspberry
rice
sea buckthorn
sesame
siberian pea shrub
strawberry
sunflower
wheat
xanothocarns sorbifolia 



I've included the entire list because even though some things aren't options for me, they may be later on, or for someone else. The next step is to reduce that list to the things that I can realistically grow and store before winter. That means removing the trees and slow growing perennials that wouldn't be ready to become forage before the snow flies. Unfortunately this means we're going to be including mostly short lived annuals, but that doesn't mean we can't plant those other fantastic chicken forage plants like mulberries, they just aren't of use to me in the short term.


alfalfa
barley
blackberry
brassicas
buckwheat grain
clover
corn
dandelion
hairy vetch
lamb's quarters
lentils
millet
milo
nettle
grass
quinoa
raspberry
sufflower
wheat

I have included blackberry and raspberry because even if they do not produce berries, their foliage is a quality chicken feed. Plus, I already have both growing. Realistically, I don't need to grow everything on that list in order to provide a quality winter feed mix for my chickens. I'm going to just arbitrarily say that I need to have 3 kinds of grain/seed feeds, and 3 kinds of green/hay type feeds, at a minimum. So, the things I already have growing are a good place to start.

alfalfa
clover
blackberry
raspberry
dandelion
corn
nettle
grass
sunflower

There is a large amount of alfalfa and clover that grows in ditches near my house. All I have to do is walk a half mile with a machete in hand and I can fill my arms with both of those.

Blackberry and raspberry will make good additions to the hay mix. Realistically I can't cut/pick enough for it to be a main part of the mix, but it will provide nice variety for my birds.

I have dandelions all over the place. Nice big ones with nice roots. Periodically I grab an armful and lay it out to dry, I expect this to be a large part of the feed mix for this winter.

I have a decent sized sweet corn patch, and the birds get any ears that can't be eaten or sold already, but this year I will put a small stack of ears away to dry and feed over the winter. I have also started a patch of yellow dent corn that I will dry and store for winter feed.

Nettles grow in ditches and fenclines all over the place. I am told that after they are dried that they no longer sting. I'm going to dry some out over the summer and test this on myself before feeding them to the chickens. If this works, nettles would be a great addition to the feed mix for winter. They grow large and fast and are loaded with vitamins and minerals.

Grass is something I'm not sure about. My birds love the tall fescue that grows in my lawn (or what was a lawn before I decided to stop mowing it and let it become a grass jungle) and eat it happily, however I'm not sure that there is any value to storing it for feed. Grass provides very little nutrition even when it's green and fresh, it seems that there may just be no point in storing grass. The one notable exception to this would be if it has gone to seed and has intact seed heads.

Sunflower is a great feed crop. I've planted sunflowers in all kinds of places around the place, and will pick the heads and dry them for feed when they're ready

There are two other crops that I haven't yet mentioned, but that are great chicken feed and chickens love eating them.

Pumpkins
Squash

I didn't include those in the main list because they can't really be dried out and stored for winter (except the seeds). However, they are such good feed and provide so much volume of feed, I will be storing both in my root cellar for the winter, and feeding them to the chickens for as long as they last. Ideally, small pumpkins and squash would be better than large ones, so that they birds can eat them up before they freeze in the coop. That's perfect, because the small ones aren't much good for carving or selling anyway. I've fed both to my chickens pretty much since I brought them home. I just lay the pumpkin or squash on the grown, chop it into thirds with a machete, and toss it in. They gobble up the seeds first, but they eat the pulp too.


So, how much of all this am I going to need?

Well, I've discovered that when it comes to commercial feeds, most chickens eat about 1/4 to 1/2 pound of feed per bird per day, during the winter. So if I cheat high and store enough to feed 1/2 pound of food per bird per day from November 1 until April 1, that should be a pretty good start on things, as far as arbitrary guesses go.

So, figure 5 months times 30 days, 150 days. Times 1/2 pound per day for a bird equals 75 pounds per bird. Times 6, 550 pounds of feed. That's commercial feed which they eat 100% of. There is waste in this like pumpkin skins/stems, alfalfa/clover stems, etc. Let's use it as a starting point anyway, since we already rounded up to 1/2 pound per bird per day.

Yikes.

So about half of that by weight will be grains and half will be hay/dried greens. 275 pounds of dried hay is going to take up some space. I better clean out an area for that this weekend. 275 pounds of grains, that doesn't seem so bad. Between sweet corn, field corn and sunflowers, that should be doable. I'm also not sure where pumpkins and squash fit in that equation either. Let's adjust numbers a little bit.

200 pounds of grain
200 pounds of hay/dried greens
100 pounds of pumpkins/squash
Whatever kitchen scraps are available
garden scraps

Conclusion?

That seems a little more possible. And, if at the end of winter I run out, I can always buy a bag of feed. It's not like my chickens will starve if I guess wrong. I'm learning here, after all.


I guess I better get busy picking and drying some dandelions, clover, and alfalfa. And, as always, I welcome your input. This plan is a work in progress, I'm sure I'll make many adjustments before winter comes.


Related: http://medicinegardens.blogspot.com/2013/07/update-mandan-bride-flour-corn.html



7 comments:

  1. Thank you for the list! I'm new to chicken farming and I am amazed at everything they'll eat in my yard. 200lbs though, hats off to you ;)

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  2. Great list. We grow a few I didn't see on your list:
    Jerusalem Artichoke (tubers)
    White African Sorghum
    Giant Golden Amaranth
    Sweet Potatoes
    And if you like brassicas look into Perennial Purple Tree Collards. They live for up to 25 yrs and produce leaves year round. We feed them to our meat rabbits.

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  3. So, a year later, how did your experiment go? We're thinking of a similar system, for the same reasons, we're cheapskates!

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  4. Squash can be stored for long periods of time.

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  5. I just saw the link to part two, thanks for the updte.

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  6. Pretty sure your list came from the permies forum.

    http://www.permies.com/forums/posts/list/120/997

    (posted by Amit Enventres who summarized a LONG thread into a nice tidy post on July 20, 2012)

    ReplyDelete