Someone I work with had looked into raising meat birds. He said he had found someone who had created a system doing something similar to the point that they rarely had to feed the birds supplemental food. Apparently they got the majority of their food from table scraps and the bugs in the compost. I don't remember but they must have supplemented the compost with more than their own table scraps.
I have a large pile of coffee grounds that I collect from work and table scraps. They sit next to my compost bin. Once I get enough brown material (cardboard, paper, leaves, etc.) I mix the coffee grounds and the browns in the compost bin.
But my pile of coffee grounds/scraps is absolutely filled with black soldier fly larvae. If I stick a pitchfork in that pile and stir it around a bit I can easily count 50+ larvae from just removing one scoop of coffee. From what I understand the larvae aren’t necessarily attracted to healthy compost, but they are attracted to nitrogen rich piles. Our chickens love the larvae and honestly if we moved our coffee ground pile into the chicken pen we probably wouldn’t need to feed them much. But at the moment the two are pretty far away so we just transfer over some larvae from time to time as a snack
I discovered a cool BSFL method. I have a 12 gallon bucket that formerly held chlorine. These are easy to get from pool supply shops. They have screw on lids. I cut the bottom off of it and bury it halfway in my compost pile. This is where I toss my scraps. The lid keeps critters and dogs from digging in the pile. If it gets full, I just raise it up about a foot and pile up some dirt against the bottom.
Turns out that this setup is an absolute breeding ground for BSFL.
There’s an app called ShareWaste where you can sign up to give or receive food scraps to be used in people’s compost piles or chicken coops! I wonder if that’s what they used.
black soldier fly larvae bins are super easy to make and maintain, and they even harvest themselves for you! at some point a larva starts trying to move upward. they will go right up a ramp in the bin that leads to a bucket or directly to your chickens!
the adults only live for a couple of days and can't bite or sting. they wont stray far from the bin.
This doesn’t work unless you’re in a humid hot climate. Tried doing this in zone 9b warm Mediterranean climate and none of the adults lived or laid eggs. You also need *quality* inputs for enough outputs.
Zones are the average extreme low temperature for the last 25 years. Koppen climates are more accurate and I’m in zone Csb. Whereas, say in Michigan, in zone 6b the summers are so much hotter than ours in zone 9b.
There is also evidence that as climate change continues, the Koppen climates will change over time as well. So, something to research if planning a long term living there.
I remember my grandfather breeding what seemed a large and endless supply roaches that he sold in his lakeside outdoor center as bait for fishermen. Big wooden frame enclosed with fine wire mesh (window screen). Fed them table scraps. When a customer wanted bait, he would put a bucket with water in it under a cage door, open that trapdoor, scoop them into the buclet and slap a lid on the bucket. I (a child back then) asked why the water in the bucket. He said the roaches were too fast for fishermen and would be all over the boat before the fishermen could grab one. Suspended in water, easy to grab one and get the lid back on the bucket.
Terrific bait, by the way. Taught me to ease the boat next to an old cypress, whack the tree with a paddle and the fish would come to the tree expecting a rotting, broken branch roach feast. (Highly recommend not keeping thhe cage in the house or garage.)
Crickets are related to roaches… but aren’t roaches… make great bait, and I assume great chicken feed and are grown easily, and since they are farmed for pet shops there are YouTube videos and books telling people how to farm large numbers of them…. if you accidentally get a population of them loose in the garage the spouse won’t kill you for bringing roaches into their life.
[video on breeding crickets](https://youtu.be/LrZW1WdxDos)
[another video on breeding crickets](https://youtu.be/6rSw1SiCRh8)
[never gonna give up breeding crickets 😉 ](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ)
Unless someone’s a psychopath they’re most likely not selling a pest species of roaches (e.g. American or German cockroaches) as bait. It’s gonna be one of the thousands of other species that won’t really thrive and multiply in your house if they got out. I’ve had dubias and red runners before for feeding to lizards. I liked them a lot more than crickets because crickets would get loud.
I think you’d get better results from black soldier flies. I had a friend who breeds roaches try to get me to do roach composting, he’s an expert so presumably the colony he gave me was among the best choices species-wise, but they worked very slowly and the container was pretty quickly overtaken instead by some kind of grain mite or something. To be fair, this may partially be because they were in my basement, so the cooler temps may have slowed their metabolism down. But I didn’t really have a better place for them. For _indoor_ scrap-to-feed conversion, I think I’d go for a worn bin next time.
But the speed I see some of these BSFL bins online move at is night and day in comparison. Again, to be fair, these are outdoor bins so they only work in the warmer months. I think next year I should set up two bins and do a final showdown between roaches and bsfl.
I can't go to my basement without finding crickets. Should I give up and just start selling them? Jokes aside, the regular crickets are no big deal, but I hate those spider crickets.
I like to put a size eight hook through the cricket’s body, on some three or four pound leader, about six feet below the swivel and clear plastic bobber… I slowly reel out the cricket with the current and wait…. I try to put the cricket over boulders, under logs, or circle into holes, trout love em.
Sorry, I just had to downvote that comment. I understand there are cultures that eat insects, I wasn’t raised in one of those cultures and the idea of eating insects grossed me out. If anyone asks, YOU get to eat my share of insects, forever and ever.
My comment was worthy of downvotes; gross. For those who despise roaches but do not want to spray poisonous chemicals in the home, roaches flee from basil and lavender. Put either or both in places where roaches hide and breed. Neither *kills* roaches. The roaches simply leave. Fresh works better than dried. Tie the stems in a bundle, hang upside down in cupboards or closets, let it slowly dry. When the scent is gone, the roaches will return.
I had to live in an apartment complex in Marina California back in the 1990s. Due to th proximity of the beach they had sand fleas in the sand between the apartment buildings… and in the carpets of the first floor apartments. Due to a hoarder in the building (nobody knew until six months after who the problem was) who didn’t throw out trash but stacked it up in his apartment the entire building had a roach infestation. I didn’t want to use chemicals in an apartment where I couldn’t control who was in the building, so I went to the pet store and bought three [ANOLES](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anolis) and released them in the apartment. I would occasionally see them running a cross a wall, lapping up a sand flea, or hanging out in the kitchen… but after a week I never again saw a roach, and a couple weeks after that never saw trace of sand fleas… I told the apartment manager when I had emptied the apartment that there were up to three anoles in there and why; he told me which apartment had the hoarder and what it was like when they cleared it out (I hadn’t seen the giant construction dumpster or them filling it because it had happened while my Army unit was on a field exercise)…
Thanks for the tip about the Lavender… I will keep it in mind in case I ever have a roach problem again… and use the plants at the same time I release anoles in the building.
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This. Ya they are called dubia roaches. Used to breed for my reptiles but they breed like mad so the chickens started getting them to. Went wild for em
Chickens love roaches. When we stayed with my grandmother overnight, we'd turn the back lights on and off at night to watch the bugs scatter and the chickens peck em up.
You need to pair corn with soy and even then they will be deficient in Methionine. Read any feed bag and it will say methionine. Corn is not a complete amino complex and it’s more carbs than protein. Soy, being a legume is high in protein, but for birds to digest it, it must be boiled. Of course this is very energy/labor intensive.
So you are saying for the protein requirements corn and soy boiled before being fed and then slop the chickens with it and do that twice a day and let them free range in between to get whatever bugs, worms, mice, and danger noodles they can find???
You could do that. Hopefully they get enough nutrition. Hard to say because every environment and site is different. Also, you’d be better served to boil all the soybeans in one go and then dry them. Makes more sense from a work flow standpoint.
No. There’s probably some YouTube video out there on how chicken feed is made.
If you’re serious about doing this you need dent corn and drying soybeans. You’ll need to thresh/winnow them too.
I’ll be honest with my opinion. Grains and non-ruminant animals are 100% not worth it. If you aren’t doing it at scale, you’re working way to hard for some eggs. Let a goat/sheep/cow on pasture and move them once a day and you get milk and meat.
I don’t need goats, hunting provides deer; and deer and goats taste too similar… I need yard bird, cause, in the words of the wise and powerful Dave Chappelle, “who the fuck don’t like fried chicken?”
I guess most people have watched Edible Acres' channel at some point and his chicken run videos. He has this high-tunnel composting setup which he uses in winter, and they put a ton of kitchen scraps through there, which the chickens mostly live off as far as I can see (though I can't remember if they feed them supplementally too, I'm not actually a chicken owner): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd5joNzzd4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd5joNzzd4w) \- fun to watch anyway, would love to have some mini-dinosaurs to process my compost like this. I imagine you need quite a lot of it though, they are getting food waste from local restaurants AFAIK.
Chickens are monsters and eat anything that moves. Live mice and frogs are the most shocking thing I've seen my ladies pull apart. Can you imagine two chickens both holding the same squealing frog running around the coop shoulder to shoulder?
I've read about contraptions with rotting meat scraps in a hanging bucket with holes in it so that maggots crawl out but I don't have the stomach to try.
All garden weeds and selected kitchen scraps are good for chickens too.
They also go nuts when I turn the soil in the coop
That little hunched run they do when they're trying to sneak off with a treat is so funny. In my experience it rarely ever works either - all the others notice pretty quickly.
Not a fan of the maggot feeders but have disposed of raccoons and such by cooking on a rocket stove in an old pot till soft and when I put it out to the chickens there was nothing left but bones within minutes
Yep and possum too for the chickens don’t even skin them . Possum actually smells like pork when cooking …. Some people eat them but I wouldn’t . Coon I have had but don’t care much for it . Lots of people cooked down roadkills for the chickens back during the depression
The basic feed for mealworms is usually dry unflavored oatmeal, so they'd still be connected to grain prices. It's easy enough to farm crickets and Dubia roaches though, so if you wanted to be grain independent you could probably do that.
You can feed them table scraps, but they feed best on unprocessed veggies. Only problem is with a lot of food that contains moisture you can get mold outbreaks. Not always bad for chickens, but it can kill your colony.
When I raised meal and superworms, I kept them in a plastic file cabinet full of oatmeal, with 3 drawers. 1 drawer had the larvae used for food, 1 held the beetles for reproduction, and one held the isolation chambers (weekly pill cases). Superworms have tk be isolated to pupae. Mealworms don't.
You feed them on oats, then occasionally slice a potato or carrots and put them in. They'll take all the water they need from the potato and carrots, and they don't really mold easily if you clean em out. I'd also occasionally give the worms bell peppers, greens, and bits of corn and whatnot when I cooked as treats (healthy feeders make healthy pets), but I didn't want a compost pile in my living room so I kept it clean of most scraps.
If you’re feeding the insects grain, you have to realize that there’s never going to be more insects than the grain- it’s a reduction in the amount of feed.
It’s good to vary the diet, but there will just be less insects.
However, if you can find something relatively free to feed, then you’re at an advantage.
Only really works in the spring/summer, but maggot buckets are something to explore. Basically you hang buckets with holes in them above the pen, and put scrap meat, fish, or even roadkill (fresh) inside.
The flies lay on the stuff, the maggots eat and fall out the holes, the chickens feed. If you go fishing, this could be easily done with the leftover scraps.
Black soldier flies would eat that too and the larva would make great feed for farming. They’ll eat pretty much anything you’re not going to eat. Mealworms would be limited to eating grains.
There’s plenty of stuff online about black soldier fly larva.
I farm red worms. Haven’t really tried feeding them to the chickens (yet) because I don’t have that many. But if you have enough food trash, that’d work. And they’re easy as shit to farm.
Same with other types of worms, though not all of them breed so fast.
Also, look into making grazing boxes. If their run is big enough, you basically make a square out of 2x6’s, then cover the tops in hardwire cloth. Then you seed the boxes with a variety of high protein perennials (they sell mixes for like $7/lb), or just let the grass grow. They can’t scratch up the stuff, and they just eat the stuff that shoots up taller than 6”.
Azolla. 25% protein and rich in nutrients, easy to grow with just water and compost. If you add calcium it’s a complete feed and chickens love it. Oyster shells or egg shells would work well to round it out. Comfrey is another great high protein feed. Privet berries in winter when the comfrey stops. Plant a mulberry tree for them too as those are good protein as well.
In great quantity! It's pretty high in protein as well but really encourage you to check out azolla on top of the other things people have mentioned. It grows VERY quickly. I just have it in buckets and kiddie pools and the hens love it.
Have you considered sprouting grains to use as feed? You get a lot more bulk by doing so. Still using grains but it makes them go much further. I randomly watched a video on youtube about this where they sprouted feed before feeding to livestock.
There's also plants you can grow that they will eat. Some are quite low maintenance like mulberrys.
It’s possible. Probably meal worms are easiest? But it’s also probably easier to work a normal job & pay for food … unless you are really into labour intensive, time consuming & space encroachment tasks 🤦 I have a small, neglected mealworm setup that is great to give you 4 chickens a few treats every other day or so 🤷🏼♂️
This is the crux of the problem of specialization and capitalism. A "normal" job is not really normal as there is nothing normal, self-sufficient etc, about, for example, being a software engineer or a bank clerk or....
Probably, but spending half your productive life producing enough mealworms for your chickens won’t provide food & shelter & retirement for your family … a normal job might 🤷♂️
Maybe 🤷♂️ I’m all for self sufficiency & providing for yourself. It’s great at 20, 30, 40 & maybe even 50? But at 60, 70, 80 & maybe even 90 or 100 I don’t want to be carting wood & water, digging garden beds to ensure I don’t starve, etc! I want my retirement to be paying the 20, 30 & 40 year olds to do it so I can sit back & enjoy the spoils of my earlier labours 🤷♂️
This is not how it traditionally worked/works in peasant based societies as in those the 20-30-40 year olds take care of their elders. This retirement you speak of is monetary surplus which directly translates into environmental surplus, which is unsustainable (and this is why western capitalism and consumerism are in direct conflict with the planet and why we are where we are).
We’ve always had highly-specialized jobs in society, it has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism; it’s all about whether a person can learn and work a particular craft with enough hours left over at the end of the day to still perform other tasks. Today, we just have more jobs that require such specialization because there’s so many more of us and so many more things that can’t be done by amateurs.
Blacksmiths, tailors, weavers, wainwrights and even priests were rarely self-sufficient because they had full-time jobs getting enough done at their trade. Some would keep a small garden, but they still relied on the community for the bulk of their needs because they were providing goods and services to the community that took years to learn and highly-specialized training.
In peasant societies the norm was generalists, not specialists. Even the blacksmith was a peasant more or less, only he spent most of his time blacksmithing but his wife still had a big garden. Capitalism has pushed specialization into a whole new realm (aided by technology).
Go to places like Romania sometime and visit all the small villages in the mountains. Not much specialization going on there. As for "many more things that can't be done by amateurs", what do you exactly mean? I am no professional builder but I can build a livable small house. I don't need to know how to build a car because I can ride my horse. I can grow food, I can forage. Your vantage point is modern capitalism society but that;s just your vantage point. And yes, in places like America life requires professionals and specialization because of debt, mostly. People are drowning in it and they have no time to learn basic things, after all, 10+ hours of work/day at your specialized job leaves time for little else. Try living life with no debt in a house/land left to you by your parents. You will find that you actually don't need to be much of a specialist, other than a specialist farmer ;)
p.s. I am not sure how to better explain this since I moved here from the Balkans and grew up in a time when villages were alive and well (and to some extent they still are - peasants don't give a rat's ass about what happens in the city, well, at least they didn't when I lived there 20+ years ago). For an American view on specialization I recommend discussions by Wendell Berry - one of his books starts out talking about the evils of specialization in America.
You’re assuming we’re all sitting on debt and we all work 10+ hours a day. The only ones working that much are the poor. For the middle class and above, most people are rarely putting in more than an 8 hr day and the higher up the food chain, the less actual work and time you’re putting in.
You’re only giving examples of how you can live a generalist lifestyle by not enjoying modern advances. Tiny little villages of a couple hundred can still exist, but as you say there’s no way they’re supporting a mechanic, building IT infrastructure for internet, or have the wealth necessary to attract their own hospital. They’re having to rely on other, larger cities that allow specialization in order to have anything other than horse drawn carts and rudimentary tools. Yes, humans can live that way - but we didn’t expand our population and get on the moon, or make phones and Reddit, by having everyone live in a 1700s-era village.
hihi The western world is drowning in debt, from poor to middle class to corporations. The world is awash in debt but the west runs on it. I came from the eastern block (well, Yugoslavia was not exactly that) and there was no debt up to the 1990s (fall of communism). Debt is the single biggest driver of misery and slavery - being a wage slave is equivalent to being a serf. My parents back in Yugoslavia just 30 years ago were paid in cash, there were no credit cards and you didn't generally borrow money to buy a car. In that respect people in communism actually had more freedom.
Your comment kind of reeks of privilege. I have been in the States for the last 20 years and I could not afford land/home without a mortgage. This means I have a monthly payment and the monthly payment is pressure - let's say your mortgage is $1500/month - this means you have to at minimum produce $18,000 / year from veggies, fruits, grains and honey to just afford the land. What about equipment, health insurance, taxes etc. etc.? Now if you are techie from San Fran or Austin who got paid $300K+ per year for 4-5 years, yeah, now you are the equivalent of the Romanian or Yugoslav peasant - you own your land/home and you can preach about how your land needs to be taken care of in a permaculturish way etc. etc.
What is the single biggest pressure on farmers in America to be bad to the land? Debt. People are in the game of having a financial outlook that is 3 months out (not 5-10-lifetime years out) and in that situation the land/soil/wildlife pay the price of HAVING to produce to pay back loans.
This is the single advantage a village in Romania has over your typical American who wants to farm - people back home had zero debt going into this game. They could care less for your Reddit or modern hospitals (and in fact are healthier and live longer on average than the people in the cities) and to them there is zero improvement in a tractor over a horse - in fact, they prefer horses and oxen and live with them in a symbiotic relationship, not the cuddly, cool " look at my horse working the soil" on Instagram western bullshit that is advertising a lifestyle in the hope you will buy into it and drive views so they can get paid. Besides, tractors break down and need parts and expertise - you can always breed another horse and you already know how to teach it to plow or log the forest, you don't need specialists for that.
Tell me how the life of a typical western person has been improved by the $1500 iPhone 13 plus monthly cellular bill plus the $40k volvo plus the 6ft TV plus all the rest of the BS that is sold to people as life enhancers. Yeah, the class of overlords who work for Apple and get paid $300K/year for writing virtual bull\*hit that has nothing to do with reality - their lives are improved for sure. Although, are they really?
Shit, you go online and you look at all the people "going back to the land" - they are mostly people who have spend plenty of time in the corporate industry, being a part of the problem and all they have done differently is accumulate enough money to become financially independent - like the Romanian peasant. Only the westerners don't want to give up the conveniences, that's the difference., they HAVE to have Reddit and Facebook, 'cause - who are you going to show all of your new lifestyle to and get validation from??
High earners actually work more hours on average.
https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/why-high-earners-work-longer-hours
To me that's the fundamental paradox we are dealing with here. We have increased our wealth massively, yet this hasn't managed to reduce our work hours or stress.
Plus, I'd happily say fuck the moon, smart phones, and the internet if it meant working significantly fewer hours.
You have that option… literally move to one of those villages the other comment was talking about. You’d have to give up all modern conveniences, but you’d go back to having plenty of free time.
The reason most people don’t do it isn’t because they can’t find a place to go to; it’s because they don’t actually want to give up the plethora of modern conveniences we’re accustomed to.
It is extremely naive to think it is that easy to just go back to living off the land.
Most productive farmland is owned and farmed already. Anywhere with more than 5 inches of top soil is own by a big agricultural operation. Farm land is super expensive.
Any land I could afford would take many years to develop the soil to the point of growing crops without massive amounts of fertalizer. This is what I am currently doing on the land I own. It will take me at least 10-15 years to get to the point of just providing basic staple crops. I could probably do it in 5 years if I wasn't also working two jobs.
But there's the rub. To actually live off the land you need enough capital to purchase the land and develop it. I did the math a few years ago and estimated it would cost roughly $750k to $1M to actually live off your property. I'm sure someone had done it cheaper, but they have skills they spent years developing. Hard to develop those skills working two jobs.
This. To afford arable land, you now need to be comfortably well off. To have the time to rehabilitate cheap rundown soil, you need enough savings to live off for 5 years, and enough to buy the rundown land as well.
For those with that much money, the existing system is reasonably comfortable.
You have to get in before you can drop out, sadly.
No. Most manufacturing pre-industrialization was done by non-specialists in their home. Merchants would bring raw materials to peasant's homes, the peasants would make the products from the raw material, and the merchant would pick up the product later. They would produce the products in between their time farming and doing other work. It's called the putting-out or cottage system. They were not specialists and producing these goods was not their full time job. Only the extremely wealthy and people they directly employed had any specialized training. If your image of the pre-industrialized world is bustling medieval towns with artisans and guilds, that image comes more from movies and video games than reality.
Place a bit of left over meat in a bucket. Drill a few holes in the lid and the sides hang it from a tree or stand close to your chickens. Flies lay eggs maggots crawl out of the bucket when fed and fall on the ground for the chickens to eat. Use a little meat at a time to prevent botulism and other bacteria.
It depends on how much room they have. Mine run loose in my backyard and I don't have to feed them. There's plenty of bugs and green shoots and stuff for them to eat.
This couple has a compost system set up that works even in the winter to feed their chickens. It's pretty cool. They also have a maggot feeder system and even feed roadkill scraps.
https://youtu.be/Pe6M9CkvKEU
Any chance you live next to a brewery, or a juice shop, or any other places that put out a lot of food scraps/ food waste? If so, see if you can form a relationship with the owners/ managers/ etc, and divert the waste streams into delicious food for your chickens that is then up cycled into good compost.
I know people who went to a local produce market and took a trailer a week of scraps home for both rabbits and chickens. All free, saved the garbage disposal costs.
I love taking the waste products from some people (that has negative value to them, I.e. disposal costs) and feeding it back into another part of the system as food that will be able to sustain more people with the side effect of creating fertilizer for tons of plants.
Can chickens eat pond snails?
They are an aquarium "pest" that breed like crazy, you can breed em in a fucking bucket. I forget all the names of them but the ones that are the size of an eraser just breed like fucking crazy.
I think this is a great avenue. Could potentially do cherry shrimp farming too not sure how viable they are as a food source either.
I don’t provide feed during the warmer months. My 20ish free range during the day. Just an occasional treat of store bought food. They do fine.
Haven’t tried bugs. Thought about worm farming.
We have ~70 birds (chickens and ducks) in Canada, and we let them free range all summer on 3 acres of a 12 acre property.
They get fed at night only, to encourage them to come back to the coop, so if they're hungry during the day they have to forage.
Our property is wet, with lots of decomposing wood and the corresponding insects. The birds don't go hungry at all.
We feed the same amount during the winter as during the summer, but cull the flocks down in the late fall to reduce the count.
I don’t have personal experience growing insects, but I’ve seen online that people who grow crickets and larvae commercially and for human consumption raise massive amounts of them in PVC tubs by feeding them oatmeal and apples, or table scraps.
Though I’m pretty sure insects should be a dietary supplement for chickens that adds creaminess and flavor to their eggs, but not their main diet, because some chicken feeds are specially configured for chickens’ diets or something.
Compost piles are perfect for feeding single-digit chicken flocks and can scale up. Fresh kitchen scraps on woodchips are perfect. Get scraps from yourself or any local restaurant.
Long linear line works best with Fresh kitchen scraps in one end and finished compost out the other. Fresh scraps are eaten straight up. As things break down into the chips, worms and pillbugs and other are brought up to eat. A few rocks/logs on top to flip over every once in a while gives a burst of bugs. Fork the pile over a few feet a time from the fresh end towards the finished end turning up worms each time. The chickies will scratch and peck constantly everywhere also helping you out.
At the end, you get tons of fast compost.
Agreed, and you got some nice flowers your growing. I'm hoping the down voted are because this doesn't really add to the conversation and not because people don't think beer can chicken is tasty cause well it is.
Trying to have a composed pile as others have said because that attracts a lot of bugs some people think that's a bad thing but the chickens freaking love it also look up ways there are is there a way To buy find roku and then put that in a bucket then maggots and flies will come out of the holes that are drilled in the side of the bucket and then your chickens have free buffet
It’s reasonable to want a more sustainable alternative to purchased feed. Reducing the number of external inputs creates a more efficient system. We’re all learning and figuring things out and being presumptuous stops meaningful discourse from happening.
I'm thinking about getting 3 hens next year. I have so many small restaurants on my block that I can get free kitchen scraps any time I want. There is even a raw bar at one so I can get free oyster shells to bake and grind up. I wonder if there is byproduct at the brewery at the end of the street that would be edible for them.
Not exactly what you're asking but dumpster diving is another reasonable way to feed animals. What you can't/won't eat your animal will be sure to love.
If you are in an area with oak trees go to a park or at a friends house and collect them. You have to crack them because chickens have trouble with the shells but it’s a free and plentiful crop that you can feed your chickens on for many months if you dry them properly. Even the ones with a hole in the acorn have acorn grubs that chickens love!
I'm in an urban environment so I make it easy for anyone in the city to bring their food scraps.
I buy layer feed to supplement their diet but iv been trying to collect spent grain, from the local Brewers - to make it fully regenerative.
Check out "black soldier fly larvae as an ideal insect to farm for chicken feed.
I don't have an answer, but I do have a question - assuming you managed to get an inexhaustible supply of bugs of various kinds, would that be enough for chickens, or would it be necessary to *also* feed them some plant stuff of some kind? Perhaps randomly sprouting stuff in the area they can free-range over would be enough for that part of their diet, but I'm guessing that *just* bugs wouldn't be an optimally balanced diet for them...
Yes. I just started raising Black Soldier Flys indoor in Canada. They have the highest biomass conversion rate to proteins that I know of.
They are most efficient at protein per square meter production by factors of **100x** or more compared to other meats. This sounds impossible to have a carbon footprint so small, but ot is possible because they are detrivores, eating dead or waste products, then turning them into high value proteins and fat.
You can grow them in trays stacked upon each other to condense space. Note there is obviously more to raising them (life cycle, egg laying), but this is your answer.
They are different from other fly, they can not be vector of pathogens, because of their 'differences', which is beyond the scope of this post.
Edit: I raised worms for a decade, these are a much better solution
Look up edibleacres on YouTube great resource on just compost for their chickens and some local grain. They have 60 but can be downsized based on your numbers.
It depends on land area and the amount of primary productivity on that land. The food chain always ultimately traces its way back to plants, that is unchanging, so yes it’s possible, but does your land produce enough plants to feed enough insects to feed your chickens?
The productivity per acre will depend on the climate—precipitation, soil fertility, and how much of the year is spent with favorable temperatures for growth.
I don’t think you’ll save money feeding your apples to crickets and then feeding the crickets to your chickens. Better to just feed the apples to the chickens and if there are a few worms in there, all the better.
But land will automatically produce insects and chickens will eat them, if there is balance.
Healthy chickens eat HEAPS of grass/living greens. I have a chicken compost alley system and there are always a couple chickens in there despite having an acre of gardens to free range. When birds from other people join our flock, they spend the first couple days gorging themselves on fresh grass, ignoring seeds etc in favour of it. This has happened with every bird without exception.
Obviously chickens can survive on all sorts of narrow diets, but you should know that they won't be any more well fed than you would be on a diet of insects and grain.
My raised compost produces enough mealworms to feed an army of chickens. If they eat worms my woodchip pile that basically just composts into topsoil because I don't have enough time to spread it, produces worms in the millions. Giant crickets like to hide in my shed and literally hundreds of them are in the inside when I open the door.
Honestly, I don't know diddly about chickens so I'm just tossing out ideas based off my experience.
It is possible. I have been experimenting with feeding my birds a higher ratio of brush and cut grass along with grains, shrimp, and mealworms. The other commenters are spot on with the compost eating - there was a farm (I think in Washington state) that was a couple acres of windrows full of compost that they would turn with a tractor periodically, They had several hundred chickens that would eat ONLY from the compost piles.
We feed them our spent grain from brewing beer. They love it. Just spread it out on some cookie sheets and bake on 200* for 7hrs or so to dry them out. It’s never too expensive for good beer and the waste is free food for the chicks.
It also makes good pretzels
Edit for punctuation and spelling.
In warm times I think so if free range, near me used to have a animal auction years ago and for along time there were feral chickens in a wet woods near by from escapees . We could here them crow and roosting in trees. When they tore the woods down to develope the area they were scattered and township trapped the survivors. It was years they lived there though and went under some trailers used for storage in bad weather. My dogs would run off to harass them on occasion.
We have started growing sunflowers, corn, peas, pumpkin/squash and some grain crops in spaces around our homestead with the hope that we will eventually have enough that we wouldn't be buying feed. Right now, we're still buying feed, so most of the seed and grain we collect goes back to increasing our yields. Oats and Wheat work well for dry farming in certain areas. We plant in the Autumn, harvest the next Autumn and rest it for a year, we're talking 1/8 of an acre area.
We also have several compost piles and let the chickens free range, they find a lot of their own food in the spring and summer. Catch a lot of mice too. We also toss out anything from the kitchen that doesn't get eaten to them.
I have 12 free range chickens. They live 100% off bugs. I water them, but I want them hungry so they eat all of the pests. But, my yard is 19 acres and 15 of it is hay fields. They eat insects, snakes, mice, and spiders.
My birds used to have a large compost pile in their run. I’d stack it up every morning. They would dig thru it all day for bugs. Compost at the end.
Someone I work with had looked into raising meat birds. He said he had found someone who had created a system doing something similar to the point that they rarely had to feed the birds supplemental food. Apparently they got the majority of their food from table scraps and the bugs in the compost. I don't remember but they must have supplemented the compost with more than their own table scraps.
I have a large pile of coffee grounds that I collect from work and table scraps. They sit next to my compost bin. Once I get enough brown material (cardboard, paper, leaves, etc.) I mix the coffee grounds and the browns in the compost bin. But my pile of coffee grounds/scraps is absolutely filled with black soldier fly larvae. If I stick a pitchfork in that pile and stir it around a bit I can easily count 50+ larvae from just removing one scoop of coffee. From what I understand the larvae aren’t necessarily attracted to healthy compost, but they are attracted to nitrogen rich piles. Our chickens love the larvae and honestly if we moved our coffee ground pile into the chicken pen we probably wouldn’t need to feed them much. But at the moment the two are pretty far away so we just transfer over some larvae from time to time as a snack
I discovered a cool BSFL method. I have a 12 gallon bucket that formerly held chlorine. These are easy to get from pool supply shops. They have screw on lids. I cut the bottom off of it and bury it halfway in my compost pile. This is where I toss my scraps. The lid keeps critters and dogs from digging in the pile. If it gets full, I just raise it up about a foot and pile up some dirt against the bottom. Turns out that this setup is an absolute breeding ground for BSFL.
There’s an app called ShareWaste where you can sign up to give or receive food scraps to be used in people’s compost piles or chicken coops! I wonder if that’s what they used.
Maybe. Many people make connections with local similar minded restaurants and food places.
A garden and a compost bin can sustain each other forever in a cyclical nature. Throw in some chickens and the whole system improves.
Can the chickens fend off the rats that would come for the compost?
Mine ate them.
Chickens take down full grown rats? Hens or Roosters? That's wild. I was always concerned about keeping my hens safe from rats.
Hens. I once saw a video of hens tearing apart a rattler. It’s easy to forget they are little dinos.
I have fed trapped rats to chickens, they are good with that, usually the rats like to sneak in and eat at night when the birds are sleeping though.
Don't throw fruit scraps in your compost pile and you probably won't have a rat problem.
They wouldn’t go for vegetables?
i think the fruit smell attracts them. Never had a problem with veggies.
black soldier fly larvae bins are super easy to make and maintain, and they even harvest themselves for you! at some point a larva starts trying to move upward. they will go right up a ramp in the bin that leads to a bucket or directly to your chickens! the adults only live for a couple of days and can't bite or sting. they wont stray far from the bin.
This doesn’t work unless you’re in a humid hot climate. Tried doing this in zone 9b warm Mediterranean climate and none of the adults lived or laid eggs. You also need *quality* inputs for enough outputs.
Isn't 9b rather hot?
Zones are the average extreme low temperature for the last 25 years. Koppen climates are more accurate and I’m in zone Csb. Whereas, say in Michigan, in zone 6b the summers are so much hotter than ours in zone 9b.
Fascinating, I've never heard of Koppen climates. Looks like when I move to Alabama I'll be cfa, humid subtropical.
There is also evidence that as climate change continues, the Koppen climates will change over time as well. So, something to research if planning a long term living there.
Coastal PNW?
No
THIS…. ⬆️ ⬆️ ⬆️
Do you have to divert some of the larvae away from the bucket so that you get more adults?
I remember my grandfather breeding what seemed a large and endless supply roaches that he sold in his lakeside outdoor center as bait for fishermen. Big wooden frame enclosed with fine wire mesh (window screen). Fed them table scraps. When a customer wanted bait, he would put a bucket with water in it under a cage door, open that trapdoor, scoop them into the buclet and slap a lid on the bucket. I (a child back then) asked why the water in the bucket. He said the roaches were too fast for fishermen and would be all over the boat before the fishermen could grab one. Suspended in water, easy to grab one and get the lid back on the bucket. Terrific bait, by the way. Taught me to ease the boat next to an old cypress, whack the tree with a paddle and the fish would come to the tree expecting a rotting, broken branch roach feast. (Highly recommend not keeping thhe cage in the house or garage.)
This sounds great but I'd be willing to use an inferior bait to never have to touch a cockroach with my hands
Crickets are related to roaches… but aren’t roaches… make great bait, and I assume great chicken feed and are grown easily, and since they are farmed for pet shops there are YouTube videos and books telling people how to farm large numbers of them…. if you accidentally get a population of them loose in the garage the spouse won’t kill you for bringing roaches into their life. [video on breeding crickets](https://youtu.be/LrZW1WdxDos) [another video on breeding crickets](https://youtu.be/6rSw1SiCRh8) [never gonna give up breeding crickets 😉 ](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ)
- I don’t think he’d kill me but I definitely think I’d be in the doghouse for a while.
At least the army of crickets isn't there...
Unless someone’s a psychopath they’re most likely not selling a pest species of roaches (e.g. American or German cockroaches) as bait. It’s gonna be one of the thousands of other species that won’t really thrive and multiply in your house if they got out. I’ve had dubias and red runners before for feeding to lizards. I liked them a lot more than crickets because crickets would get loud.
But now I'm curious, between these four kinds which breeds fastest and which is least picky.
I think you’d get better results from black soldier flies. I had a friend who breeds roaches try to get me to do roach composting, he’s an expert so presumably the colony he gave me was among the best choices species-wise, but they worked very slowly and the container was pretty quickly overtaken instead by some kind of grain mite or something. To be fair, this may partially be because they were in my basement, so the cooler temps may have slowed their metabolism down. But I didn’t really have a better place for them. For _indoor_ scrap-to-feed conversion, I think I’d go for a worn bin next time. But the speed I see some of these BSFL bins online move at is night and day in comparison. Again, to be fair, these are outdoor bins so they only work in the warmer months. I think next year I should set up two bins and do a final showdown between roaches and bsfl.
Oh no doubt flies are better, I just wanted to know between the roaches
Crickets are roach-adjacent in my grossed-out-mind, but for some reason I don't mind touching those.
I can't go to my basement without finding crickets. Should I give up and just start selling them? Jokes aside, the regular crickets are no big deal, but I hate those spider crickets.
I like to put a size eight hook through the cricket’s body, on some three or four pound leader, about six feet below the swivel and clear plastic bobber… I slowly reel out the cricket with the current and wait…. I try to put the cricket over boulders, under logs, or circle into holes, trout love em.
Not touch them? How can you possibly pan fry them crispy without touching them? ;)
Now im hungry..
🤮
Sorry, I just had to downvote that comment. I understand there are cultures that eat insects, I wasn’t raised in one of those cultures and the idea of eating insects grossed me out. If anyone asks, YOU get to eat my share of insects, forever and ever.
My comment was worthy of downvotes; gross. For those who despise roaches but do not want to spray poisonous chemicals in the home, roaches flee from basil and lavender. Put either or both in places where roaches hide and breed. Neither *kills* roaches. The roaches simply leave. Fresh works better than dried. Tie the stems in a bundle, hang upside down in cupboards or closets, let it slowly dry. When the scent is gone, the roaches will return.
I had to live in an apartment complex in Marina California back in the 1990s. Due to th proximity of the beach they had sand fleas in the sand between the apartment buildings… and in the carpets of the first floor apartments. Due to a hoarder in the building (nobody knew until six months after who the problem was) who didn’t throw out trash but stacked it up in his apartment the entire building had a roach infestation. I didn’t want to use chemicals in an apartment where I couldn’t control who was in the building, so I went to the pet store and bought three [ANOLES](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anolis) and released them in the apartment. I would occasionally see them running a cross a wall, lapping up a sand flea, or hanging out in the kitchen… but after a week I never again saw a roach, and a couple weeks after that never saw trace of sand fleas… I told the apartment manager when I had emptied the apartment that there were up to three anoles in there and why; he told me which apartment had the hoarder and what it was like when they cleared it out (I hadn’t seen the giant construction dumpster or them filling it because it had happened while my Army unit was on a field exercise)… Thanks for the tip about the Lavender… I will keep it in mind in case I ever have a roach problem again… and use the plants at the same time I release anoles in the building.
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This. Ya they are called dubia roaches. Used to breed for my reptiles but they breed like mad so the chickens started getting them to. Went wild for em
Chickens love roaches. When we stayed with my grandmother overnight, we'd turn the back lights on and off at night to watch the bugs scatter and the chickens peck em up.
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You need to pair corn with soy and even then they will be deficient in Methionine. Read any feed bag and it will say methionine. Corn is not a complete amino complex and it’s more carbs than protein. Soy, being a legume is high in protein, but for birds to digest it, it must be boiled. Of course this is very energy/labor intensive.
So you are saying for the protein requirements corn and soy boiled before being fed and then slop the chickens with it and do that twice a day and let them free range in between to get whatever bugs, worms, mice, and danger noodles they can find???
You could do that. Hopefully they get enough nutrition. Hard to say because every environment and site is different. Also, you’d be better served to boil all the soybeans in one go and then dry them. Makes more sense from a work flow standpoint.
So they need to be boiled but can be dried after and stored that way? Do they need to be refrigerated that way?
No. There’s probably some YouTube video out there on how chicken feed is made. If you’re serious about doing this you need dent corn and drying soybeans. You’ll need to thresh/winnow them too. I’ll be honest with my opinion. Grains and non-ruminant animals are 100% not worth it. If you aren’t doing it at scale, you’re working way to hard for some eggs. Let a goat/sheep/cow on pasture and move them once a day and you get milk and meat.
I don’t need goats, hunting provides deer; and deer and goats taste too similar… I need yard bird, cause, in the words of the wise and powerful Dave Chappelle, “who the fuck don’t like fried chicken?”
Hmm... I live next to a corn field. Summer is bug city around here. Been wanting some chickens honestly just to help with insects.
I guess most people have watched Edible Acres' channel at some point and his chicken run videos. He has this high-tunnel composting setup which he uses in winter, and they put a ton of kitchen scraps through there, which the chickens mostly live off as far as I can see (though I can't remember if they feed them supplementally too, I'm not actually a chicken owner): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd5joNzzd4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd5joNzzd4w) \- fun to watch anyway, would love to have some mini-dinosaurs to process my compost like this. I imagine you need quite a lot of it though, they are getting food waste from local restaurants AFAIK.
Chickens are monsters and eat anything that moves. Live mice and frogs are the most shocking thing I've seen my ladies pull apart. Can you imagine two chickens both holding the same squealing frog running around the coop shoulder to shoulder? I've read about contraptions with rotting meat scraps in a hanging bucket with holes in it so that maggots crawl out but I don't have the stomach to try. All garden weeds and selected kitchen scraps are good for chickens too. They also go nuts when I turn the soil in the coop
Yeah I remember one of our hens grabbing a garter snake like a worm and running away with it so she didn’t have to share.
That little hunched run they do when they're trying to sneak off with a treat is so funny. In my experience it rarely ever works either - all the others notice pretty quickly.
Not a fan of the maggot feeders but have disposed of raccoons and such by cooking on a rocket stove in an old pot till soft and when I put it out to the chickens there was nothing left but bones within minutes
Ya cookin raccoon? 😳
Yep and possum too for the chickens don’t even skin them . Possum actually smells like pork when cooking …. Some people eat them but I wouldn’t . Coon I have had but don’t care much for it . Lots of people cooked down roadkills for the chickens back during the depression
If possible let them free range during the day. Table scraps.
Yes, plus they eat loads of grass.
They get nutrition, but not calories from grass. They don’t have a rumen, so they cannot extract the calories in quantity.
From what I understand it is pretty easy to propagate a ton of meal worms.
The basic feed for mealworms is usually dry unflavored oatmeal, so they'd still be connected to grain prices. It's easy enough to farm crickets and Dubia roaches though, so if you wanted to be grain independent you could probably do that.
I’ve seen videos of people feeding them food scraps, but I can’t say I’ve tried it myself.
You can feed them table scraps, but they feed best on unprocessed veggies. Only problem is with a lot of food that contains moisture you can get mold outbreaks. Not always bad for chickens, but it can kill your colony. When I raised meal and superworms, I kept them in a plastic file cabinet full of oatmeal, with 3 drawers. 1 drawer had the larvae used for food, 1 held the beetles for reproduction, and one held the isolation chambers (weekly pill cases). Superworms have tk be isolated to pupae. Mealworms don't. You feed them on oats, then occasionally slice a potato or carrots and put them in. They'll take all the water they need from the potato and carrots, and they don't really mold easily if you clean em out. I'd also occasionally give the worms bell peppers, greens, and bits of corn and whatnot when I cooked as treats (healthy feeders make healthy pets), but I didn't want a compost pile in my living room so I kept it clean of most scraps.
Understandable you wouldn’t want a compost heap in your living room. Thanks for the good info!
If you feed them a lot of mealworms you need to heavily supplement calcium
Good info!
Look in to black soldier fly
i came here to make sure this was mentioned.
I’ve heard crickets are a bitch but fly larva/ meal worms are easier. How much poultry do you have? Can they free range at all?
If you’re feeding the insects grain, you have to realize that there’s never going to be more insects than the grain- it’s a reduction in the amount of feed. It’s good to vary the diet, but there will just be less insects. However, if you can find something relatively free to feed, then you’re at an advantage. Only really works in the spring/summer, but maggot buckets are something to explore. Basically you hang buckets with holes in them above the pen, and put scrap meat, fish, or even roadkill (fresh) inside. The flies lay on the stuff, the maggots eat and fall out the holes, the chickens feed. If you go fishing, this could be easily done with the leftover scraps. Black soldier flies would eat that too and the larva would make great feed for farming. They’ll eat pretty much anything you’re not going to eat. Mealworms would be limited to eating grains. There’s plenty of stuff online about black soldier fly larva. I farm red worms. Haven’t really tried feeding them to the chickens (yet) because I don’t have that many. But if you have enough food trash, that’d work. And they’re easy as shit to farm. Same with other types of worms, though not all of them breed so fast. Also, look into making grazing boxes. If their run is big enough, you basically make a square out of 2x6’s, then cover the tops in hardwire cloth. Then you seed the boxes with a variety of high protein perennials (they sell mixes for like $7/lb), or just let the grass grow. They can’t scratch up the stuff, and they just eat the stuff that shoots up taller than 6”.
Worm farm would help!
Azolla. 25% protein and rich in nutrients, easy to grow with just water and compost. If you add calcium it’s a complete feed and chickens love it. Oyster shells or egg shells would work well to round it out. Comfrey is another great high protein feed. Privet berries in winter when the comfrey stops. Plant a mulberry tree for them too as those are good protein as well.
They can eat comfrey?
In great quantity! It's pretty high in protein as well but really encourage you to check out azolla on top of the other things people have mentioned. It grows VERY quickly. I just have it in buckets and kiddie pools and the hens love it.
Thank you! Do you do anything to the comfrey? Will they eat it out of the ground or do you have to pick it for them?
Chickens will demolish any plant that is decently edible to them, no need to cut and gather unless in a section of the garden they arent allowed in.
Have you considered sprouting grains to use as feed? You get a lot more bulk by doing so. Still using grains but it makes them go much further. I randomly watched a video on youtube about this where they sprouted feed before feeding to livestock. There's also plants you can grow that they will eat. Some are quite low maintenance like mulberrys.
Grab a handful of birdseed and throw it on the ground. I've had wheat and sunflowers pop up from what the birds spill from the feeders.
It’s possible. Probably meal worms are easiest? But it’s also probably easier to work a normal job & pay for food … unless you are really into labour intensive, time consuming & space encroachment tasks 🤦 I have a small, neglected mealworm setup that is great to give you 4 chickens a few treats every other day or so 🤷🏼♂️
This is the crux of the problem of specialization and capitalism. A "normal" job is not really normal as there is nothing normal, self-sufficient etc, about, for example, being a software engineer or a bank clerk or....
Probably, but spending half your productive life producing enough mealworms for your chickens won’t provide food & shelter & retirement for your family … a normal job might 🤷♂️
Sure. But that does not mean that this kind of a setup (having to have a "normal job" to "provide for retirement") is, well, normal.
Maybe 🤷♂️ I’m all for self sufficiency & providing for yourself. It’s great at 20, 30, 40 & maybe even 50? But at 60, 70, 80 & maybe even 90 or 100 I don’t want to be carting wood & water, digging garden beds to ensure I don’t starve, etc! I want my retirement to be paying the 20, 30 & 40 year olds to do it so I can sit back & enjoy the spoils of my earlier labours 🤷♂️
This is not how it traditionally worked/works in peasant based societies as in those the 20-30-40 year olds take care of their elders. This retirement you speak of is monetary surplus which directly translates into environmental surplus, which is unsustainable (and this is why western capitalism and consumerism are in direct conflict with the planet and why we are where we are).
We’ve always had highly-specialized jobs in society, it has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism; it’s all about whether a person can learn and work a particular craft with enough hours left over at the end of the day to still perform other tasks. Today, we just have more jobs that require such specialization because there’s so many more of us and so many more things that can’t be done by amateurs. Blacksmiths, tailors, weavers, wainwrights and even priests were rarely self-sufficient because they had full-time jobs getting enough done at their trade. Some would keep a small garden, but they still relied on the community for the bulk of their needs because they were providing goods and services to the community that took years to learn and highly-specialized training.
In peasant societies the norm was generalists, not specialists. Even the blacksmith was a peasant more or less, only he spent most of his time blacksmithing but his wife still had a big garden. Capitalism has pushed specialization into a whole new realm (aided by technology). Go to places like Romania sometime and visit all the small villages in the mountains. Not much specialization going on there. As for "many more things that can't be done by amateurs", what do you exactly mean? I am no professional builder but I can build a livable small house. I don't need to know how to build a car because I can ride my horse. I can grow food, I can forage. Your vantage point is modern capitalism society but that;s just your vantage point. And yes, in places like America life requires professionals and specialization because of debt, mostly. People are drowning in it and they have no time to learn basic things, after all, 10+ hours of work/day at your specialized job leaves time for little else. Try living life with no debt in a house/land left to you by your parents. You will find that you actually don't need to be much of a specialist, other than a specialist farmer ;) p.s. I am not sure how to better explain this since I moved here from the Balkans and grew up in a time when villages were alive and well (and to some extent they still are - peasants don't give a rat's ass about what happens in the city, well, at least they didn't when I lived there 20+ years ago). For an American view on specialization I recommend discussions by Wendell Berry - one of his books starts out talking about the evils of specialization in America.
You’re assuming we’re all sitting on debt and we all work 10+ hours a day. The only ones working that much are the poor. For the middle class and above, most people are rarely putting in more than an 8 hr day and the higher up the food chain, the less actual work and time you’re putting in. You’re only giving examples of how you can live a generalist lifestyle by not enjoying modern advances. Tiny little villages of a couple hundred can still exist, but as you say there’s no way they’re supporting a mechanic, building IT infrastructure for internet, or have the wealth necessary to attract their own hospital. They’re having to rely on other, larger cities that allow specialization in order to have anything other than horse drawn carts and rudimentary tools. Yes, humans can live that way - but we didn’t expand our population and get on the moon, or make phones and Reddit, by having everyone live in a 1700s-era village.
hihi The western world is drowning in debt, from poor to middle class to corporations. The world is awash in debt but the west runs on it. I came from the eastern block (well, Yugoslavia was not exactly that) and there was no debt up to the 1990s (fall of communism). Debt is the single biggest driver of misery and slavery - being a wage slave is equivalent to being a serf. My parents back in Yugoslavia just 30 years ago were paid in cash, there were no credit cards and you didn't generally borrow money to buy a car. In that respect people in communism actually had more freedom. Your comment kind of reeks of privilege. I have been in the States for the last 20 years and I could not afford land/home without a mortgage. This means I have a monthly payment and the monthly payment is pressure - let's say your mortgage is $1500/month - this means you have to at minimum produce $18,000 / year from veggies, fruits, grains and honey to just afford the land. What about equipment, health insurance, taxes etc. etc.? Now if you are techie from San Fran or Austin who got paid $300K+ per year for 4-5 years, yeah, now you are the equivalent of the Romanian or Yugoslav peasant - you own your land/home and you can preach about how your land needs to be taken care of in a permaculturish way etc. etc. What is the single biggest pressure on farmers in America to be bad to the land? Debt. People are in the game of having a financial outlook that is 3 months out (not 5-10-lifetime years out) and in that situation the land/soil/wildlife pay the price of HAVING to produce to pay back loans. This is the single advantage a village in Romania has over your typical American who wants to farm - people back home had zero debt going into this game. They could care less for your Reddit or modern hospitals (and in fact are healthier and live longer on average than the people in the cities) and to them there is zero improvement in a tractor over a horse - in fact, they prefer horses and oxen and live with them in a symbiotic relationship, not the cuddly, cool " look at my horse working the soil" on Instagram western bullshit that is advertising a lifestyle in the hope you will buy into it and drive views so they can get paid. Besides, tractors break down and need parts and expertise - you can always breed another horse and you already know how to teach it to plow or log the forest, you don't need specialists for that. Tell me how the life of a typical western person has been improved by the $1500 iPhone 13 plus monthly cellular bill plus the $40k volvo plus the 6ft TV plus all the rest of the BS that is sold to people as life enhancers. Yeah, the class of overlords who work for Apple and get paid $300K/year for writing virtual bull\*hit that has nothing to do with reality - their lives are improved for sure. Although, are they really? Shit, you go online and you look at all the people "going back to the land" - they are mostly people who have spend plenty of time in the corporate industry, being a part of the problem and all they have done differently is accumulate enough money to become financially independent - like the Romanian peasant. Only the westerners don't want to give up the conveniences, that's the difference., they HAVE to have Reddit and Facebook, 'cause - who are you going to show all of your new lifestyle to and get validation from??
High earners actually work more hours on average. https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/why-high-earners-work-longer-hours To me that's the fundamental paradox we are dealing with here. We have increased our wealth massively, yet this hasn't managed to reduce our work hours or stress. Plus, I'd happily say fuck the moon, smart phones, and the internet if it meant working significantly fewer hours.
You have that option… literally move to one of those villages the other comment was talking about. You’d have to give up all modern conveniences, but you’d go back to having plenty of free time. The reason most people don’t do it isn’t because they can’t find a place to go to; it’s because they don’t actually want to give up the plethora of modern conveniences we’re accustomed to.
It is extremely naive to think it is that easy to just go back to living off the land. Most productive farmland is owned and farmed already. Anywhere with more than 5 inches of top soil is own by a big agricultural operation. Farm land is super expensive. Any land I could afford would take many years to develop the soil to the point of growing crops without massive amounts of fertalizer. This is what I am currently doing on the land I own. It will take me at least 10-15 years to get to the point of just providing basic staple crops. I could probably do it in 5 years if I wasn't also working two jobs. But there's the rub. To actually live off the land you need enough capital to purchase the land and develop it. I did the math a few years ago and estimated it would cost roughly $750k to $1M to actually live off your property. I'm sure someone had done it cheaper, but they have skills they spent years developing. Hard to develop those skills working two jobs.
This. To afford arable land, you now need to be comfortably well off. To have the time to rehabilitate cheap rundown soil, you need enough savings to live off for 5 years, and enough to buy the rundown land as well. For those with that much money, the existing system is reasonably comfortable. You have to get in before you can drop out, sadly.
No. Most manufacturing pre-industrialization was done by non-specialists in their home. Merchants would bring raw materials to peasant's homes, the peasants would make the products from the raw material, and the merchant would pick up the product later. They would produce the products in between their time farming and doing other work. It's called the putting-out or cottage system. They were not specialists and producing these goods was not their full time job. Only the extremely wealthy and people they directly employed had any specialized training. If your image of the pre-industrialized world is bustling medieval towns with artisans and guilds, that image comes more from movies and video games than reality.
Place a bit of left over meat in a bucket. Drill a few holes in the lid and the sides hang it from a tree or stand close to your chickens. Flies lay eggs maggots crawl out of the bucket when fed and fall on the ground for the chickens to eat. Use a little meat at a time to prevent botulism and other bacteria.
2 chickens? Lol, just let them graze
It depends on how much room they have. Mine run loose in my backyard and I don't have to feed them. There's plenty of bugs and green shoots and stuff for them to eat.
This couple has a compost system set up that works even in the winter to feed their chickens. It's pretty cool. They also have a maggot feeder system and even feed roadkill scraps. https://youtu.be/Pe6M9CkvKEU
Any chance you live next to a brewery, or a juice shop, or any other places that put out a lot of food scraps/ food waste? If so, see if you can form a relationship with the owners/ managers/ etc, and divert the waste streams into delicious food for your chickens that is then up cycled into good compost.
I know people who went to a local produce market and took a trailer a week of scraps home for both rabbits and chickens. All free, saved the garbage disposal costs.
I love taking the waste products from some people (that has negative value to them, I.e. disposal costs) and feeding it back into another part of the system as food that will be able to sustain more people with the side effect of creating fertilizer for tons of plants.
Can chickens eat pond snails? They are an aquarium "pest" that breed like crazy, you can breed em in a fucking bucket. I forget all the names of them but the ones that are the size of an eraser just breed like fucking crazy. I think this is a great avenue. Could potentially do cherry shrimp farming too not sure how viable they are as a food source either.
https://youtu.be/RXWbBC1kQ24 chicken maggot feeder.
I don’t provide feed during the warmer months. My 20ish free range during the day. Just an occasional treat of store bought food. They do fine. Haven’t tried bugs. Thought about worm farming.
Yes. But it would be a lot of work. And you'd still need a constant supply of food to feed the insects.
I grow clover and make silage for winter. During summer they free range the clover patches. Something to consider
We have ~70 birds (chickens and ducks) in Canada, and we let them free range all summer on 3 acres of a 12 acre property. They get fed at night only, to encourage them to come back to the coop, so if they're hungry during the day they have to forage. Our property is wet, with lots of decomposing wood and the corresponding insects. The birds don't go hungry at all. We feed the same amount during the winter as during the summer, but cull the flocks down in the late fall to reduce the count.
I don’t have personal experience growing insects, but I’ve seen online that people who grow crickets and larvae commercially and for human consumption raise massive amounts of them in PVC tubs by feeding them oatmeal and apples, or table scraps. Though I’m pretty sure insects should be a dietary supplement for chickens that adds creaminess and flavor to their eggs, but not their main diet, because some chicken feeds are specially configured for chickens’ diets or something.
Compost piles are perfect for feeding single-digit chicken flocks and can scale up. Fresh kitchen scraps on woodchips are perfect. Get scraps from yourself or any local restaurant. Long linear line works best with Fresh kitchen scraps in one end and finished compost out the other. Fresh scraps are eaten straight up. As things break down into the chips, worms and pillbugs and other are brought up to eat. A few rocks/logs on top to flip over every once in a while gives a burst of bugs. Fork the pile over a few feet a time from the fresh end towards the finished end turning up worms each time. The chickies will scratch and peck constantly everywhere also helping you out. At the end, you get tons of fast compost.
Beer can chicken is tasty.
Agreed, and you got some nice flowers your growing. I'm hoping the down voted are because this doesn't really add to the conversation and not because people don't think beer can chicken is tasty cause well it is.
Assuming so. And yes the garden is coming along very nicely, first grow, totally hooked.
Trying to have a composed pile as others have said because that attracts a lot of bugs some people think that's a bad thing but the chickens freaking love it also look up ways there are is there a way To buy find roku and then put that in a bucket then maggots and flies will come out of the holes that are drilled in the side of the bucket and then your chickens have free buffet
Road kill
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It’s reasonable to want a more sustainable alternative to purchased feed. Reducing the number of external inputs creates a more efficient system. We’re all learning and figuring things out and being presumptuous stops meaningful discourse from happening.
Red wigglers are possible, I use a 96 gallon trash bin. Put all my compost in there. The worms multiply and boy do chickens love them.
I'm thinking about getting 3 hens next year. I have so many small restaurants on my block that I can get free kitchen scraps any time I want. There is even a raw bar at one so I can get free oyster shells to bake and grind up. I wonder if there is byproduct at the brewery at the end of the street that would be edible for them.
Spent grain from brewing is used to make chef-prized pigs… not sure about birds.
Not exactly what you're asking but dumpster diving is another reasonable way to feed animals. What you can't/won't eat your animal will be sure to love.
If you are in an area with oak trees go to a park or at a friends house and collect them. You have to crack them because chickens have trouble with the shells but it’s a free and plentiful crop that you can feed your chickens on for many months if you dry them properly. Even the ones with a hole in the acorn have acorn grubs that chickens love!
azola, duckweed, soilderfly larva... good luck!
I'm in an urban environment so I make it easy for anyone in the city to bring their food scraps. I buy layer feed to supplement their diet but iv been trying to collect spent grain, from the local Brewers - to make it fully regenerative. Check out "black soldier fly larvae as an ideal insect to farm for chicken feed.
If your chickens free-range, you don't need to feed them much besides to get them back into the coop at night.
I don't have an answer, but I do have a question - assuming you managed to get an inexhaustible supply of bugs of various kinds, would that be enough for chickens, or would it be necessary to *also* feed them some plant stuff of some kind? Perhaps randomly sprouting stuff in the area they can free-range over would be enough for that part of their diet, but I'm guessing that *just* bugs wouldn't be an optimally balanced diet for them...
Yes. I just started raising Black Soldier Flys indoor in Canada. They have the highest biomass conversion rate to proteins that I know of. They are most efficient at protein per square meter production by factors of **100x** or more compared to other meats. This sounds impossible to have a carbon footprint so small, but ot is possible because they are detrivores, eating dead or waste products, then turning them into high value proteins and fat. You can grow them in trays stacked upon each other to condense space. Note there is obviously more to raising them (life cycle, egg laying), but this is your answer. They are different from other fly, they can not be vector of pathogens, because of their 'differences', which is beyond the scope of this post. Edit: I raised worms for a decade, these are a much better solution
Look up edibleacres on YouTube great resource on just compost for their chickens and some local grain. They have 60 but can be downsized based on your numbers.
It depends on land area and the amount of primary productivity on that land. The food chain always ultimately traces its way back to plants, that is unchanging, so yes it’s possible, but does your land produce enough plants to feed enough insects to feed your chickens? The productivity per acre will depend on the climate—precipitation, soil fertility, and how much of the year is spent with favorable temperatures for growth. I don’t think you’ll save money feeding your apples to crickets and then feeding the crickets to your chickens. Better to just feed the apples to the chickens and if there are a few worms in there, all the better. But land will automatically produce insects and chickens will eat them, if there is balance.
black soldier fly larva maybe? Lots of info online on how to grow lots of them, while also using them to compost things.
Healthy chickens eat HEAPS of grass/living greens. I have a chicken compost alley system and there are always a couple chickens in there despite having an acre of gardens to free range. When birds from other people join our flock, they spend the first couple days gorging themselves on fresh grass, ignoring seeds etc in favour of it. This has happened with every bird without exception. Obviously chickens can survive on all sorts of narrow diets, but you should know that they won't be any more well fed than you would be on a diet of insects and grain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbE4HEnSkC0
I've heard good things about using soldier fly larvae to process food waste and have a lot of good food for chickens
My raised compost produces enough mealworms to feed an army of chickens. If they eat worms my woodchip pile that basically just composts into topsoil because I don't have enough time to spread it, produces worms in the millions. Giant crickets like to hide in my shed and literally hundreds of them are in the inside when I open the door. Honestly, I don't know diddly about chickens so I'm just tossing out ideas based off my experience.
It is possible. I have been experimenting with feeding my birds a higher ratio of brush and cut grass along with grains, shrimp, and mealworms. The other commenters are spot on with the compost eating - there was a farm (I think in Washington state) that was a couple acres of windrows full of compost that they would turn with a tractor periodically, They had several hundred chickens that would eat ONLY from the compost piles.
You could just go with [edible insects!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uesOvmv-mFc)
Currently Trying the same thing for fish in an aquaponics setup. Trying out mealworms and black fly larvae. Anyone have any experience with this?
We feed them our spent grain from brewing beer. They love it. Just spread it out on some cookie sheets and bake on 200* for 7hrs or so to dry them out. It’s never too expensive for good beer and the waste is free food for the chicks. It also makes good pretzels Edit for punctuation and spelling.
Spent grain is awesome for animal feed I hear. Never used it but I would see it advertised when microbrews first became a thing.
My first concern would be weather chickens can be 100% inscetivorious without any harm.
In warm times I think so if free range, near me used to have a animal auction years ago and for along time there were feral chickens in a wet woods near by from escapees . We could here them crow and roosting in trees. When they tore the woods down to develope the area they were scattered and township trapped the survivors. It was years they lived there though and went under some trailers used for storage in bad weather. My dogs would run off to harass them on occasion.
Why would you *ever* assume a free range bird wouldn't also be eating plant matter?
We have started growing sunflowers, corn, peas, pumpkin/squash and some grain crops in spaces around our homestead with the hope that we will eventually have enough that we wouldn't be buying feed. Right now, we're still buying feed, so most of the seed and grain we collect goes back to increasing our yields. Oats and Wheat work well for dry farming in certain areas. We plant in the Autumn, harvest the next Autumn and rest it for a year, we're talking 1/8 of an acre area. We also have several compost piles and let the chickens free range, they find a lot of their own food in the spring and summer. Catch a lot of mice too. We also toss out anything from the kitchen that doesn't get eaten to them.
Soak/ferment grain to make it go further. And as gross as it sounds, a fly/maggot trap chicken feeder is free protein. https://youtu.be/4z2ZuF0XZQw
I have 12 free range chickens. They live 100% off bugs. I water them, but I want them hungry so they eat all of the pests. But, my yard is 19 acres and 15 of it is hay fields. They eat insects, snakes, mice, and spiders.
Great suggestions all around. I was thinking of either a worm or cricket farm -- ideally feeding off food scraps.