Factory Feed Free meat & laying birds

[3KillerBs]

I got a giggle out of this. I grew up this way. True that was a while back for me but plenty of people around the world still live this way and it's not all in third world countries. The "long vanished past" starts when you were born for you but that's only where you are. Some people may still be living it.

Lots of homesteaders, maybe.

But very few, if any, commercial farms expecting to make a profit. Given that making a profit in farming is hard enough with every possible advantage that modern Ag science can provide.

 

[iwltfum]

One might have thought this would be the case but what I found with free rangers was they tended not to stay close to the coop and the ground around the coops remained relatively untouched.

With a thousand birds?

 

[raingarden]

In re: stocking density,

Has there been any attempt to study the feral chicken populations in places where they exist in order to determine how much room they need?

I consider our free-ranging flock quasi-feral. We call it "our" flock only because our family has been supplementing their diet with some corn for thirty years. But, they go where they want.

Their numbers stabilize at about a dozen to fifteen hens, a reigning rooster and a few young-of-the-year pullets and cockerels. With few exceptions, the rooster drives away cockerels and I think hens actually drive away pullets, or, at least, deprive them of resources. The turn-over rate is low.

Watching their numbers and where they range is where the 5,000 square feet per bird number came from.