Growing food for chickens

[ChaoSS]

I'm looking into chickens right now, hoping to get some chicks within a month or less. For my rabbits, I've been feeding them a lot of grass out of my yard, cuts down a lot on how much I have to spend on their feed. For the chickens, I know they eat more grains and not so much the grasses, so I'm looking at what I can grow to supplement their feed and save me some money.

I don't have room to grow enough food to keep them fed with a balanced diet, I won't be making any sort of attempt at that. I know I can give certain weeds out of the yard, kitchen scraps, etc, but I'd like to cut down even more on feed costs. I was thinking that things like corn and oats would take a lot of room for too little payoff in the end.

Any suggestions for crops I can grow to supplement some birds that are good on the space/yield/money saved ratio?


Secondly, I've been having issues with the grass in my lawn, it's turning into more foxtails than grass. I was getting ready to poison it all and start over again, but then I started thinking of how every time I see a chicken pen it seems utterly devoid of anything green. Will the chickens be an effective way to eliminate the grass, weeds, everything, so that I can start again? Will the chickens eat the seeds from the foxtails? Will the foxtails pose a risk to the chickens like they do with some animals? Will the chickens act like the rabbits and eat the greens and leave the foxtails in the yard, spreading the weeds even worse?


Thanks for any answers, I'm just looking at what my best options are going to be at this point.



BTW, if it makes any difference, I'm looking at 6 hens, RIR, and maybe a rooster, since I want eggs but also want to raise meat chickens without having to buy the chicks every time.

 

[Kelsie2290]

A couple of threads you might like, check out fermenting feeds, https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/645057/fermented-feeds-anyone-using-them also a really long thread on it in the Meat Birds forum. or growing fodder https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/713334/growing-fodder-for-chickens and grass https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/...ur-yard-for-increasing-free-ranging-nutrition
We thankfully, don't have the problem foxtails here, there are a couple of short threads on foxtails getting lodged in a chickens eye etc but they don't seem to have near the problems with them that dogs do. Chickens will turn their run into a waste land, they are incredibly destructive, depending on how big your yard is, they may do a good job of decimating it also if you give them the chance they would probably take care of the young plants or green seeds.