Has anyone succesfully had chickens without feeding chicken food

[freemotion]

Quote:
Try the organic threads on the sister forum, Backyard Herds. Or Sufficient Self, where most people have many ideas on living on next to nothing.

For the OP:

I haven't had to worry about contaminated feeds or pet foods in a few years since I make all my animal's foods from scratch.

I feed my flock whole grains, which can be cheaper if you can get them from the farmer or without too many middlemen. I pay an average of $7.50 per 50# and feed whole corn, barley, and oats. You need to switch over gradually, though, if you have been feeding pellets or mash, as the crop is a muscle and it will not be "fit" enough to handle whole grains.....take three weeks to switch over.

Illinois has some snow, so unfortunately, you haven't had enough time to plan ahead. If you can get really creative to get through the winter, you will be home-free once the first bugs and blades of grass show up. The hens seem to find them before we can even see them....they are pretty amazing!

I dry lawn clippings (untreated) and store them in feed sacks for winter greens. I boil up the bones from any chicken or turkey that we eat or that is left from making catfood, and mash them with a potato masher. They LOVE this! And chickens are cannibals, the bones are boiled for hours (24 for chicken, three days for turkey leg bones) so I don't worry about it being chicken. There is hardly a scrap that doesn't go to the critters here.

I have boxes and boxes of those little pumpkins I picked up for free when the nearby farmstand closed. I also have lots of big pumpkins and squashes, but they are not keeping well this year, so I won't be able to count on them much longer. The little ones can often keep until the end of February if I am really diligent about picking them over EVERY week and cooking up any with suspicious spots.

I have a sack of acorns I picked up to experiment with this winter.

I sprout barley, as the protein levels rise dramatically just as the sprouts emerge. I soak all my grains in the winter, as the nutrients become much more bioavailable. If you can get whole barley, you might just do ok with this and scrap greens and veggies from the local grocery.

I do not fill feeders, I toss grain twice a day (once in summer) and make sure it is all cleaned up. The local rodent population can find their food somewhere else!

Hope this helps!

 

[txchickie]

Quote:
Oh gosh, for a goat?

They would be horrified to know I feed our goats the cheapest sweet feed I can find at the feed store and they get a horse-quality round bale to eat. Plus they eat scraps along with my (free-range) chickens. They are doing great, too. It's a goat, right? They prefer weeds and leaves

 

[freemotion]

There are a LOT of very mean goat people with computers........and a few nice ones. Problem is, the nice ones quietly go away, and the mean ones take over. Let's start reporting nasty posts on "other forums" and post nice comments to overwhelm the nasty ones....shift the balance. They do end up going away in a huff most of the time. Problem is, another one comes in and replaces them!

Help me! It is not such a big job if a lot of people help..... please?

 

[Fancie]

thank you for all your help... I didn't have enought time to read everything yet... but I will. It made me feel much better. I figured if they were too hungry they would jump the fence... My husband went out hunting yesterday and brought home two trash bags full of corn. That will be there staple as well as table scraps. They are beggers! They are nor laying now cause the cold, and will try to get them back on feed by spring.

Again thanks to everyone...

 

[SussexInSeattle]

To stretch my feed, I buy a bale of soft grass hay and toss down a flake every week or so. The chickens free range all day on 1/2 acre but the grass is really dying off s they will eat the hay when it finally snows. They get all the table scraps as well as their egg shells back and they get fried or scrambled eggs about once a week. I bought a huge box of Quaker oats at Costco and every few days they get a big bowl of oatmeal with old crystalled honey mixed in. We have an asian market nearby that sells it bruised fruits and vegatables real cheap so we will buy a box there every couple of weeks. When I cook fish they get the heads, tails and back bones which they go crazy for.

This may be a no-no but this morning I fried up a pound of bacon and they got the drippings on a loaf of old bread (bought cheaply at the local bread store-- which you could also try, just ask if they sell any animal bread which is just bread that is about to expire) and they went crazy for that. I figure it's so cold lately that the fat may help to harden their little arteries to stay warm...

I would let all the birds free range, the young will learn from the old. They also may need some of the nutrients from free ranging that may not be available in the pen. Your oder birds may not be laying if they are 18 months or older because they retire as layers after the moult. Did you notice them looking scruffy in the past month or two? If so, they have likely simply retired. Which usually means you have seen your last eggs out of them and as one poster suggested, it may be time to add them to your stew pot. I've heard they live to about 10 years but only lay from 6 mos to 18 mos of age.

Currently I am supporting 2 retired and 1 due to retire any minute, out of 10 total. I can not bring myself to eat them but if I were out of food for the dogs and people, I would have to consider it! They have no selling value as non-layers and I am sure if I re-homed them as retired layers someone would either eat them or turn them into animal feed themselves.

 

[Emzyyy]

My parent's friends give us old bread and some leftovers and we get the produce their about to throw out at the store for free and feed this all to the chicken's with seed added. I just feed them the pumpkins sitting on our front porch, they loved them.

 

[joebryant]

That's a good question, and I've often wondered about it myself. When I was a kid, my grandmother had several chickens and roosters that free ranged 24/7/365. I've no idea what she was tossing out along with kitchen scraps that she was feeding them. I do know that whatever she fed them in the winter was not a commercial feed and was probably some grain(s) raised on the farm. As far as I know, her chickens were all very healthy. Well, maybe not so much the ones that my cousin and I would throw out of the barn loft to see them fly.

 

[Plain Old Dee]

We got our first flock of chickens over 20 years ago. A local egg farm was selling off their flock of over 2,000 leghorn hens. Individuals could buy as many as they could transport, and the rest would be trucked off somewhere to be made into soup. (A new flock would then be brought in.) We paid about $.50 each for our hens, and we bought about 75 or so. We started off feeding them laying mash and scratch, but not long after, my husband got sick and couldn't work. Our income was minimal, so we adjusted by feeding the hens home grown oats, table scraps and whatever else they could find at the time. Egg production remained totally unaffected, and selling the eggs were a significant percentage of our income for a while. When my husband was able to return to work, we didn't go back to feeding the mash, though we did add a bit of cracked corn, since we were finishing off a pig at the time (that also grew off VERY well on the oats, table scraps and garden waste!).

I really miss being able to do that, but we've pretty much had to quit the farming operation due to health reasons. However, we now have chickens again - and goats - and will find economical and healthy ways of feeding all of them on a minimal budget. (Will even be heading down to the garden in a few days to plant some turnip seed a friend gave me - it will either grow or it won't, but it didn't cost a dime to buy and won't cost a dime to spread it in the garden!)

 

[Happy Chooks]

Quote:
You were a very naughty boy Joe.

ETA: Bet you gave your mom a whole lot of gray hair.

 

[Overeasyplz]

Congrats on the self sufficiency! My birds get layer pellets, along with boiled potato peels, apple cores, fruit trimmings, veggie leftovers, and fat/grease from frying pork. I figure the extra calories in this -5 degree weather will help them keep warm. When it's summer they hardly eat any commercial food as they love to range. I am building them a new coop this coming year!