Home Feeding Ideas and Solutions Discussion Thread

[triplepurpose]

I like the potato idea. You could grow potatoes on a pretty large scale, if you hade the seed. When I looked it up on the net, an acre of potatoes planted will yield well over 20,000lbs of potato... You wouldn't need a mountain mix if you could pull that off.

The problem:
"How many pounds of seed potatoes does it take to plant 1 acre assuming 30 rows and 15 plant spacing?"

The answer:
Somewhere in the 1,100 pound range.

Another source said that 45# of potatoes could yied 1,000 lbs... that is more like it!
It may be a good idea to have a bag of spuds on hand.

Impressive numbers!

That's a major problem with potatoes I guess. Potato "seed" is more is more expensive and cumbersome than true seeds and needs more careful storage. But I suppose if you were saving your own, you would just take that into account. And if you're just growing for yourself, you don't really need that much to get a dang big harvest. I mean with that 45 pound sack of seed potatoes you'd have about 20 pounds of potatoes a week for a year!

As for growing potatoes, I'd use sweet potatoes here. They are just about the most nutritious crop for the amount of effort you can possibly grow. And the chickens love them raw, no cooking needed. The leaves are also edible, both for you and the chickens. Win/win!

I grow lots of sweetpotatoes. Here in Hawaii we have all different kinds from around the world. I think it's probably the easiest thing to grow: here folks basically just cut the ends off the vines in the old patch and stick 'em in the ground and watch 'em grow year round! No need for seed, or sprouting, or anything... Pretty handy! When a crop is good, I a few pounds per foot of row. The only thing I have that yields more heavily is cassava, but I can grow two or three sweetpotato crops in the time it takes to grow one cassava crop.

My chickens don't care for them raw though (sometimes one or two of them will eat a little of the really sweet kind raw, the blander ones they won't touch). Sweetpotatoes have an anti-nutrient that interferes with protein digestion anyway, but just a few minutes of cooking breaks it down. So I cook and feed them the culls.

 

[triplepurpose]

I'm still working out however, how in the extreme winter cold, how to provide them a balanced diet without depending on commercial feed. I'm looking to learn what vitamins and minerals chickens NEED for sustained health. Most of what you read these days wants to just give the "commercial feed" listing rather than give us the list of minerals, vitamins, protein breakdown. Perhaps I will have to resort to speaking with a poultry professor and getting the details directly from a university facility that is researching poultry health.

That is something I have no experience with, but I think that's a really important issue to raise! It's my personal feeling, based a little humble experience and research, that the nutrition is much less precise and demanding than we are often led to believe. For illustration, can you imagine if someone applied the same ideas of precision and "perfect balance of nutrition" to HUMAN nutritional guidelines? Imagine some food manufacturer telling people "Be warned! You should all only eat this specific, scientifically formulated ration, which contains EVERYTHING you need to survive and be healthy, and NOTHING else...OR ELSE BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN!!" They would appear utterly nuts, part of some conspiracy, or both!

But as to the science, I agree it's probably better to be over-informed and then take it from there than to be under-informed. Personally, I would also see if you can find any historical accounts about how people kept chickens through the winter in cold climates--you probably wouldn't find anything scientifically precise, but you might get some good ideas... just a thought...

 

[galanie]

 

That is something I have no experience with, but I think that's a really important issue to raise! It's my personal feeling, based a little humble experience and research, that the nutrition is much less precise and demanding than we are often led to believe. For illustration, can you imagine if someone applied the same ideas of precision and "perfect balance of nutrition" to HUMAN nutritional guidelines? Imagine some food manufacturer telling people "Be warned! You should all only eat this specific, scientifically formulated ration, which contains EVERYTHING you need to survive and be healthy, and NOTHING else...OR ELSE BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN!!" They would appear utterly nuts, part of some conspiracy, or both!

But as to the science, I agree it's probably better to be over-informed and then take it from there than to be under-informed. Personally, I would also see if you can find any historical accounts about how people kept chickens through the winter in cold climates--you probably wouldn't find anything scientifically precise, but you might get some good ideas... just a thought...

Good point. But just think of the chickens like athletes. Athletes will follow a precise nutrition plan in hopes of getting specific results. The rest of us pretty much just eat what we want. So you can feed your chickens in order to have them the best they can be, or just let them eat whatever they can scrounge. I guess in both cases you reap what you sow.

 

[400constantne]

Quote:

That is something I have no experience with, but I think that's a really important issue to raise! It's my personal feeling, based a little humble experience and research, that the nutrition is much less precise and demanding than we are often led to believe. For illustration, can you imagine if someone applied the same ideas of precision and "perfect balance of nutrition" to HUMAN nutritional guidelines? Imagine some food manufacturer telling people "Be warned! You should all only eat this specific, scientifically formulated ration, which contains EVERYTHING you need to survive and be healthy, and NOTHING else...OR ELSE BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN!!" They would appear utterly nuts, part of some conspiracy, or both!

But as to the science, I agree it's probably better to be over-informed and then take it from there than to be under-informed. Personally, I would also see if you can find any historical accounts about how people kept chickens through the winter in cold climates--you probably wouldn't find anything scientifically precise, but you might get some good ideas... just a thought...

We do have that formula, it is called Captain Crunch Crunch Berries!



I take vitamins, & minerals

 

[Clay Mudd]

Good point. But just think of the chickens like athletes. Athletes will follow a precise nutrition plan in hopes of getting specific results. The rest of us pretty much just eat what we want. So you can feed your chickens in order to have them the best they can be, or just let them eat whatever they can scrounge. I guess in both cases you reap what you sow.

I think Sky was talking about the "Feed as sole ration" mentality, which would be more like that athlete eating nothing but protein shakes (which I've seen a couple bodybuilders try to do!).

 

[galanie]

Good point. But just think of the chickens like athletes. Athletes will follow a precise nutrition plan in hopes of getting specific results. The rest of us pretty much just eat what we want. So you can feed your chickens in order to have them the best they can be, or just let them eat whatever they can scrounge. I guess in both cases you reap what you sow.

 
I think Sky was talking about the "Feed as sole ration" mentality, which would be more like that athlete eating nothing but protein shakes (which I've seen a couple bodybuilders try to do!).

My brother, for one. He didn't end up doing that very long though Guess I have a reason to be mentally challenged with family like that hehe.

 

[galanie]

Back to the Korean Natural Farming stuff, I'm about to put some Fermented Plant Juice made from Comfrey on some parsley, wish me luck lol. I'm doing it as much for the supposed nitrogen that is in those leaves as for the other things. But I want them to green up some so, like I said, wish me luck with this.

 

[Kassaundra]

I'm going to try this one more time, BYC and my work computer are fighting and it keeps kicking me off.

My IMO is still growing, I've been looking at it every couple of days or so and it just started growing white stuff. The LAB milk has seperated and I guess I need to look at the video again to see how to tell when I should add the brown sugar. I am really looking forward to having the LAB to spray on the poop in the coop to see if it really makes any differance.

Are you going to withhold the fermented plant juice from some of the plants as a test to see if it makes a diff?

 

[galanie]

   


I'm going to try this one more time, BYC and my work computer are fighting and it keeps kicking me off.

My IMO is still growing, I've been looking at it every couple of days or so and it just started growing white stuff.  The LAB milk has seperated and I guess I need to look at the video again to see how to tell when I should add the brown sugar.  I am really looking forward to having the LAB to spray on the poop in the coop to see if it really makes any differance.

Are you going to withhold the fermented plant juice from some of the plants as a test to see if it makes a diff?

Yes, I have another huge one off to the side of that bed that won't get any. You don't add brown sugar to the LAB, you use it just as it is after straining off the cheese stuff, so long as you put it in the fridge. I'm in the process of removing the brick floor of my coop, something I've been meaning to do forever. So I'm holding off putting this junk in the litter till they're really on soil. Thankfully the brick is just laid in with no base, not mortared or anything.

 

[Kassaundra]

Yes, I have another huge one off to the side of that bed that won't get any. You don't add brown sugar to the LAB, you use it just as it is after straining off the cheese stuff, so long as you put it in the fridge. I'm in the process of removing the brick floor of my coop, something I've been meaning to do forever. So I'm holding off putting this junk in the litter till they're really on soil. Thankfully the brick is just laid in with no base, not mortared or anything.

But if you plan on storing it at room temp (limited fridge space) you have to add brown sugar or molasses (brown sugar is cheaper) right?

I would love to have made comfrey FPJ, but my chickens found my comfrey!!!! And there is no doubt they really like it, so I need to plant lots more, I want to plant the self seeding kind too, I'd rather have invasive comfrey then runner grass.