Backyard Chickens: Nutrition and Feeding

For the first installment on our system of keeping backyard chickens, I thought I would lead off with what we feed our girls.  The whole idea behind our micro farming experiment is to provide us with eggs that are as near to free-range as we can get within the confines of a one acre yard. Because of our location we can't let them out to run free in the yard and get into trouble either with the neighbors, predators or traffic on our road. But we are able to give them all the grass and bugs they can eat together with suitable greens and scraps from the garden in season. I took special care this past spring to reserve a section of the yard that didn't get treated with any herbicide or fertilizer as we would not want them eating those granules while they scratch around.

In addition to what they can find in the yard they are given full access to a daily layer ration. This by itself would be perfectly adequate to sustain them. We use Blue Seal NoCoSo #3520 layer crumble from Kent Nutrition of Muscatine Iowa. Although not specifically GMO free, it is specifically corn and soy free. This assures us as  healthy an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio as we can get while not having to worry about any residual soy protein making its way into the eggs. It doesn't make sense to free-range your bird on grass and feed them greens from the garden if you are then going to turn around and load them up on commercial grains. Chickens are omnivores and eat a variety of plant matter, insects and even small animals if given the chance. NoCoSo also assures that they are getting adequate protein (16-18%), calcium, and trace minerals. We buy this at cost from Rufus Martin (the supplier of our pullets) as it is his standard ration for his free-range flocks and he buys it by the skid.

In addition to the crumble, our girls do get a few tablespoons per day of classic poultry scratch (cracked corn, wheat, and millet). This is used as a treat and to give them something to do. We also give them all of the garden greens they can eat in 30 minutes or so including lettuce, chard, kale, tomatoes, strawberries and cucumbers. They especially like chard and go completely bonkers on overgrown cucumbers that are split lengthwise. Things will get interesting this winter when the garden greens are gone and the grass is dormant. We expect they will be eating more of the crumble by then and plans are in place to occasionally sprout trays of wheat or rye seed and to start a colony of meal worms. Because of the added scraps we also provide a tray of granite grit and oyster shell just to make sure they have enough grit and calcium.

Because the Japanese beetles were bad this year we had to set traps to keep them off the basil. When we dumped the bags we would also dump a few into the tractor. It was great fun watching the girls run around to catch them. It got to the point that we worried whether they were getting too much but they didn't get sick and the eggs did not have any odd flavors. Next year we might just set up a lure above the tractor and let them go after the beetles directly!

So far they seems to be happy and healthy. Let's see how things go over the winter.