Hi, I am an experienced gardener and I do put up a lot of food for my family. I live in Upstate NY on top of a hill with 2.5 acres. Once the winter winds get going here, not much fun to be outside. I do not have a flock yet but my daughter has started dreaming about keeping chickens. To feed my family over the winter months, several years ago I built a root cellar, insulated it floor, ceiling, walls, then installed a *CoolBot device with an air conditioner in my basement. It drips water out the back of the AC unit into a bucket on my already wet basement floor. If that's inconvenient then you'll need an exterior window where you can let it drip outside, but I didn't want to be cooling down from higher ambient temperatures, or dealing with winter freezes, so my root cellar needed to be below ground in my basement. In that 4'wide x5' H x6 Long room I have stored amazing amounts of foods. I'm not sure what hens would want to eat but for the cost of running a small air conditioner unit daily, I can buy or grow a ton of food and keep it all winter long - all summer long. I have stored 16 bushels of apples and still had room for lots of other stuff. Root veggies, cabbages, potatoes, last fall's wild grapes, fall fruits I want to extend their ripe period a few weeks or longer, etc. Bins of greens will keep for a month if fresh when they go in. I always have a bushel of leftover immature peppers when the first freeze hits and they would keep at least a month or two. Certainly if you can buy bins of discount produce from a grocery store, that food would be kept from spoiling while the chickens get fed daily. The CoolBot tells the air conditioner to keep running far below it's normal temperature range, and it consistently maintains a temperature of 39F. When it comes to that much space to store food cold, compared to a walk in cooler or refrigerator, it is very afforable. I have heard that commercial cold rooms cost $800 and up just for the chiller, and then all the metal construction materials and plumbing and the maintenance fees when they break. It's $8000 for a restaurant size cold room. Mine cost $500 in materials, a curb side digital air conditioner, $325 for the CoolBot device, and the cost of electric to operate it monthly. I don't think it's more than $1/day. I think of it as my insurance plan - a couple crates each of carrots, beets, potatoes, cabbages, and apples for the humans could easily be expanded to having enough alternative feed for the hens, like how about all those pumpkins that go to waste in the fields after every Halloween! Stack them up in the cold root cellar. Hand them out once a week to the girls. If there were no way to get to a feed store, there probably will still be electric, although I'm not sure how every power company works, perhaps even more so in the case of someone who has solar panels or wind generator. I'm glad you posted this question, it's a good creative exercise for how to avoid buying feed. One of the deterrents to me getting a flock started is being able to afford organic feed! I will have to research how much food a chicken needs to eat in a day to understand the volume of alternative food that I'd need to have on hand. Assuming that chickens can survive on the types of storage foods I described, can anyone chime in on that? Thank you!
