Hi everyone. I found y'all via google. I live in the willamette valley, in Oregon. My wife and I along with our 2 year old moved into my great grandparents old house there a chicken coop already here but hasn't been used in several years.
as you can see its a bit neglected. But there's lots of shade under the tree! The pen is about 30x20 and the she'd has 10 roosting boxes built into it. I plan on tearing out the fence and going in with the bobcat and brush hog to clean it up before putting a new fence back up.
so onto the the questions. How many chickens can I keep in an area that size. I plan on not letting them out of the pen. To free range that is, Too many predators around. Next. We raise squash for the seed also.(like what you buy in the store as roasted pumpkin seeds) before they can be roasted and salted they have to be washed and dried. So I have thousands of pounds of broken dried seeds/meat/pulp. It looks like this
would it make a suitable food source for the chickens? I have a feed grinder I could run it all through first too if those chunks are too big. I'm sure I'll have plenty of more questions. But that's all I can think of for now!
Welcome To BYC and Happy Holidays! Like everyone else said, the general rule of thumb is 4 sq/ft per chicken in the coop and 10 in the run. That is a lot of squash seed, it is a good treat. If you have an idea of the nutritional makeup you could probably formulate your own chicken feed using a good portion of that. Had a link saved where they tried different amounts on broilers, don't know if it is the same squash. 
