Pellet vs Free Range/Foraging

[saysfaa]

... I take the view that the proof is in whether the chickens are healthy and reproducing or not. If they are doing those things for a sustained amount of time, then they’re getting what they need. ...

The rabbit trails went down a few forks but the original context was 3-and-a-half-and 5-year old hens with health and reproductive problems.

If all a person wants is enough eggs to eat and doesn't care which individuals in the flock the eggs come from then they might consider two years to be a sustained amount of time. And conclude the chickens are getting what they need.

They are getting what they need... to live two years, and replace themselves.

That doesn't help with whether they would have lived six healthy, productive years if they had eaten only commercial chicken feed.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

Where does the two year life span figure come from?

 

[saysfaa]

Two years comes from being long enough for one generation to replace a previous generation.

Also from being much shorter and easier to type than trying to say "some length of time less than what the original question was about."

Also, being much less confusing than trying to get the concept of a life long enough to be considered "substantial time" yet still short of the potential lifespan across in an explanation or analogy.

 

[3KillerBs]

2. Not all habitats are conducive for meeting a chicken’s needs, but given the world-wide historical practice of free ranging chickens to provide food sources for their owners, proper free range habitat is not rare or complicated.

This is the point where I have to quibble.

If the area does or has historically supported feral chickens, then yes, it can indeed support chickens in that fashion without any human-produced input.

But if it does not/has never supported feral chickens then it is not reasonable to believe that it could currently do so.

Chickens living off human's waste in an urban environment and chickens living without direct feeding on a diversified farm where they have access to human's waste, spillage from other animals, spillage and gleanings from harvested fields, etc. are not being supported by the environment alone.

If it were really as easy to support free-range chickens as you seem to be claiming then feral chickens would be everywhere instead of being limited to high-productivity ecologies in warm, wet climates.

 

[NatJ]

Chickens living off human's waste in an urban environment and chickens living without direct feeding on a diversified farm where they have access to human's waste, spillage from other animals, spillage and gleanings from harvested fields, etc. are not being supported by the environment alone.

I agree that a chicken in that environment is not being supported by a wild or natural environment.

But if you consider people & their waste to be part of the environment, then that environment sometimes does support chickens without the people having to consciously do anything for the chickens. So "the environment alone" is supporting the chickens.

When people change an environment, sometimes they change it in ways that allow chickens to survive when they could not before.

(I'm still in favor of providing food to chickens in the vast majority of cases, just quibbling about your quibble.)

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

This is the point where I have to quibble.

If the area does or has historically supported feral chickens, then yes, it can indeed support chickens in that fashion without any human-produced input.

But if it does not/has never supported feral chickens then it is not reasonable to believe that it could currently do so.

Chickens living off human's waste in an urban environment and chickens living without direct feeding on a diversified farm where they have access to human's waste, spillage from other animals, spillage and gleanings from harvested fields, etc. are not being supported by the environment alone.

If it were really as easy to support free-range chickens as you seem to be claiming then feral chickens would be everywhere instead of being limited to high-productivity ecologies in warm, wet climates.

First, I think its a false comparison to allege that chickens cannot thrive free ranging on farms where they do not live feral in nature. Farm conditions are conducive for chickens in ways that has nothing to do with the farmer directly providing crops either for the chickens or for other livestock. For example, on my farm my cows eat wild woods grasses and weeds. They of course make manure from such and stir up the ground and thickets with their grazing. The chickens follow behind and pick through the manure, the bugs and tasty bits the cows stir up, and the parasitic bugs that actually bite the cows. Thus the chickens thrive because of farm activity, but its activity that has nothing to do with any effort by myself to provide food for the chickens, and the only effort I made to provide food for the cows was laying out their fence in the places I want them to graze and browse. Also, my presence and the presence of my dogs reduces predator activity around the immediate farmyard. What a bobcat may dare to attempt on a chicken 500 yards in the woods has little to do with what the bobcat will try 50 yards from my porch, as the bobcat knows myself and my dogs are a threat. The gamefowl know this to and stick to the safe zones, while factory layers wander the danger zones until they get picked off. Therefore if you want to look at history, it doesn’t make sense to look to where chickens historically live feral, but instead where chickens were historically raised free range on farms. Which was almost everywhere.

Now as to feral chickens, the reason feral chickens haven’t conquered the southeastern United States, in my opinion, is because chickens are hard wired to not disperse far. Red jungle fowl do not disperse far in the wild. Unlike wild turkeys, which will travel for miles within a single day. Feral chickens have a tendency to just live in perpetuity whereever they are released, not traveling beyond a few city blocks or a few hundred yards in the woods for many decades or even a century or more, even though surrounding habitat is conducive for spread.

Supporting free range chickens is in fact easy in farmland if the chickens are of a rustic type. They eat bugs, grass, weeds, and miscellaneous small animals. If they have plenty of those things, water, cover, and high predator alertness, they thrive. What I’m describing here is the history of the chicken. The coop is NOT the normative way chickens have been kept by humans in history. Coop keeping is an aberration that has only defined two limited periods in domestic chicken history; for a time during the Roman period and the last 100 years. Why are you resistant to that fact?

 

[Shadrach]

And, in any case, when considering a farm one is considering significant acreage -- not anything like the ordinary backyard "free ranging".

I think this is the problem here. There is no ordinary backyard free ranging particularly when one includes how the rest of the world keep chickens. U_Stormcrows poll indicates as much for the keepers here on BYC.
What there is is a proportion of people who never let their chickens out of their coop and run and then there's the rest.
The rest interestingly, are the majority. Just in what way and by how much whatever time they have out of the coop and run influences their diet and health is a topic without much data.

What I think would help here is taking more into account that what may be a sensible approach to nutrition for say a fully confined group is not necessarily going to be the same for another keeping model.

 

[Shadrach]

This is the point where I have to quibble.

If the area does or has historically supported feral chickens, then yes, it can indeed support chickens in that fashion without any human-produced input.

But if it does not/has never supported feral chickens then it is not reasonable to believe that it could currently do so.

Chickens living off human's waste in an urban environment and chickens living without direct feeding on a diversified farm where they have access to human's waste, spillage from other animals, spillage and gleanings from harvested fields, etc. are not being supported by the environment alone.

If it were really as easy to support free-range chickens as you seem to be claiming then feral chickens would be everywhere instead of being limited to high-productivity ecologies in warm, wet climates.

I don't think this a fair arguement.
There wouldn't be any chickens to argue about without human interference.
You can't rule out adaptation, be that to an environment primarly human, or some other creature. There is interdependency between all the species.

 

[Black star night]

.... unless we broke them, Perhaps we need to ask if our selection made it impossible for them to live like their wild jungle fowl ancestors. Maybe they're not fast enough or maybe their nutritional needs are different because of their breeding or maybe they do not have the cultural heritage that a wild hen passes to her brood.

Feeding grain to chickens, cows, pigs etc is something that started in the 1900’s. Not 1000 + years ago. And it only became ‘major’ source in the last 50 years.

The biome and genetics don’t evolve that quickly

And no matter what the overwhelming evidence that rawly back to naturally intended is never a bad idea.

 

[raingarden]

Feeding grain to chickens, cows, pigs etc is something that started in the 1900’s. Not 1000 + years ago. And it only became ‘major’ source in the last 50 years.

I don't agree. Domestication of wheat and corn started in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica respectively about 10,000 years ago. The domestication and improvement of these two crops was an important part of the human transition from hunter/gatherers to farmers.

Wheat farming was already well established and had spread throughout the world by the time chicken domestication began about 4,000 years ago; again in Mesopotamia. Like wheat, chickens quickly spread throughout the known world.

Wheat harvesting and processing is not a tidy process, especially when the thrashing and winnowing was done artisanally by hand. Picking up every grain that was left in the field or accidentally fell in the dirt is not practical when you have quantities to process. Letting the chickens clean up the fields and pick up spilt grain puts what would otherwise be wasted to productive use.

Corn had spread throughout North and South America, and everywhere else, by the time chickens arrived with Hernan Cortez in 1504. Corn, beans and squash formed the staple diet of the indigenous people in the area. Corn also had to be shelled and ground by hand. It is likely that chickens were eating spilt corn soon after getting off the boat.

In that sense, chicken domestication and imrovement has gone hand-in-hand with domestication and improvement of wheat and corn.

Chicken feed, made primarily of grain, became commercially available about a century ago.