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Re: truly self sufficient (and therefore self-sustaining) farmers
In article <961221090556_777370200@emout12.mail.aol.com> YankeePerm@aol.com
writes:
>Chickens do things while they are alive, if allowed to do so, like get all or
>most of their own food (grain is handy when you want them to gather-'round)
>converting stuff you can't or won't ingest to stuff that is yummy. Free
>range chickens taste so much better than store chickens that they require
>different words. Moreover, if you have lived for a while eating only chicken
>that you slaughtered and cooked, more or less on the spot, the chicken in
>stores tastes rotten. All of it. Chicken doesn't age well.
Poultry folklore says that it's always better to keep commercial feed
in front of your birds at all time. This was true at one time, when
poultry could be instantly converted into cash in any town. Nowadays
the local feed store is no longer a wholesale buyer of eggs, and
no one collects live poultry for shipment to processing centers,
either.
With the poultry=cash equation out the window, some of the basic findings
of the first half of this century become invalid. Back then, a chicken
who found all her own food and laid only in the spring would give you
around 80 eggs, while one "properly" cared for would give you twice
as many. You'd make more money in the latter case if you were selling
the eggs. For home consumption, decisions are based not on market price
but on the value you place on the products.
Advice from extension services and backyarder literature echo the
conclusions drawn on conditions fifty years dead. You'll get the
most eggs or meat per bird by feeding them as much commercial feed
as they will eat, but high egg production or fast weight gain aren't
everything.
Most people with a large garden and an acre or two can probably keep
a dozen or so healthy hens by feeding them scraps, garden trimmings,
and whole grains. (If you live in a place with real winters, you
may have to spend more during the period where foraging is impractical.)
Let the birds have the run of your entire place, except the garden
when the plants are young. Letting them run on the neighbors' place,
too, is the oldest form of passive redistribution of wealth in human
civilization. If they start acting sick or sluggish, feed them more
and better food. But, according to a book I just read, the average
farm flock in 1940 wasn't fed anything except whole grains. They
got their other needs from poking in manure piles for insects, stealing
scraps from the pig trough, and general scavenging.
For meat, consider the larger breeds. You can't go wrong with Barred
Plymouth Rocks or Buff Orpingtons. You'll eat the birds at an older
age than if you were raising them according to the usual
instructions, since they will gain weight more slowly once you
restrict feeding (but DO use a commercial chick starter for the first
six or eight weeks unless you know exactly what you're doing).
Chickens have a valuable role to play in a sustainable ag environment.
Dryden claimed in 1916 that keeping an average of 50 chickens per acre
would keep the soil well fertilized indefinitely, while 100 chickens
per acre added so much nitrogen that extra plowing was necessary just
to mix it with the soil to keep it from burning the plants. Thus,
a two-acre farm with 100 birds would be sustainable with little
or no additional fertilizer. With a two-crop rotation, you'd
have your 100 birds on one acre and crops on another.
Some crops valuable as chicken feed, such as kale, thrive especially
well on soil with a heavy load of chicken manure. Combining birds
with orchards is also a time-honored tradition. The chickens like
the shade and the dropped fruit, while the trees like the manure.
(This is difficult with apples, though, since they tend to require
a lot of spraying, and the sprays tend to be toxic to the birds. This
is true of both conventional and "organic" sprays. Plums are supposed
to be almost ideal.)
-- Robert
--
Robert Plamondon, High-Tech Technical Writing, Inc.
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett * Oregon * 97326
robert@plamondon.com * (541) 453-5841 * Fax: (541) 453-4139
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