We just canned dill pickles last night. Mine will not last til next year. Mmmm.....
A moment back to the OP. Q: How to be self-sufficient with your chickens? A: Feed them something they don't like, and not realize it. They find their own ways to eat...unless you pen them up 24/7.
so here's what happened....
I switched my girls from crumbles to pellets a few months back. It did seem much more efficient. The pellets were lasting much, much longer. I did notice a drop in egg production, but figured it was because they were about a year old. Free-ranging worked well, except for their bad habit of jumping the fence. I want to be a good neighbor, so I had been working on a pen for them. I could watch them free-range for a couple hours each day without them becoming a nuisance.
Then, I went on vacation. Their egg production dropped even more. I was starting to wonder if something else was wrong. They were particularly wild about their treats, and had started getting more adamant about the pecking order. They used to be a very placid flock. I kept checking the feeder, waiting for it to empty before I opened the new bag of pellets. It never seemed to get much lower.
Doh! I feel so dumb.
They weren't eating the pellets, except when under duress. I was starving my birds. When I took away their free-ranging, they stopped laying. They had been shunning the commercial pellets, and eating my veggie treats, bugs, weeds, and my neighbor's hill of wild oats.
I don't think it would be that hard to feed them adequately without commercial feed if I could let them free-range most of the day. However, in my suburban backyard I have to pen them most of the time. Their feeder now has crumbles again, but I will be trying to find ways to replicate what they had been getting on their own. They're pretty smart after all.
