Factory Feed Free meat & laying birds

[obsidian73]

I am curious if anyone has experimented with pure free range chickens, esp meat birds such as the cornish cross (yes I know about the freedom rangers as well), but also just with regular laying hens? I am wanting to try to start moving my chickens to less factory food dependency and more into only foraging. So I am wondering if there are those that never give factory feed (winter excluded) or just a very minor amount and what your experience has been? What you have learned and some of the breeds you found that work the best at doing this.

 

[Isadora]

Cornish cross could not exclusively forage and find enough food to sustain them. There are a few threads on this site about exclusively free-range birds but I don't believe they were being used for meat. Even birds that can free range exclusively and survive, like a lot of feral chickens in Hawaii, are going to be small and will not have a lot of meat on them.

 

[Molpet]

My great grandparents did. They laid in spring until they went broody and most didn't start again until next spring, ....if they lasted that long. They did have a large coop they were locked in at night. Dogs also free ranged and weren't allowed in the house. kept some predators away.
During the day they free ranged. In the winter they ate grain and hay the draft horses and cows dropped...one way or another . They stayed away from the pigs or became pig food.
Cockerels were harvested for Sunday dinners , dressed about 2lbs, and older hens for soup. Not sure what breed they started with, but I think barred rocks and road Island reds.

 

[3KillerBs]

Where are you located?

Are you in an area where feral chickens already live year-round?

If not, it is unlikely that any sort of chicken could survive on forage alone over time. IF any can, it will be game-type chickens -- small and scrawny, not the meaty sort and absolutely NOT Cornish X, which were developed for high productivity under very specific management.

IMO, it would be outright animal abuse to turn Cornish X out without feeding them.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I am curious if anyone has experimented with pure free range chickens, esp meat birds such as the cornish cross (yes I know about the freedom rangers as well), but also just with regular laying hens? I am wanting to try to start moving my chickens to less factory food dependency and more into only foraging. So I am wondering if there are those that never give factory feed (winter excluded) or just a very minor amount and what your experience has been? What you have learned and some of the breeds you found that work the best at doing this.

I had some Hoover Hatchery Cx when i started two+years ago. In addition to factory feed, they free ranged all day on acres - the same acres which now aid my flock.

If you were to search my posts regarding Cx from two years ago, you will find a constant litany of moaning by me about how severely underweight my Cx were relative to everyone else's birds. That was WITH feed.

You could also follow my culling project and my (unorganized) pasture project in one of the most forgiving climates in the US to create a bird well suited to free ranging on my grounds. tl;dr? Two years in, I can shave about 35% off my feed budget in the best months, and have males dressed at 3 to 3.5# at 20 weeks (with exceptions in either direction). As well as pretty solid egg prodction of medium and medium large eggs at a not particularly late date.

Compared to a "meat" bird? I've got a LONG way to go on both the bird, and the pasture.

 

[Penpal]

We kept a free ranging flock of RIR. Once they were about half grown I switched from commercial feed to just free ranging with free choice corn, oats, wheat, BOSS, and hay. In the winter months they did just fine, but as soon as the pasture had anything to eat the amount of feed they consumed dropped considerably, and they plain refused to eat the oats. I had them seven years before loosing them to foxes (who had just moved in) and the neighbor's dogs. (Now my new flock is better protected)

So, even though they were not getting commercial feed, they were still fed. They laid 9 months out of the year, just less as they got older.

 

[iwltfum]

I've done it with Freedom rangers in the middle of the summer into the fall in Maine with lots of buggy woods for them to forage in. They survived fine but they did not grow nearly as big as they could have - even after 16-20 weeks (usually we butcher 5+ pounders in 8-9 weeks). I wouldn't do it again but it was an interesting experiment. After 3 weeks in the brooder with minimal feed, they went out into our orchard with a shack to sleep in if they wanted. Automatic waterer hooked to a live hose and we basically didnt pay attention to them for several weeks at a time. Would only work in a low predator situation because they seem to need to roam far to get what they need. They ended up being 2-3 pounds butchered and we did feed them 5 or 6 times with a store bought feed.

 

[raingarden]

From what I can tell, fully free range chickens need about 5,000 square feet per bird on fairly productive ground without predators. They will still need some supplemental feed because without it the birds will be impossible to control and manage. I'm curious if others think this figure is in the ball park? BYC has all sorts of rule-of-thumb numbers and specificaions to go by.but not one for free-range carring capacity.

 

[iwltfum]

From what I can tell, fully free range chickens need about 5,000 square feet per bird on fairly productive ground without predators. They will still need some supplemental feed because without it the birds will be impossible to control and manage. I'm curious if others think this figure is in the ball park? BYC has all sorts of rule-of-thumb numbers and specificaions to go by.but not one for free-range carring capacity.

Kind of hard to say because if they are fully free range, they wouldnt have a fence - at all. I would say that if you wanted to attempt to emulate a free range scenario with a fenced area that the chickens can not exit, 5000sqft per bird would probably be close to what you need, but as big as possible is probably the way to think of it in that situation.

I think in a real free range system the chickens wouldn't technically use that much space.

I like to think of it more in terms of how many chickens you can have on the land based out of a singular coop station without over stressing your land. Depending heavily on the local vegetation density, variety of plant types, terrain, and agricultural zone- I would say that, in my location, I could have up to 250-300 chickens on an acre, but it's not like I could put 1200 chickens on a fenced 4 acre plot and expect there to be any vegetation left at chicken height after a few months of that.

Even if you had 1000 chickens based from one chicken house and able to free range unlimited amounts of space and range unlimited distances, they would completely ruin the ground around the coop to a certain radial distance and they would probably ruin a few big spots beyond that as well, because they are, well, chickens so of course they flock together, and have cliques, and dust in certain areas every day, roost in the same spot every night, etc.

This is the argument for mobile coops, chickens tractors, blah blah blah.

But, you can see, it gets complicated when talking about free range numbers.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I'm curious if others think this figure is in the ball park?

I think it is more complicated than any square foot number, but it usually is. Is that square foot in the New Mexico desert, the Kentucky Bluegrass region, or the lush Gulf Coast? What time of year, spring summer, or fall? How much does it rain at that season? Is it varied farmland and fallow or overgrown land with a huge variety of vegetation and creepy crawlies or a sterile back yard with one turf grass kept mowed so there are no seeds?