It’s nice to know where your food comes from and how it’s produced. That’s why we produce some of our own chicken food. We’d like to think there’s a eco-friendly cycle that helps us produce great eggs that we can be happy with. And, if we’re doing it right, our girls will be happy about it too.
Let’s start with fruit and vegetable scraps that we get from a local merchant. It’s a special food source for our flock. They run into yard #2 to enjoy the feast. Whatever can be pecked, torn apart, scratched apart or broken into small pieces is usually devoured quickly. We chop up some material with a machete to help the girls get at it. Fruit and vegetable scraps are the first step in the cycle.
Root vegetables, rinds, husks and other portions of the scraps that can’t be consumed by our flock are ground up for easier consumption. In the photo above left, you’ll notice a grinding station mounted on one side of the worm bed. The ground material lands in the worm bed where it’s eaten by the hens during the day, and by the worms at night. Nothing goes to waste or is ever discarded. That’s the second step in the cycle.
The third step occurs when our flock enjoys the composting worms we have in the worm bed. They’re called Red Wigglers, and they’re great for composting and fishing and feeding our flock. There isn’t any type of food that gets our girls more excited than worms. They can spot and catch a worm with peak efficiency. Where we see a couple of worms in the soil, the girls can see many more and get busy extracting them. The worm bed is a 4-foot diameter heavy steel culvert turned up on end and buried about 8 feet deep. So, the worms have plenty of room to retreat and reproduce. A drip system surrounds the inside of the worm bed, and that makes it moist for the worms, just the way they like it. Any time I turn over the worm bed, the hens are right there to harvest worms with peak efficiency.
The fourth step in the cycle of chicken food is to grow natural pasture loaded with grass, weeds, bugs and worms, and vegetable crops that are protected by fencing panels parallel to the ground. The flock is free to eat from the land dedicated to natural pasture, and they get to stick their necks down into the protected beds and harvest vegetables as they grow. This year the protected beds offer them an abundance of bok choi, carrot tops, collards, Swiss chard, beets, radish tops, spinach and kale.
The fifth part of the food cycle consists of the bird droppings that unavoidably make their way into the protected beds and worm beds and pasture areas, and are cultivated or rinsed into the soil. These natural additions make the chicken yards some of the most fertile soil areas we have.
The last part of the chicken food cycle is using the material in the worm bed as garden compost for the protected beds. Since we’re quite dry here in Wyoming, composting in a traditional way is almost impossible. With adding new material, the drip system keeping it moist, the worms depositing their “castings,” and our flock constantly scratching through it and leaving their own deposits, there just isn’t any better compost. So, we use it to grow more veggies for the flock within the protected beds and in our other garden spaces.
Although our flock has access to commercial grain, they rarely partake in it, preferring natural food like grass, weeds, bugs, worms, fruit and vegetable scraps, and whatever they can reach through the fencing material on the protected beds.
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Clair Schwan continues to create more and better ways to take care of his flock of 24 layers. He believes that good chicken food is a key to great eggs.
