HOW TO FEED YOUR CHICKENS if there is no scratch or pellets?

[EmmaRainboe]

I saw this article the other day.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/ar...hop-principle-to-improve-chicken-diets.77197/

It got me thinking about possible way to reduce feed use if pellets do become unavailablel

 

[Weeg]

When I pull out the straw bales from the coop in the spring, I always save the 3 best intact bales for planting my sweet potatoes in. They grow fabulous that way and saves land space for other crops.

Good idea! I really want to plant sweet potatoes this year, for us and the chickens. I'll have to look into using the bales once I'm done with them.

 

[dirkandlorie]

Good idea! I really want to plant sweet potatoes this year, for us and the chickens. I'll have to look into using the bales once I'm done with them.

Careful with the seasoning on those hay bales, you have to use lots of nitrogen(chick poop) to get them ready for planting, but need to balance that out before putting the sweet potatoes in. Unless you just want the leaves for the chickens.

 

[JackVinehopper]

With the current events and talk of no fertilizer. The fear of losing animal feed is real. So I've been researching going through all of my homesteading books trying to find ways to feed my chickens and keep them healthy and producing with no layer pellets and no grains. I have found a few amazing videos as well, on composting with chickens which I've been doing since I've got my chickens. (Last spring) That was one reason I was really thrilled to have my own so I didn't have to go to my friend's house and beg poop from them.

What I'm finding is that composting and letting your chickens pick through compost, they eat the bugs they turn the compost and they leave their own little nuggets of nutrients behind. Is an excellent way to grow my crops.
Also there are crops you can grow just to feed your chickens which I was doing last year to supplement but now know, that there are ways to feed and I don't have to grow an entire crop of corn for the girls, which I have been failing miserably at, just trying to grow for our own table.
Hoping that my chicken poop would help me yield a better crop of corn for our family plus all my other veggies. But I do not have to grow another crop just for my chickens?
Which I just do not have the room.

So I thought I would start sharing some of the things that I am learning on how to feed your girls and boys, if there is no rural King to supply you with your chicken feed.
Anyone else interested in this? Anyone else have their own advice to give an ideas to share? I'd be happy to hear.
Just for fun, this is fluffy. Who's not so fluffy at the moment. She's molting. Lol

I'm just starting to put together a fodder system for my chickens and sheep. My property is mostly for growing pasture for sheep but I plan to stuff pumpkin seeds all along the perimeter. I like the idea of sunflowers. If my wife would let me, I'd tear up the lawn and grow something useful. Also, I was reading about growing duckweed and water hyacynth in black plastic bins of some kind. They grow super fast and the more stagnant the water the better. Throw some chicken poop in there and watch it grow inches every few days. Chickens love that stuff. Make sure it doesn't propagate outside somewhere cause it is very invasive and will choke out irrigation canals, streams and lakes to the point everything dies of lack of oxygen. They are nitrogen hogs.

 

[LavenderDaFlerf]

You can sprout all kinds of things, I'm trying to sprout my Scratch and Peck feed right now. Not sure if it will sprout though.
You can sprout anything from oats, millet, barely, quinoa, peas, to sunflower seeds, alfalfa, etc, etc. Basically any seeds or grains.

I feed scratch and peck and it sprouts for me.

 

[JackVinehopper]

With the current events and talk of no fertilizer. The fear of losing animal feed is real. So I've been researching going through all of my homesteading books trying to find ways to feed my chickens and keep them healthy and producing with no layer pellets and no grains. I have found a few amazing videos as well, on composting with chickens which I've been doing since I've got my chickens. (Last spring) That was one reason I was really thrilled to have my own so I didn't have to go to my friend's house and beg poop from them.

What I'm finding is that composting and letting your chickens pick through compost, they eat the bugs they turn the compost and they leave their own little nuggets of nutrients behind. Is an excellent way to grow my crops.
Also there are crops you can grow just to feed your chickens which I was doing last year to supplement but now know, that there are ways to feed and I don't have to grow an entire crop of corn for the girls, which I have been failing miserably at, just trying to grow for our own table.
Hoping that my chicken poop would help me yield a better crop of corn for our family plus all my other veggies. But I do not have to grow another crop just for my chickens?
Which I just do not have the room.

So I thought I would start sharing some of the things that I am learning on how to feed your girls and boys, if there is no rural King to supply you with your chicken feed.
Anyone else interested in this? Anyone else have their own advice to give an ideas to share? I'd be happy to hear.
Just for fun, this is fluffy. Who's not so fluffy at the moment. She's molting.

With the current events and talk of no fertilizer. The fear of losing animal feed is real. So I've been researching going through all of my homesteading books trying to find ways to feed my chickens and keep them healthy and producing with no layer pellets and no grains. I have found a few amazing videos as well, on composting with chickens which I've been doing since I've got my chickens. (Last spring) That was one reason I was really thrilled to have my own so I didn't have to go to my friend's house and beg poop from them.

What I'm finding is that composting and letting your chickens pick through compost, they eat the bugs they turn the compost and they leave their own little nuggets of nutrients behind. Is an excellent way to grow my crops.
Also there are crops you can grow just to feed your chickens which I was doing last year to supplement but now know, that there are ways to feed and I don't have to grow an entire crop of corn for the girls, which I have been failing miserably at, just trying to grow for our own table.
Hoping that my chicken poop would help me yield a better crop of corn for our family plus all my other veggies. But I do not have to grow another crop just for my chickens?
Which I just do not have the room.

So I thought I would start sharing some of the things that I am learning on how to feed your girls and boys, if there is no rural King to supply you with your chicken feed.
Anyone else interested in this? Anyone else have their own advice to give an ideas to share? I'd be happy to hear.
Just for fun, this is fluffy. Who's not so fluffy at the moment. She's molting. Lol

With trying to make our chicken go further, how do you all regulate how much feed you give your flock? Do you just fill the feeders and let them have as much as they want or do you regulate it somehow. It has been a year now that I've fed my flock nothing but pellets and table scraps and my feed bill is going up with the inflation. I do free range them most of the day which helps. Ideas?

 

[EliteTempleton]

Edit: Fake news re-shared. Sorry!

It should still be cheaper from your local feed mill so give them a call if you're not using them yet.

 

[Pojojuniper]

I'm definitely interesting in this topic. I am mildly concerned about the possibility of chicken feed becoming unavailable. I am at least interested in finding ways to supplement the diet to reduce the feed consumption.

An idea posted on another thread was to grow black oil sunflowers, and harvest the seeds. I plan on getting a bag of black oil sunflower seeds and trying to plant some next week. Also experimenting with sporting grains, or growing fodder.

I would love to know more about this as well. How did pioneers feed their flocks before the convenience of local Tractor Supply store? Even very small homesteads fed themselves and their animals. How? I would imagine it takes planning, determination, and a lot of work, but there must be a way to maintain a healthy flock throughout the winter on a limited budget without depending an increasingly unreliable and expensive supply chain.

 

[TooCheep]

-By living with a lot more land than most of us to provide bugs, plants, horse/cow poop and kitchen scraps.
-By not having genetic freak birds that lay eggs daily, causing a huge drain on their bodies.
-By keeping roosters that would protect the others.
-By culling excess roosters and non-laying hens. Non-productive birds weren't kept around.
-By not pampering them nearly to the extent that we tend to with backyard flocks.
-By not obsessing about perfectly balanced nutritional feed. Laying fewer eggs makes this less of an issue.

Modern systems are mostly designed to run using thousands of dependencies that may break down. Older systems had a lot more room to function without advanced supply chains.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I would love to know more about this as well. How did pioneers feed their flocks before the convenience of local Tractor Supply store? Even very small homesteads fed themselves and their animals. How? I would imagine it takes planning, determination, and a lot of work, but there must be a way to maintain a healthy flock throughout the winter on a limited budget without depending an increasingly unreliable and expensive supply chain.

We have answered that question, repeatedly, in this thread and others. We've even linked recipes.

Once again, I recommend this very excellent thread assembling info by @Lauravonsmurf, with contributions by @saysfaa @rjohns39 @Rangergord and others.

The short answer is, their birds were - by modern standards - tiny, slow to grow, produced eggs very poorly, and subsisted (not thrived) on a diet consisting of spilled seeds and grains, plus what they harvested from the fields of (largely grains) plantings and vegetables, plus any feeds missed by the horses, the cattle, the dogs or cats, kitchen scraps, and what they could forage as part of a working farm system, usually on the edge of failure. Take away the spilled feed for the horses, the dogs, the fields of grain, mom's veggie plots, etc and the whole thing falls apart.

Or they were fed - usually a mix of corn, wheat, and one or two other grains (whatever was local and cheap - sorghum, rye, barley, etc) supplimented with a source of needed amino acids (though they didn't know this is what they were providing) from an animal source, typically milk, buttermilk or "meat scraps" together with green forage (alfalfa was commonly recommended, and clover - we tend to use soy today). On that diet, a productive hen produced maybe one egg every third or fourth day, generally medium to large in size, and an old rooster might be six or seven pounds. Chicken in the pot was a special treat - so special it was often a Sunday dinner, and the basis for numerous political slogans, "a chicken in every pot". And the reason it was in the pot, apart from its small size, was that only long moist cooking methods made it edible.

/edit and you ate your flock going into Winter, so you didn't need to feed them, keeping only the best birds and maybe a single rooster, two at most, so you could build up the flock's numbers come Spring.