podcast 3: raising chickens 2.0 - no more coop and run

About 25 to 30 people convinced me to start a podcast. I have now uploaded my third one:

https://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/28-podcast-003-chickens/

podcast #2 was about "what is permaculture? what is a permaculture design course?"

https://www.richsoil.com/permacultu...what-is-a-permaculture-design-course-podcast/

I have eight more podcasts already made and ready to upload. As they are ready, I'll announce them on my twitter stuff:

https://twitter.com/paulwheaton

I'm very new to podcasts, blogs and twitter. I could sure use advice and folks have making suggestions at the tinkering forum at permies: https://www.permies.com/permaculture-forums/11.0

 

QUOTE chickens harvesting their own feed

Ahhhh ..... I think this is where permaculture really shines.

Imagine an area for the chickens which has en enormous mulberry tree dropping fruit throughout june, july and august. There is a plethora of clover, alfalfa, grains, sunflowers, buckwheat, peas and lentils in the more open areas. Fruit and nut trees are surrounded by siberian pea shrubs, chickweed, comfrey, dandelion, amaranth, nettles and sunchokes. Maybe some raspberries and blueberries are in the mix too. Assuming it is summer, why would a chicken eat dried up "chicken feed" with this bounty at hand?

When raising chickens on a large scale, you generally raise your meat birds only in the summer. And you harvest your non productive layers in the fall. So most of your chicken feeding efforts are focused in the warmer months when your chicken feed crops can be producing prolifically.

What, specifically, to grow depends on a lot of factors. How much room do you have; how cold does it get; what is your soil like; how much does it rain ....

Some plants produce more food per acre per year than other plants. And some produce food for a just a week and others produce food for six months. The best producers appear to be mulberry trees (lots of fruit dropped constantly over three months) and wheat (when grown with the bonfils method). Sepp Holzer pushes a perennial rye and sunchokes as the core chicken/pig feeds.

I advocate using the chicken paddock method. And along with that, I think that the lion's share of the people food should be grown in those same paddocks. A lot of the stuff we eat is great chicken food! And the chickens clean up anything we drop and anything we leave behind. Less waste.

This is a good time to mention polyculture. All plant eating animals are designed to eat plants from a polyculture. They eat plants, not from rows and rows of the same thing, but from a mix of a dozen or more species. Every plant has special nutrient needs and every plant exudes an excess of nutrients that it mysteriously has superpowers to find/build/whatever. The mycelium in the soil has no leaves and depends on developing a bartering relationship with plants to get sugar. The mycelium offers nutrients. The sugar water from a carrot is loaded with nutrients that the carrot has in excess. The sugar water from an oak tree is loaded with something completely different. The carrot gets a bit of the oak excess and the oak gets a bit of the carrot excess. Because the oak's roots cover a bigger territory, it gets far more diversity than the carrot. And the oak ends up inadvertantly sharing some of that with the carrot.

We have barely scratched the surface of what we know for human nutrition. And we have studied human nutrition ten thousand times more than chicken nutrition. Human nutrition is based on humans eating from a polyculture and eating the meat of animals that consumed from a polyculture. Rather than prending that we know all there is to know and growing things in a harshly organized fashion, I suggest that, instead, we grow things in a diverse polyculture of 50 or more species. I suspect that by doing this, the vegetation will become far richer in nutrients (both known and currently unknown) than if we attempt to infuse the soil with known nutrients. Diversity would include things that make for good chicken feed and things that make for good people feed. Rather than have an area for the chickens and an area for the people food, have one area for both (and many other purposes too).

Since paddock shift systems tend to encourage five times more growth of vegetation, the result should be MORE people food than if chickens were not rotated through the area.

For the winter, a lot of remaining grains and seeds will still be on their stalks. The taller stalks will eventually fall to the level chickens can get it. Winter apples will often stay on the trees deep into the winter. When they fall, they will keep for a long time on the ground. Kale can provide some winter greens. If chickens follow pigs in a rotation, pigs will often pull up sunchokes (and other tubers) and leave scraps for the chickens. Sepp Holzer has observed chickens eating the manures of other animals in winter. His son reports that they will provide feed to chickens only on the dozen coldest days of the year.

QUOTE

The part that interests me the most. I really should get my chicken food growing.

These are links in that thread.

I do this because it wasn't quite as simple to access this info through the initial thread as it could be. In case anyone is feeling too lazy to go through the whole lot. For me it was the second time i've read through the story of the chicken solution. This is a short cut for next time.

Still if you haven't read it at least once, its probably worth reading through. There's more useful info towards the end of the page.

 

This is a great resource, thanks Paul. One suggestion is to put the length of each audio file in the blog announcing it (at the moment you have to start playing the file to see how long it is). I might want to download for later and it's a hassle if I have to start playing it to find out which I want to do.

I appreciate you posting here, and I've subbed to the RSS on the blog (I don't follow twitter).

 

I just uploaded my second podcast about raising chickens. This one is basically a recording of a presentation I was giving.

Both podcasts are based on my article about raising chickens:

https://www.richsoil.com/raising-chickens.jsp

This is a little more than half of my chicken presentation at the missoula public library. My recording contraption croaked while I was talking about predator stuff.

This podcast and many other of my podcasts, make full use of the beautiful english language. Some folks that choose to be offended by words should probably skip all of my podcasts.

https://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/156-podcast-014-chicken-presentation/

pebble, so in the decription somewhere? I guess I thought that little playbar would show it, but I guess it isn't.

 

I'm new here, and just listened to Raising Chickens 2.0 - then I read the article. I've been thinking about how to make the backyard chicken system work better almost every day.. and this info has fast-tracked the whole process. I started with a coop and run.. but now I let them out to freerange in their own half of the backyard for at least half the day most days. My husband and I have used a tractor (but for brooding chicks, not a perm. home), and just recently we're toying with the idea of a bottomless home over a compost heap. None of those solutions solve the problem of access to fresh green forage though. The paddock shift system sounds great! (I was probably getting there, it just would have taken a few more years. )

A question - what about wild birds eating the feed? At the moment, much of my feed is going to wild sparrows (incredibly frustrating and expensive). At very least, with a coop and run (minus the free-range bit) I could enclose the roof and keep out the wild birds. I havn't done that here because I let the chooks free-range often and the sparrows would get in anyway. I imagine the inclusion of the flock protection dog would help prevent wild birds from getting too comfortable?

Another question - Under the "Truly freerange" section, quote: "Several white rock roosters turned out to think they could take anybody down. Even me. They would attack and attack and attack. Until they took that special trip to the soup pot." How does the paddock shift system help solve this problem?

Thanks!

 

wild birds: work them into your systems

attack roosters: the paddock shift system doesn't solve the problem, but it exposes you to the problem less. Semi-solved.

 

Thanks Paul, I've been thinking about this system non-stop since I read it and it's fantastic. I'm looking into buying property to start making my dreams reality. It's so exciting, yet scary all at the same time. My husband and I are starting with very little, and we'll have to work at it slowly, but I really feel like we can make a success of it.

Thanks for the inspiration.