How Karl Hammer Feeds 600 Chickens (Without Grains)

Carl hammer is growing 600 chickens a 300 eggs a day on absolutely no grain what's the magic right there compost day 99 of the great American farm tour y'all I cannot believe where we are Carl hammer Vermont composting you see that you guys see that chickens free to go wherever they want to go but I guarantee you Oh way more up there guys way more up there in the compost piles I think it over it says do not enter oh well we've got a special tour coming with Carl himself kind of all scheduled in about ten minutes the rain has let off it's been raining all morning I cannot wait to see this chicken system this is it come on guys come on back down let's go find Carl this is a chicken system where they are completely off grain they're on compost there's some food residuals in there but not that much they're feeding off the microbial life in there can always find out more about it it's Carl who inspired me to first weaned my chickens off of grain first through free ranging and then through my own composting system at a homestead level so can you jump I'm excited [Music] [Music] everyone this is Carl hammer vermicompost hi Dale oh yeah how many chickens you got here Carl huh well we started the last capensis I think it's about 600 600 600 we have had as many as 1,200 what what happened she died well that we had a building that wasn't really adequate and this one that this building is good for about 650 okay and we're planning to move the birds okay so this is where they this really nice so if you had clicked over how many eggs are you getting today well it varies we are an average layout right now is probably about 50% okay so we're getting something like 300 a day where's your fingers like oh there's our feeder we don't feed any game we don't think okay we're sneaking around looking for some feeders here somewhere but there's none huh no Peters 300 eggs a day on 600 birds no feeder you gave me some water yeah we give them again some water and is that the normal in a an oyster shell that's Calvin oyster shell yeah I'm not sure we get into 300 right now because we're down a little from the peak oh okay but and again you know this is a the age of the fáák matters younger you know first time we often have birds that will go through three or four or even more moats okay so our Birds lived for a number of years typical so we're not trying to squeeze every egg out a heaven-born with every egg shell ever lay and then she has to do this enormous task every day of taking a tiny microscopic egg and turning it into a ball and you ever harvest the birth themself we do we don't I mean when they stop laying we sometimes though we're not we're not especially vigilant about that okay we figure if she's eating and pooping and imparting knowledge yeah we were very into the culture part of this because Birds sociology is very important to the management you know they know what's prudent and what's not and we've produced eggs for sale in this farm every day of every year since 98 9 without buying grain it tells more about how in the world we don't buy grain well so this feeding mix is the combination of cow manure horse manure our own donkey mule manure and food residuals Trenor area schools supermarkets co-op restaurant so we last getting to in 2016 we accepted for management about 1200 wet tons of community food wild grounds and all of that got blended we developed where the blending happens how much of the compost pile is actual food residual well a starting ratio is never more than about 20% so what do you think they're eating in there well I just they're eating all kinds of things because they're they're eating all of the all of the componentry is in transition as soon as it gets blended so they're eating protein and carbohydrates from the food itself they're eating bacterial and fungal components they're eating bugs and grubs they also they do a lot of other foraging so those rocks and rolling down because they're there that's a that's a work that's a chicken managed worm farm over there ah okay okay see this sculpture yes that's all chicken sculpture okay okay and these piles we get they get worked a lot with loaders but you can see the chickens like this is a pile of wood chips granite and basalt that we use for winter traction so this is our winter traction mix which is 80% woodchips which keeps it from freezing okay which you don't have the kind of challenges that we do with wind not that much snow somebody in winter here this gets very slippery and we need to be able to get trucks up this steep hill so you see them grain in the winter no not even the winter no but the piles have to be hot you got to keep the piles going so we have these two feeding piles they get they get fresh material put on them every morning and then at some point we harvest that and windrow it up here so did you learn this lesson from the wild bird like right here you got a ton of wild birds feeding on this yeah you know and funny thing is we didn't have any gulls till for several years so where did you come up with the idea that let's chicken beyond the compost I don't really know it occurred to me one day that it well I had a over guy with a healthy restaurant in town Gary beards Worth and he decided to compost the food scraps from his cafe and coming this way he set up a three-bin system downtown and the Health Officer showed up within a day and threatened to close the restaurant so he called me and asked if I could use it and at the time we had probably 25 or 30 birds household flock so I said sure and that's where it started nice um so you know black garlic is this is running just about perfect black garlic temperature well you're supposed to leave your garlic for 40 days at 140 Fahrenheit so this is day four what will ultimately do it all this compost rule we will sell it I make potting soil out of it okay we do where do you sell we sell probably 35 or 40 percent of our production is right here in Vermont and about sixty-five percent goes out of state now got the perfect black garlic temperature going here nice he's got buck dollar buyer in there really yep part of its process well I just yeah this is my first time o of making black garlic okay I've been growing garlic for over 40 years and I never heard of black garlic till lately well I don't even know what it is yeah I couldn't believe I was nobody told me either black garlic Korean and Chinese okay so it's typically 30 to 50 days in a container of some kind that retains moisture at temperatures around 140 Fahrenheit which is a mallard process the Mallee are you familiar with the mallard my yard was a French chemist who identified mallard process and this is a little hotter maybe well it's alright mal yard process is what makes bread brown okay that's what makes coffee brown many things so it's not microbial it's a it's a complex sugar dynamic that happens too slow caramelizing basically and it really changes the character of garlic makes it very sweet and our garlic is very hot sugar anyway ours is running about 47 bricks so anyway it turns as black is here and and and it's kind of chewy you can spread it its keeps indefinitely it can be dehydrated in power it's used medicinally about it's super healthy for you yeah yeah it's going to make me live forever is what I'm afraid of this will have to be turned before that's ready so I'm hoping that everybody's supposed to know that there and I'm hoping we're not going to end up so food comes in and gets mixed an engineered substrate okay this is alfalfa ground here yep because we want the birds to have access to alfalfa we have to Queen seed hmm but we want them to always have a place where mycorrhizal spores are being generated so the birds can in vector mycorrhizal nancial we don't want our compost process to get so extensive that it doesn't intersect the farm at the field in forest ecology because we want to participate in that and bring it forward food comes from supermarkets etc etc collected by a couple of haulers and gets brought up here this is the last couple days worth okay blended it gets thrown typically dumped here okay and then blended with what we call hot mix okay which includes maple bark in this case hardwood bark that's a biochar product this is incoming cow and horse manure getting blended to make the the blending material all of that activity with the raw is on a bed of bark that's about three feet deep so the bark gets slowly incorporated but it's first used as a filter for the liquids which are then channeled to that filter cup where do you get the bar the spark is comes from Quebec where the logs are song but the logs are really Vermont logs oh this is you can smell the bark right here um so bark is very endemically potent and has a much narrower CN ratio than a wood chipped wood so we've been using hardwood bark for a very long time it's a relatively expensive ingredient but we liked the quality of the compost project is a water management project here again we this is a wood chip blend with granite and basalt which is how we that's our traction mix but we also use it as a primary filter then we're carrying so that's all finished compost of the substrate here is shaped so that all the raw material juices do not go out on to the pad with the pen from the earth this was tryna keep that separation and we're trying to keep that pond drinkable so this road actually is sand d play of sand on the original sod retained in place with stone and rivet you know it's got a stone revetment on top of it but it is itself a sand filter just so that we ourselves that we maintain potability of that pond and so we carry all of that leachate on the inside to a filter and we have well mostly the further all that further field is pasture nowadays so we have a couple of pieces of ply around you grow a little bit of garlic make or black glare like there's dark the jackass pit is the end and we have one Genet they are Mary baby and his mother and the mule so all of this goes into this little cattail wetland and across there and it actually crosses again with a pipe this is kind of the crossroads of the farm this so we take this material out here into this wandering filter which is under construction at the moment always construction but we're so familiar with the term Google Google culture yeah yeah you can explain it for those that don't so when the certain point it became clear in certain parts of Northern Europe in Germany and Austria in places like that that there were these terraces that had tremendous productivity over hundreds of years they were enormous ly productive and archaeologists determined at a certain point that they were constructed of Forest debris wood long time ago of course people all over the world build terraces out of whatever they have so if you were in the forest you would naturally use wood so we're we have access to various kinds of wood and so we use it in conjunction with compost and woodchips and other materials to literally build the filters because there's a lot of value in the leachate from the process hello folks guys so this is Mary and she's she's been bred greatly Mary and Mary's doing some harness work bigger than I imagined yeah these are mammoth American Jack stuck these are huge look at them compared to the kids there that's Mary say hey to Mary so what's the role of the donkey here Karl well we worked them okay and we so here's our Jack Cody and he's he's actually got a fancy pedigree that goes back to some very important Jack stock torch he's shedding right now good YUM yeah I got and Bennet is hot that fence is hot didn't you yes he knows but he does so what's the job they do you use it for work are you hauling are yet plowing and what are you doing where we deliver eggs right now so Jeff I can come up readily with a picture here we have a picture on your phone he doesn't look at that actually he doesn't you you're not picked up on phones yet he you put your phone up he's apt to take it if you it doesn't like his face presented with phones you don't see he'll be held up here yo tiling oh there you go there you go sweetie there we are last week this is love you have met either then this is an old mule named Katy and Ruby who's the mother of her baby yeah we were just coming back from delivering a car and I was a that made the news yeah Jake we're under some pager now okay but a lot of this is about blood about endangered wild livestock breeding yeah mammoth American Jack stock was very important to the development of this country these particular bloodlines come from the in Spain the type of donkey there that's called the Luke got the lot there amazing animals I've had I got my first Jack when I was in probably 20 years old Wow I've had what with their role in American history then somewhere in his pedigree goes back to a gift of this King Carlos the third to George Washington the name of that Jack was royal gift and the king of Spain Reckitt was the first European power to recognize the New Republic because it was a stick in England's eye and and because the king of Spain knew that in order to do plantation agriculture the United States would need mules slaves were very expensive and so in order to grow indigo and sugar and cotton you needed mules okay horses can't work in the heat the way meals can nor can axon so an oxen are slow so mules were very very important for tropical and sub-tropical agriculture so not only not to be outdone Lafayette then gave the George Washington a a Maltese Jack knit that was called knight of Malta and both George Washington Thomas Jefferson were all very engaged in mule breeding and it became a very important industry in places with good limestone soils like Missouri Kentucky Tennessee Caroline parks the Carolinas that could build big cannon bones on mules it's not the first time that a fortune was made in mules the import to France yes in part to France in the 15th century great fortunes were made would they have a particular Jack called the pot to jack stock called the pot to the biggest of Jackson the world for many years they would not allow any Jack stock out of pot to donate their phone they have their own horse called the milesg a with which they made mules and they built they bred the big heavy draft mules of Flanders these critters coming from the Pyrenees a little more compact a little faster I'd say these critters coming from the Pyrenees these two in particular really exemplify the Pyrenees bloodlines he's wanted some hey Carl yeah in 98 gathering food waste around town with a pair of big mules and we've had big mules here mostly we're down to one big mule the Mules aged holding died but now that we have the these mammoth donkeys and we're committed to the brezza what we want to make them work as well okay and without so we we still have one mule and she's kind of our trainer she's 24 years old okay she's very traffic safe we have one Janet that we're working her with that's also very prudent person she's doing a great job and we have a foal by her and she's bred back and we're probably gonna buy another couple jigs by my hair but our goal is to ultimately have a team of four to pull the freight that we're trying to pull we have a young team serves very gung-ho Kaylie is ruined yeah she's here well pretty much five days a week putting harness on it doing some training we have young young animal we're training we really think of them as plausible power for the future so in each case here we waterflow for the last fifteen thousand years has been straight down into the Blanchard Brook and onto the Winooski River and Lake Champlain so we've turned everything okay so we have again you know the active pad so that that berm separates the potable water from the process water okay so in every case and that's that's actually a I dug that hole in 96 when I bought the place to water mine critters it was the first place I could hold water because there's a kind of big lay of underground river cobble big rocks here and there I found so I could keep water so and we've kept that ever since both to mark the original grade where the water was and to so we can feed our Heron frogs and so we can count legs on frogs to see whether our activities or anything or and we have very healthy prolific two-legged problem is a constructed Terrace again you know like by the time you get to these pear trees they're maybe 15 feet of fill from original grades because this was a steep gully and there we turn it again this is the top of the watershed all of this water gets directed so every drop of water on the farm has a destination it's been designed for it okay and enforced upon it because we really don't want to be releasing nutrients from the fondant we're going it's our responsibility and it's also what we have to sell yeah going to keep it all here why why do you cover the chickens compost there oh well we had that framed they like it in midwinter it's good for them okay when we shorten that building we decided to throw another cover on the birds like it it's right by the house there when it's really snowing or raining that little bit of shelter gives them old thermal benefit or just keeps them dryer how often you change out what they're on right now they get new every day and it gets taken out every ten or twelve days so if somebody were to do this on the homestead level could they yes yes you certainly could that's all where we where we make blended media those dead space compost pile has to be three cubic yards or meters big the heat up that right is that what you found oh just the minimum size I don't know well it's frequently people say yard but yard is small okay let's say three yards is it besides where you can start to get and again where you are matters in Vermont in the winter we really need a fair amount of thermal bump for the birds okay to be comfortable you know because they the pile is really hot they get to okay it's yeah moves them salad yeah chef a homesteader was going to make one of those piles how many birds could they feed on one of those huh well our rule of thumb has been and I wouldn't take this to any bank that we need a minimum of about two pounds of average mixed food waste or food scraps per bird per day okay other people have felt they needed more and you know obviously it's very different a pound of lettuce or a pound of salami have very different yeah energy arithmetic so they're not going to live on lettuce no they're not and they can't live on pasture there they're there they're omnivores and they need to be they have a short durable digestive system they're very hard to poison but they need higher protein density than pasture alone so insects are really important worms and bugs and grubs we're very convinced that there are fungal components that they eat and benefit from and bacterial components that they benefit from we think the manure the the mammal manures are also really important if available we haven't tried to do without mammal manure and so I'm not sure how much that would change yes we have birds that don't go up to the that is always a little colony of birds that lives in the mule barn and manages mule manure and donkey manure and raises worms and doesn't bother going up where food is wow I'm they're not supposed to be there they're discouraged but we do have some laying boxes in there they also tend to self-replicate yeah you know they're kind of Mountain renegade group it's a very safe place because where the dog sleeps so you know Fox doesn't come down here right so we're in a pretty serious predator pressure here that's why we need this especially because of bears and we've never had a bear here but bears go around both sides my book keepers gave up keeping chickens because the Bears were breaking in their chicken so and we have coyotes and foxes and the donkeys help with that too they're really hard on and and while we were here in the suburbs so you know domestic dogs are and we don't yeah we don't see much of that on this yeah I've heard that donkeys are good guard guard animals that serve yes Duncan's are very good guard animals this is what we were on the street leash you can have this an all manure spreader it is part of manure spreader what we let drop down the street last trip so you don't leave it there you harvest it yeah we pick it up because it's valuable and leaving it on the street seems irresponsible but I I started my route in town with this I never this was always just a running gear I have an old new idea completely intact with front trucks and everything rubber tyred but this makes a very good it's a very convenient in town wagon we pull it with a full cart and now and we're getting ready to offer residential pickup of compostable school and we're going to sell them eggs and we're going to find some other things to sell them and we're going to you know try to make Kaylee's pay and something besides yeah we did the delivery to the coffin we were just good little practice you could you could do some donkey mimicry but so we're working on it but we're kind of committed to the idea having it be a property yeah mallamma because the safest place for an endangered species is being profitable in profitable rod fits you so well right now in India if Vandana Shiva is numbers there to be believed animal power provides 2 billion dollars worth of avoided fuel Burma and 6.6 million metric tons of carbon not excrete so you know because remember the you feed them on grass yeah and and and you get the value of the manure and so for small farming they the economics is compelling really is so we're trying to retain that capability here in terms of skills and we're very much a mixed power farm but but we're we're really trying to use these animals where they make sense and in such a way that it and you know to give you an idea Teamster here is making a pretty serious wage you know we everybody here is making 115 bucks basically okay and my Teamsters actually getting paid more net she's she's a little bit of a prodigy and 19 years old nine yeah yeah but very very very good at you know she's really a critter whisperer she's very so I'm optimistic that we're actually well we're on the street we have a route we've been we've been delivering eggs and we're going to start picking up some other business whatever it may be we have the advantage that we're less than two miles from the car is actually on Main Street in the capital city well thank you Karl thank you it's been awesome to see this and we appreciate what you're doing [Music]

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Views: 2,542,437

Rating: 4.8561554 out of 5

Keywords: feeding chicens, cut feed costs, how to feed chickens without grain, how to cut chicken feed costs, karl hammer, vermont compost

Id: IWChH9MHkHg

Length: 31min 5sec (1865 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

VT is the best

[u/Thinkbigst]

Holy shit I could listen to him forever.

[u/garthock]

My grandpa used to keep some chicken and geese. When I was young I used to go to grocery stores nearby and help him pull the thrown out produce out of the dumpsters. He would take this to feed his geese and chickens.