Chickens - Ideas for Feeding for FREE!

the other day I put a video out asking for questions that folks may have about our channel and one question that popped up that received the most interest it seems is about our chicken composting operation how do we source the food scraps from the restaurants are we concerned about the quality is it something you can scale up or down and so I thought I would spend a few minutes in this video and just share in a little bit more detail our particular system not in any way saying all it's the best or anything like that but just here's what we're doing four and a half years in it seems functional enough you can take it and adapt it to your site so stick with us and I'll address this particular question in more detail in this video most of you watching this video have already seen a lot of our chicken videos about composting I'm gonna link here to our playlist if you haven't seen any of these videos check those out I don't want to spend a ton of time on that this morning but we have a little over 60 chickens we feed them almost entirely on food scraps and soil life so we've got these huge piles of compost breaking down well they're dwindling now but the main question I want to address is how do you source food scraps how do you feed your chickens for low cost we live near Ithaca New York and so we're lucky that there are a number of restaurants there's a lot of interest in composting and you know being green that kind of stuff and so it's relatively easy to approach people and say hey what are you doing with those food scraps what do you do with the leftovers can we have access to them and what you're looking at right here is one week worth of compost from a particular catering company and I just approached her directly I called up and said look we've got chickens is there any chance we can get your compost this was two years ago she said oh I've got some a pig farmer picking it up but I'll put you on the list for next year and so this last year we started a routine we've been very reliable in coming to her site twice a week we get five-gallon buckets filled with her leftovers from kit prep but then also leftovers from catering jobs to some really good stuff for example right in here beans and rice and noodles that's really amazing material for the chickens the leafy greens are wonderful so it's been a huge resource and we've been very careful to make sure we wash the buckets bring them back on time communicate thoroughly with her so we can preserve that relationship so that's been a key ingredient to getting food scraps wherever you live if there's a restaurant nearby or a catering company or a college or a school that ideally serves decent quality ingredients contact them if there's no shame in just calling and saying I've got chickens I'm interested in in composting your food scraps if I bring you buckets once a week twice a week what's what's the rhythm day one you put them in one spot they fill them and leave them out there with lids you pick them up and just make it very simple for them there's an idea if we had two or three restaurants lined up like this I feel like we could probably feed our chickens without any other supplements beyond this but let me pause for a moment and talk about some of the the grain aspects that we work with quick sidenote before I forget in that question it was hey do you ever are you concerned about the quality of ingredients or specific ingredients and I'll say yes to some extent I'm not worried if I find you know lemon rinds and onion peels in here the chickens are pretty smart about avoiding it you can see some onion peels and that chicken is not eating them so there you go proof but what I would like to avoid is if I were to connect with for example a diner or a restaurant I would probably ask hey is it possible to take your coffee grinds and dump them in their own bucket those would be great in a worm composting system or in their own bin but I generally am kind of bummed when I get a bucket full of coffee grinds it mixes into everything and it's not great for our chicken so I try to avoid that and if a business sells really junky cheap you know GMO Laden or CAFO meat type of food I just we're such we're so close to what these chickens are as far as eating their eggs or eating them the quality of the ingredients I try to go for something good but whatever you can get you can get I talked about this in another video this is on just the the back of the chicken coop here protected from rain and snow a little bit we've got these galvanized garbage cans which I think are great they're on I learned this the hard way so if you're gonna get into this from scrap you should consider this we put wooden bars on the ground underneath these to keep them up off the ground even though they're sealed if they sit in wet soil or with snowbank to get them against them for a while though wick water and can ruin a whole container of grain so do yourself a favor and maybe put some cinder blocks and post but so far no raccoons or opossums or mice or rats have gotten in here so it works quite well what you're looking at in this one is this is establishing a relationship we're now really great friends farmer ground flour in the Finger Lakes really wonderful organic grain milling operation they make flour and they have waste material that comes off of their milling operation which they're now bagging up so it's a real crapshoot sometimes it's just whole winter wheat sometimes it's a lot of weed seeds but it's pretty starch carbohydrate dense and we love it we love that it's organic it's up to you how you feel about that I would encourage if you're getting grain seek out organic a lot of wheat a lot of those grain seeds corn that kind of stuff in conventional agriculture is really laden with glyphosate and all that kind of stuff so see what you can do maybe there's an old timey farmer or those are Amish folks that aren't using spray where you live but we get this we trade for installing gardens and bringing them produce bringing them eggs sometimes if that's what they want and this material soaked in a bucket for a day or two sprouts and we can add it to their system over there and that adds a whole lot of extra carbohydrate and nutrient in that way so we're not completely grain free we do buy in millet and sunflower periodically but ideally we're trying to work as much as possible with restaurant food scraps a incredibly key ingredient to all this that I haven't even touched on yet is the woody biomass or the carbon biomass you can see there's a thick layer of woodchips in front of me here and this pile that the hens are working on right now is loaded with leaves these two resources can be completely free depending on where you live many people put bags of leaves out on the curb in the fall some people even pay to have them taken away we collect as many as we can we talk about this in greater detail in another video this bulking material not only is it help with the composting process you really can't just put piles of food scraps it'll get really sour and gross smelling so you need that air and bulking material but piles of woodchips and leaves on their own left for a few weeks or a month start having pill bugs and earthworms and millipedes all sorts of soil life and that may very well be the highest value food you can give to your chickens are big warm compost piles that they don't have access to for a few weeks and then you let them kick them apart so maybe that's food for thought where you are the woodchips if you talk to local arborists tree care people even your Highway Department and ask if they can dump chips at your site that could be very helpful we do that sometimes I also use my truck to load up with woodchips if I'm going downtown and I have an empty truck I'll do that periodically another way that we're getting food scraps for our chickens you can see these old totes we're probably gallon tubs if they're completely filled they're heavy so you want to scale to the size that's comfortable for your body and I invested ten bucks in these long rubber gloves and when we're driving by our local food co-op they have composting bins out back and we'll poke around and see what we can get from there what I'd like to do in the future is try to make an arrangement with their produce department and this might be something to consider for yourself is to talk with folks that run produce or meat departments or whatever you're comfortable thinking about sourcing for your chickens ask them if they can set it aside it's kind of gross getting in there and rummaging around but we'll fill up four of those every week maybe twice a week and a lot of times what I'll do is have my truck filled with woodchips and then put those tubs on top so we can dump out the woodchips and then dump the food on top of that maybe throw in some grain that's been soaking in a bucket for a day or two and those are some pretty excellent ingredients to keep our chickens healthy and happy and pretty low-tech and it's a way of tapping into a waste stream in this case it's going to go to a composting operation but why not pass through the chickens instead and be our compost that's my preference it's the takeaway message that I'd like to impart to folks that are just getting into this is feel comfortable just calling restaurants food co-ops schools wherever whatever is local to you or is on a driving path you already take and see if it's possible to tap into their food scraps can you ask them to partition out greens and things like that feel that out see what feels comfortable talk to local companies that might have wood chips might be collecting leaves is there a relationship with them where they can be dumping that material close to you are there local farms that have waste hay or waste grain maybe there are manure piles at local farms that you can tap into other people that are would be happy to deliver it to you for a reasonable price that you can support some local economy and some labor if you don't own a truck and most importantly I don't feel strongly that this system is an all or nothing you may very well continue to feed your chickens the rations that you buy them and just have a little compost pile that they can work on and you heal up and each time you take the material and scoop it and pile it up again there's a renewed interest in your chicken so it could be very small-scale could just be an additional bonus for them instead of an all-or-nothing like our system where they basically this is it this is their feed but it's worked for us for over four years it continues to evolve we'd love your feedback and thank you so much for that particular question hopefully this has been useful or helpful to you feel free to ask further questions in the comments or have some dialogue with each other what ways are you providing free or low-cost feed for your chickens how is it working for you thanks so much

Channel: EdibleAcres

Views: 223,426

Rating: 4.9350648 out of 5

Keywords: chicken, permaculture chicken, feeding chickens free, free chicken food, low cost chickens, permaculture, chickens, permaculture chickens, permaculture design, backyard permaculture chicken coop, backyard chickens, chicken (animal), chicken coop, chicken house, permaculture gardening, raising chickens, urban permaculture design, permaculture with chickens, permacuture, free range, chickens permaculture garden, backyard chicken coop design, garden, free food, free feed

Id: Y5qyJcr6WJs

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mhswift]

Great video. Thanks for sharing. I've been dipping my toe into this area for my chickens and ducks and this gives me some great ideas :)

[u/Seva108]

Yes, this is best thing, chicken are just best friends for gardener.

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