Home Feeding Ideas and Solutions Discussion Thread

[galanie]

With feeding the young chicks uncooked brown rice I would think they would need some grit as well but can not find any mention of that.  Any thoughts??

The IMO4 that goes in the brooder is half soil. Also, they always make a point of saying to have floors of chicken houses be soil. So I'm supposing that's where the grit is coming from. I thought of that too and already decided I'd supply them with a bit of sand anyway.

 

[RaZ]

Based on the ideas of BYCers, I am going to try collecting duckweed from local ponds, and seaweed and maybe fish from the shore. And for substrate, what we have the most of in Connecticut: leaves.

Thanks to BYCers for enriching my life and property!

If you are collecting duckweed from local areas, please make sure those ponds are not contaminated or polluted. Duckweed is a great plant for bio-remediation in that it will take up lead, arsenic and other heavy metals.
I'm not trying to scare anyone, just want you to be aware of where you get your plant material from. And if your are growing food stuffs in your own backyard, get a soil test from your local extension office. You can learn a lot from this inexpensive analysis to help your garden grow.

 

[Zanna]

The IMO4 that goes in the brooder is half soil. Also, they always make a point of saying to have floors of chicken houses be soil. So I'm supposing that's where the grit is coming from. I thought of that too and already decided I'd supply them with a bit of sand anyway.

Thanks Galanie! They initially had the babies in a cardboard box on the coop floor but yes, I had wondered if the IMO4 would have enough gritty type soil to suffice. I always give my babies a bowl of sand right from the get go from my breeder pens so they can get grit and also exposure to cocci which we seem to have an abundance of here in the Willamette Valley. From watching the you-tube video, she wanted you to feed egg yolk smeared on cardboard as they could choke on the pieces if you just crumbled it. Why could they not choke on rice? At least the egg is soft but maybe that is the problem, that it could gum up in their throat..........

 

[Tallulah Chicklet]

RaZ, excellent points about the duckweed and soil testing. I might give growing duckweed in half barrels a try.

Sky and Kassaundra, at first my chickens couldn't be bothered with the comfrey, then next thing I knew, it was totally decimated! I am hoping to propagate it and plant a bed under the hedges like most normal people around here would grow hostas.

 

[harbortaylors]

So I found this thread interesting and thought I would throw my experiences on here. First off, we currently have a flock of 12 birds. We are located very near downtown in our city and have not had a single complaint in over a year. I don't water my chickens, or rather I never need to fill a bucket or check their water. I designed, for very minimal expenses, a simple watering setup that utilizes a 5 gallon bucket (hidden inside a fake water tower I built out of wood scrap) which has a toilet float valve in it and two 1" pvc fittings coming out the bottom. Each fitting uses a compression fitting, for ease of cleaning, which feeds two water lines, one inside the coop and one beneath it. On each line there are three chicken nipples connected through standard sprinkler head connections (which happened to fit the fittings perfectly). That said, the entire system is sealed, connected with a standard garden hose to the water system of the house, even if the water shuts off for some reason the 5 gallons will last at least 3 days for my girls. Once every six months I pull it apart, which takes about 3 minutes, clean it out with a long brush (like for cleaning stovepipes but smaller, I got it for free somewhere) and I rinse it with a mild bleach solution. I probably don't even need to clean it that often as it is always nearly pristine when I clean it, but I would rather be cautious.

Now for feeding. I do plan on switching over to a homemade food of all natural grains and whatnot this spring, but for the last year I have used standard layers pellets and supplement. I also only feed them once a week. I used 6" sewer pipe to build a feeder that securely stores a weeks worth of food. The feeder will hold about 25lbs of food, or half a bag. I also have it designed near the water system on the outside, and it slips through a hole in the coop so the girls can access it. This means that I don't have to enter the coop at all if I don't want to.

I also stop by a local fruit/vegetable stand every day on the way home and collect his garbage. I usually get 1/2-1 boxes of slightly bad vegetables and fruit every day which I throw straight in the pen every night when I get home. They usually decimate the entire pile of food in hours. We also collect our food scraps and our neighbors as well. We don't put anything organic except avocado in the garbage. Not only do our girls love it, we have cut down from a large garbage can every week to less than half that.

Our girls are happy, productive, friendly, and clean. They produce somewhere between 10-16 eggs a day (even in the worst weather, like right now, I have never gathered less than 8 a day). They are also rather effective mousers as well. I happened to see a mouse attempt to get through their pen the other day and my girls nailed him.

Anyway, I will try to post some pictures as soon as the monsoon like rains stop so you can better understand the setup, but I highly recommend it, it works great. Very little time investment, very effective, and cheap.

 

[Tallulah Chicklet]

Welcome, harbortaylor, good to hear from you! It sounds like you have a great thing going with the produce...I'd love to find a connection like that. I went dumpster diving for the first time with a friend and got about 100 lbs of organic bananas among other things, and some rice and kitchen scraps from a sushi restaurant. The things I'll do for my chickens!

 

[RaZ]

Have some care about feeding bananas to your chickens. I don't know all of the details but too much potassium can be problematic in the egg laying process.

This is purely anecdotal but when I give my hens bananas, I get eggs with extra shell deposits on their eggs. Some of the research I've read suggests that too much potassium has an affect on the calcium of the egg shells. I'm not sure, but some reports suggest that too many bananas can lead to egg-bound chickens.

This may be an old wives tale but it does suggest moderation in what we feed our chickens. I need to go to the library for more research.....

 

[triplepurpose]

Have some care about feeding bananas to your chickens. I don't know all of the details but too much potassium can be problematic in the egg laying process.

This is purely anecdotal but when I give my hens bananas, I get eggs with extra shell deposits on their eggs. Some of the research I've read suggests that too much potassium has an affect on the calcium of the egg shells. I'm not sure, but some reports suggest that too many bananas can lead to egg-bound chickens.

This may be an old wives tale but it does suggest moderation in what we feed our chickens. I need to go to the library for more research.....

Thanks for sharing this. I tend to take cautionary data like this with a big grain of salt, but it never hurts to be informed. However, any number of things aren't good in excess. I've read that a person shouldn't eat too many potatoes (I think it was over two pounds per day, according to one source?) because of potassium overdose--but of course that doesn't stop them from being a key staple food in many parts of the world (as with bananas). Anyway, moderation and variety in the diet is ALWAYS a good thing to aim for regardless (with chickens or with people).

 

[triplepurpose]

The IMO4 that goes in the brooder is half soil. Also, they always make a point of saying to have floors of chicken houses be soil. So I'm supposing that's where the grit is coming from. I thought of that too and already decided I'd supply them with a bit of sand anyway.

My thoughts exactly...

I think it's important to have your chicks on old litter and soil as early as possible, but extra grit can never hurt.

 

[triplepurpose]

I symphathize Kassaundra. I too have been frustrated by a lack of detailed info online about the KNF chicken practices in general. I've done a few searches mostly gotten the same vague info. Maybe it just hasn't translated well out of Korean? I think this stuff is kind of new to the States, so maybe the R and D hasn't been done yet. The most in-depth stuff I've been able to find to date is all Hawaii-specific--mostly, I assume, because the University of Hawaii has done some research on it.

Despite living in the tropics, I too would have to buy imported rice, mill run, and sugar to follow those recipes, so really I'm no better off. But since I see no logical reason why culturing microorganisms should be so reliant on specific ingredients (after all, they're doing just fine in the leaf litter without any of those things), I intend to experiment with using other things for them that might be more readily available to me. Mainly, all these microbes need to proliferate rapidly are oxygen, and sugars--so why couldn't any starch or any form of sugar could be used?

At least you can have the excitement of being on the cutting edge!

I had no idea what type of weather Korea has, and I didn't look it up, I just equate bamboo and rice w/ tropical warm weather (even though I know some types of bamboo grow in every climate). I understood the prinicple of using local plants and microbes, but the sites I was looking on I had no idea what I could substitute for in my area. (not for feeding the chickens high fiber greens but for the different liquids they make to grow better soil and for the IMO 1-5