Pellet vs Free Range/Foraging

[Florida Bullfrog]

Random barnyard mixes of hatchery stock went 1 out of 12. But the one that made it is a doozy. She’s the best free range mother I have. Better than the games.

 

[Geena]

My take on it is that its behavioral. The reason I think that is because the few surviving factory layers I have have survived because they adopted the gamefowls’ ways. With the exception of Leghorns, it takes about a dozen factory/hatchery type layers or duel purpose birds to produce 1-2 survivors that make it free range long term. Of the dozen that used to meet me at the gate, 2 survived and are now homebodies that run with the gamefowl. Prior to that, I had 1 survivor of the previous dozen. Leghorns went 5 for 5 surviving and I simply moved them off farm so they wouldn’t breed into my games. Leghorns already have somewhat game-type builds and I produced some half-breeds that looked like games. So I didn’t want to risk unauthorized mixing. And I didn’t like them molting white feathers everywhere. The Wyandottes went 2 out of 6. Easter Eggers went 1 out of 4.

Thanks, it makes sense, that kind of smarts and survivability is not likely something a hatchery would bother selecting for. Not to make a pun, but that's something that really needs to be field tested for.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

You're right, I shouldn't have laughed.
But it still sounds quite well suited to some kind of animals and plants (evidence: all of your points about what people did raise, plus what other people are actually producing & selling there.)

Every climate has its problems, and they aren't all the same.


I thought you were saying that chickens should be able to forage for their own food ALL YEAR LONG. Just in the good months is a very different thing.

And @3KillerBs point about whether feral chickens live somewhere is clearly limited by winters-- a flock that dies in the winter is no longer there next summer.

If you think it's reasonable for people to provide some food at some seasons, you're making a very different point than I thought you were.

I’ll do a better writeup that restates my position later, but while I have good internet I’ll post some pics that might more clearly illustrate what I am and am not intending to communicate.

This morning I threw out 5 small handfuls of crumbles to the free rangers out of this bucket that is about 2/3rds full of feed. That’s all they get from me all day unless I have scraps to throw out that the dogs wouldn’t want such as old vegetables. The crumbles are a mix of all-flock, laying crumbles, and cracked corn. The remaining feed in the bucket, which is basically -all of the feed in the bucket minus 5 handfuls, goes to the coop birds, and normally feed a 1 1/2 bucket to the coop birds instead of 2/3rds of a bucket like I did today.

Now notice the background of the free range flock. The grass has seed heads. That bahia grass and its what makes up most of my
lawn.

I haven’t mowed in 3 weeks, and that’s all it takes for the bahia to go from tightly cropped to seed heads. The bahia is the basis of the food chain for my livestock. The circular area of my farmyard also happens to be the center of what amounts to a bahia meadow that I call my yard. My poultry thrive off the bahia both the seeds and the blades. When I mow this weekend seeds will be scattered all over and the chickens will enjoy picking them up on the clipped lawn.

Here is an oak north side of the pond the chickens like to roost in.

The oak’s roots go down into the pond so the oak gets infinite water year-round and therefore a reliable acorn crop each fall. The acorns will fall and blanket the area below the oak where the chickens will eat on them all late fall and winter. Acorns are an excellent source of both fat and carbs. The previous owner kept this oak cut down higher up the trunk. I let it grow back from the point of the cut. Over 5 years it grew back amazingly fast due to the access to the pond water.

Here’s some oregano growing in planter off my porch. I give it no care. It just grows. The chickens always browse in it. Its supposed to be a natural dewormer. It was here 5 years ago when I moved in inside of a hanging flower pot left lay on the planter. I put the plant in the planter and just let it be.

Here’s a bed of sweet potatoes. They’re just there. The only care I give them is I put manure from the cows in the bed late winter. Otherwise they just grow like weeds. I dig up the tubers late fall and just leave some tubers to come back the next spring. The chickens sometimes eat the vines. Sometimes they don’t. See the tall whispy green plant growing there? That’s dog fennel. I’ve been too lazy to pull it. Its a natural pesticide but also toxic. Yet the chickens love it. I suspect they use it to self-medicate like the oregano.

Just some random pics I took but they should help illustrate the point I’ll lay out later.

The free range chickens thrive because of my presence on the farm. But my activity isn’t particularly indepth. I let my lawn grow a couple of weeks then mow it. I let an oak tree and some plants do their thing. Decisions that boost the natural food available but aren’t anything beyond minimal care.

 

[Iluveggers]

Well no, it wasn’t that Florida was fertile. If you ever heard about the first European explorers like Hernando de Soto and Ponce de Leon, their expeditions generally ended in disaster because they couldn’t find much food to eat. Most of the early explorers died of starvation and disease, if not attacks from the natives. The natives practiced very limited farming based around a handful of crops that were adapted to Florida. Native settlements concentrated around fertile pockets of hardwoods and bamboo thickets we call hammocks and canebrakes respectively. Places where leaves and grasses decayed and created pockets of fertility. The natives were mostly relying on natural produce such as palmetto berries, acorns, and swamp cabbage (palm-tree heart), but more than that they were hunting and fishing.

The white settlers that survived did so by adopting the natives’ ways and by free ranging their livestock.

There was once an array of Florida adapted crops that went extinct with modern agricultural supplements that improve the soil. A few native crops that are left are Seminole pumpkins and currant (now called “Everglades”) tomatoes. Old Florida homesteads will still often have the adapted bananas and figs.

Florida didn’t really get ruined until the 1950s-1960s in South Florida and the 2000s in North Florida. Florida’s population more than doubled from 1980 to 2020. Prior to the influxes that happened in those regions during those times, the Florida landscape was just woods and primitive homesteads scattered around with the occasional village.

That seems to contradict most of what I have been reading about the Natives in Florida. Corn, beans, squash, melons, amaranth, pumpkins, sunflowers, nuts, & fruit trees were the main common Native crops referenced. They specifically set up large areas of farmland and their sustainable practices did not exhaust soil fertility. They worked together as a community to keep the crops safe, and utilized no-till hills to prevent erosion and preserve fertility. Can you cite a source for your info? If my info is incorrect I’d like to apologize.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

That seems to contradict most of what I have been reading about the Natives in Florida. Corn, beans, squash, melons, amaranth, pumpkins, sunflowers, nuts, & fruit trees were the main common Native crops referenced. They specifically set up large areas of farmland and their sustainable practices did not exhaust soil fertility. They worked together as a community to keep the crops safe, and utilized no-till hills to prevent erosion and preserve fertility. Can you cite a source for your info? If my info is incorrect I’d like to apologize.

Yes, and let me start by pointing out something I noticed about this article you posted:

http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/953

First, the only thing I'd challenge as to reliability of the article is that its grouping Southeastern Native Americans together in terms of their farming practices, which wouldn't be accurate to do. What de Soto may have observed in another part of the Southeast wouldn't necessarily have any application to Florida. Here's de Soto's reconstructed route that is generally accepted:

That's a big area with lots of different habitats and climates. How natives were growing crops in middle Georgia wouldn't have much to do with how they were growing them in central Florida.

Along those same lines, what the Creeks and Seminole were doing wouldn't have much relation to the Timucuans and other groups that were present in Florida at the time to European contact and conquest. The Creek/Seminole group were immigrants into Florida that came after the Spanish conquest.

Putting aside the grouping together of agricultural practices that may not ought to be so grouped, I think you're (with all due respect of course) misunderstanding the article. Much of what the article is describing is theories on how the Native Americans dealt with Florida's poor soil. It describes soil building methods such as using legumes like beans to fix nitrogen in the soil so that maize/corn could grow, because otherwise corn depletes the soil too much.

Starting here we can establish that Florida's soil is naturally poor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myakka_(soil)

https://www.thefloridagardeningproject.com/the-challenge-of-sandy-soil

Myakka sand is what covers most of the state. Among the sand there were/are pockets of fertility around certain forest and waterway types and that's where the Natives settled. Generally places where organic material was constantly being deposited and not washing or draining away.

That the first Natives were able to thrive here doesn't mean Florida was a paradise. It means they were tough people who grew tough crops and they knew how to amend the soil. Much of what the article describes is what modern Florida gardeners have to do in order to have a crop without using modern industrial fertilizers and amendments. I use my chickens in cows to make pockets of richness I can garden in. I also take advantage of crops that like the otherwise poor conditions. For example, my blueberries come right out of this kind of habitat in nature.

Also, note that we don't really know much about how the Timucuans did things. The Spanish didn't tell us much about them and in just a few decades after the Spanish attempted to colonize inland Florida, the Natives were wiped out by diseases. Florida then became empty in the interior. In the next centuries the Creeks moved in from the Carolinas and became the Seminole. Then the Crackers moved down from Georgia. The Spanish-Seminole-Cracker groups became the trifecta of Florida native populations until the mid twentieth century.

Timucuans probably had various native adapted crops that went extinct with those Natives did. We have at least one crop the Seminoles brought into Florida that we call Seminole pumpkins that are probably an offshoot of Cherokee pumpkins.

The above comes out of one of my Florida history books from college and you can see the Spanish failed to colonize the interior of Florida because of the harsh conditions, where they were otherwise successful in colonizing some interior portions of the greater Southeast. They simply couldn't plop their European crops into the ground and get success.

Here's a map of known Native American villages and settlements around Florida. They're clustered around the coasts and the river systems. I know some of those places on the map, having been born and raised in one of those red dot clusters and I can say those settlements are generally usually fertile places conducive for farming. I now live in one of the empty areas and farming is a struggle.

 

[saysfaa]

This Tribes of Florida only barely touches the topic but it might add a little.

Edit to add, all but the first two say at least something about their food sources. As well as what part of Florida and, sometimes, a bit about the soil.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

I forgot to add that the nuts and fruits that they were harvesting are what’s native here. They weren’t likely cultivated improved varieties. They were foraging off of the fruit trees that are naturally growing in the woods. They may have fertilized them with dead fish or human waste.

The article also makes mention of slash and burn farming, which is what is still practiced today in poor soils. The wood ash raises the soil pH and gives nutrients something to cling to in what is otherwise sand that won’t hold the nutrients beyond the first major rain. I regularly use wood ash to raise the pH of my garden beds.

The reason slash and burn is used in rainforests is because rainforest soil is usually poor. The native plants thrive in the rainforest but the kind of food crops humans want to grow don’t naturally thrive in it. Therefore poor farmers cut and burn sections of forest to farm for a season or a few then when the few nutrients are depleted they move to the next section of forest. For those sections of the Amazon that have rich soil, it is now generally accepted that ancient humans amended the soil on a massive scale in some past millennia and made sections rich.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

 

[Shadrach]

My take on it is that its behavioral. The reason I think that is because the few surviving factory layers I have have survived because they adopted the gamefowls’ ways. With the exception of Leghorns, it takes about a dozen factory/hatchery type layers or duel purpose birds to produce 1-2 survivors that make it free range long term. Of the dozen that used to meet me at the gate, 2 survived and are now homebodies that run with the gamefowl. Prior to that, I had 1 survivor of the previous dozen. Leghorns went 5 for 5 surviving and I simply moved them off farm so they wouldn’t breed into my games. Leghorns already have somewhat game-type builds and I produced some half-breeds that looked like games. So I didn’t want to risk unauthorized mixing. And I didn’t like them molting white feathers everywhere. The Wyandottes went 2 out of 6. Easter Eggers went 1 out of 4.

How many closed flock generations do you have?
It took three generations of what were already free range hatched Marans to adapt to Catalonia from France.
The Bantams however caught on pretty fast and one rarely saw them wandering around in the open.
The Marans did evenually learn by following the most senior hen who had cover to cover routes worked out to get to most of the prime resources.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

How many closed flock generations do you have?
It took three generations of what were already free range hatched Marans to adapt to Catalonia from France.
The Bantams however caught on pretty fast and one rarely saw them wandering around in the open.
The Marans did evenually learn by following the most senior hen who had cover to cover routes worked out to get to most of the prime resources.

My Crackers are somewhere around generation 4 or 5 in terms of hens. My brood cock was a Gen 2 until he died of snake bite, now I’ve restored the original Gen 1 brood cock that’s toping Gen 1, 2, and 3 hens. But I’m also adding in American gamefowl across the board to freshen up the Cracker’s disease resistance and to make them a bit larger.

The Crackers have always been predator alert from the get go. I’ve lost very few to predators including hawks. The biggest change I’ve noticed related to predator resistance is my Gen 1 brood cock seems to be sufficiently old enough to flog things that mess with his hens. He’ll now flog the Guineafowl cocks if they attack a hen and since he’s been back on free range hawk attacks have totally stopped.

 

[raingarden]

https://books.google.com/books?id=POVaAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:"Herbert+Atkinson"&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&ovdme=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiXs7mF_Z35AhXUsYQIHSagC8sQ6wF6BAgIEAU#v=onepage&q&f=false

There’s one I have on hand and I’ll pull some more this evening. This one doesn’t got into detail on specifically winter raising but it more generally talks about them taking care of themselves in chapter 6 via foraging.

Thank you very much. That's a good one.