RAISING HENS WITH NO GRAIN. Some thoughts...

today's video I want to make a little response about raising poultry without grain and just bring up a few points to contextualize and clarify some things because I get so many questions as a pastured poultry expert so many people come to me with unclear ideas about how things actually work so I want to just run through some scenarios and numbers and just point out a few things for the benefit of those who don't actually have experience with raising poultry so I got prompted to make this video because you wouldn't believe how many times people come to our farm on training we run specialist pastured poultry trainings for pasture boilers plastered layers turkeys etc and as well as you know long internships whole farm planning which is led to a lot of people especially in Europe America Australia getting started with amazing enterprises but it's unbelievable how many people come with a question around raising poultry with no grain based on feeding them insects or they've seen videos particularly Carl hammers videos by Justin Rhodes or the little teaser that just came out by Curtis Stone about a video he's got on his membership site and it's a numbers thing and I just think that I wanted to break that down I don't normally watch farming videos on YouTube but I saw that come across my feed and it prompted me because this is a question that was asked to me just last week and it's a question that's repeated so many times I wanted to speak a bit about it so I'm totally down with Carl hammer he's an incredible man I loved his podcast on farm and farmer podcast he's an absolute wizard and you know someone has been a pioneer in the field makes incredible compost and there's a contextual point in there they are a commercial compost manufacturer they make their money from compost and a little bit of money from eggs and someone usually comes to the farm saying hey I'm really into insects you know why can't I grow insects to replace the protein needs in my chicken food well it's a mathematics game in that example because if you did the mathematics of growing mealworms or sold your flies or any of these things well a in Europe there's regulations about feeding farmed animals to farmed animals so you might not be allowed to do that and be you would have a couple of hectares of intensive inset production to be able to provide the protein needs for a flock of 1,200 birds that we typically have running in our farm and so a big reflection for me is oh hey what do you want your day to look like do you want to be an insect farmer you know do you have the space to be an insect farmer and the resources to be an insect farmer or do you want to have an efficient laying hen operation and spend your time marketing selling keeping the accounts in order etc we're all busy as farmers and so we need efficient systems now I'm not saying I'm against these systems but I think it's incredibly important to understand the the compost system there's numbers that have come out in a couple of these videos that give us some contextualization and I can break them down for you as a poultry raised in myself so Carl hammers compost operation I know that they make incredible composter supplies a lot of amazing growers around the states they they're importing 1,200 tons of food scraps food waste from the community that goes into their compost and that makes up a part of their poultry diet now the figures I have are just from these videos particularly Justin Rhodes and a little snippet that just came out on Kate Stone's channel so I may be incorrect in some of my figures but the thinking is the same 1,200 tons of food scraps is far more important nutrients than I import with my grain based poultry feed so let's just take a step there what what do we feed our birds well we feed them laya pellets we've done experiments with all different feed regimes for our boilers for our layers and we layers we used to supplement with some straight grain from our local organic growers but we buy organic layer pellets we buy point of lay hens at 16 weeks old they're just about to come into lay and they're high production hence they're laying about 320 something eggs a year and we are raising them in mobile egg Mobile's that you'll be very familiar with if you follow our channel and we raised 400 a 350 to 400 in each egg 'mobile following behind cows and sheep and we've done a lot of invertebrate studies you can read about in our old books or in our new book and we make sure the birds get access to manure full of insects as well as pastoral insects and the moving daily on to fresh ground and they've been largely responsible for the radical improvement of pasture we've seen we've built 25 centimeters of topsoil in a few years of being at our farm through using a mechanical means like a keyline plow which Dee compacts the subsoil which allows air and water to penetrate deeper into the compacted ground which means roots root deeper and they wherever roots are plants are pumping out short chain carbon polysaccharides and so this is a mechanical tool that allows us to shatter up compaction and build topsoil from below there's videos on our channel about how we built soil in the past but a large proportion of that has been down to poultry and it's why poultry is so important for small funds you can have many of them in a small space you cannot do big livestock effectively economically on a very small farm and that's a big part of our new book regenerative Agriculture's looking at all these nuances and comparing all these different enterprises to different time places and circumstances as well as economics now with organic layer feed is primarily grain based now it's also very scientifically rationed through masses of data collected from the industry because alternative agriculture lists generally don't keep much data I however keep very detailed data and I have extensive time in motion studies so I really have a good platform to do these sort of comparative analysis now I select organic layer feed that has fishmeal as the protein source and that's because the chicken is omnivorous is originally an insect eating jungle edge but now our modern chickens are very far away from the original birds that lived on the edge of bamboo thickets just like all our farm animals very far removed from their ancestors but a chicken is an omnivore and therefore I see it as a matter of priority and ethical stance to make sure that birds are able to take meat protein and then that is further supplemented by insects on the pasture etc but that doesn't make up enough of their diet they do need feed now it's important to say that hens are performance birds and if you don't keep tight data you wouldn't understand the important correlation with correct feeding and performance both health and egg production chickens have a three or four day lag time for example if I run out of oyster shells that's the calcium supplement for creating strong egg shells three or four days later a bunch of the eggs will have soft shells in if I decrease my feet by 20% three days later I'll have 50% less eggs now I have very tight records on all these things and so I can tell you things with complete assurance and it's really important because in the video that just came up on curtis's channel you heard Carl saying they didn't keep very tight records and I think that's important because it plays into the mathematics of running an enterprise very much so you should look into what feeds are made of and comprised of in your area because a lot of chicken food is got soya or pea as a protein source sorry is not a great protein source for anything it seems like the only people that have used soya for a very long time or perhaps the Japanese who had very careful ways of preparing and fermenting the soya it's not great human food and it's not great chicken food chickens need meat protein now you can read in our book about how we did insect surveys and the beautiful symbiosis between herbivores and chickens mimicking how egrets always follow the water buffalo that you see if you've seen a postcard of water buffalo in bali it's always got a white egrets out on back and this is a natural symbiosis that we're mimicking by following our chicken flocks behind cows and sheep we typically do that about 96 hours behind four days behind because that's when the dung beetles are really beneficial insects have done their work left the pile buried organic matter in the ground and now the fly larvae are just about to hatch and cause a nuisance to the cows so we bring in the chickens they act like little biological muck spreaders and take all the Amigo three and six which bugs out of there which is supplementing their diet but it's really not enough for their whole diet now when I receive my hands and they go in to lay they're about 18 weeks old when they start laying we received the hens at 16 weeks old they start laying over the next month that ramps up to full production where they will sit at 95% production until November December time when it starts to slowly decrease through the winter that averages out year-round at 85% that means this let's take the figure of the recent video the Kurd this put out which was 800 hens that they had Carl hammers composting facility those 800 hens will lay me quarter of a million eggs those quarter of a million eggs I sell for 3.6 crowns that's about 36 cents euro cents for those of you in different countries that creates a value of nearly nine hundred and ten thousand euros in the year before we call them and we changed the flock over now I spend about 21 thousand euros two hundred and twelve thousand crowns on feed which leaves me with six hundred and ninety five thousand crowns enterprise profit without the labor etc so that's about 70 thousand euros coming from those eight hundred hens with the grain based diet now we heard in Curtis video Carl hammer was saying that the hens were only laying of 50% now at 50% lay those birds will be creating about a hundred and forty six thousand eggs in the year so it's nearly half the eggs now their feed costs are very low if you take them into the compost business or they're free and they create abouts to 3000 euros or five hundred and thirty thousand crowns of value if they're sold at the same price now if we say the feed cost is zero you see it's about sixteen thousand euros less net profit from that enterprise so that's quite a big chunk and it's worth really thinking about that and in that video you heard Carl say at their best they're laying 85 percent but that's a figure you need to be careful of because in the same sentence he also said they're not keeping tight data now there's a big difference between the average throughout the whole year and the peak of their production I have no doubt that astronaut's the breed in Karl's example are able to lay 85% at their peak our birds are laying 95 percent in their peak and there are high production Birds so it doesn't surprise me but it would surprise me very much if they have an average throughout the year of that much which I don't believe they do in fact whilst Australorp can produce very high numbers of eggs and the record numbers produced by Austral ops are as high as any high production bird they average about 250 which is 68% lay and so that is quite you know substantially different and those numbers add up because you're dealing with multiple multiple eggs so those kind of numbers the egg price and the amount of percentage of eggs that you can sell those numbers affect the enterprise hugely and you have to be very careful with those numbers so whilst I would say probably the data for Austral ops is 68% you need to then consider that that would be in a high production high feed input case now the data is not out if they haven't been collecting good records on whether the hens maintain that percentage on a compost based diet now I have no doubt that that diets brilliant you know natural foodstuffs and insects that's perfect for a chicken no doubt about it but bear in mind you need a commercial compost facility to be able to produce that and that's not the aim of most farms that's the aim of a compost producer so let's say even if they averaged 68 percent lay at their best 250 eggs per hen a year that would create about 73 thousand euros in value of eggs so it would be about four thousand euros and more per year than our enterprise's grain-based so it's slightly better if you are a commercial compost maker making thousands of cubic meters of compost which most of us aren't and if they lay consistently year-round like this not just at their peak so these are important things to consider something else to consider with Austral ops is they take up six months to start laying right so we have an extra two months of feed that's not producing eggs now I have no doubt that these birds are fantastic and I have no doubt that this is a fantastic system I'm not putting this video together to criticize it I think it's fantastic but I'm just trying to point out that unless you have a name to set out as a commercial compost maker making a huge amount of compost then probably this system is not replicable and it's a huge amount of inputs I would say if you calculate how much land is needed to produce the grain to feed our birds it's far far less inputs than what is going into making the compost that subsequently feeds that purse now in a way they're not worth comparing obviously they're not comparable systems but I'm just trying to point out some nuances and thoughts to allow you to develop your thinking process if you're raising a commercial flock at any scale you're not gonna get by on forage or on any other feed source than then making sure you give birds adequate feed if you try and skimp on your feed costs you will lose egg production the data is out on that and it's very clear now for those of you that are backyard hen producers and have small flocks homestead flocks of course you can raise dual purpose birds with you know with very little inputs but for most of us that are producing commercially and that scale bear in mind we typically have 1200 hence you need a lot of inputs there is no such thing as a low input high production farm they don't exist anywhere on the planet despite what permaculture books and other myths might tell you that's not the way it works you know farming takes a lot of inputs to produce good outputs and that's the way it's always been we can be smart about it you know we can integrate as much as we can between different systems but it's it takes a lot of energy to produce a lot of food now what's the value of the outputs of the system well in Karl's case you're producing a huge amount of beautiful compost that I hear is the best going and that's fantastic and it's a necessary service we need more compost our hands are doing something different that building past year you can look back at videos on our channel building 25 centimeters of topsoil you'll see our cut through profiles where we've gone from 95% root mass in 18 centimeters of topsail when we arrived at the farm down to 95 percent of top saw a root mer saw in 45 centimeters that's from pulling a key line plow twice in a timed fashion when grass is at its highest photosynthetic rate and then letting grass recover and grazing appropriately holistic planned grazing with cows and sheep and lots of regular inputs from poultry manure both boilers and layers now we have absolutely radically transformed our pastures from some of the worst land in the village to by far the best land and last year in the extreme drought you'll remember we had grass up to my shoulders photosynthesizing like crazy when everyone else had already gone yellow in June testimony to the amount of carbon we'd captured in the ground holding and storing water one particle of organic carbon in the soils holding four particles of water one particle humus four particles water if I increase my soil organic carbon by four percent that's nearly half a million liters of water per hectare stored in the living tops all exactly where plants want it for their processes and so we've built soil but then in the winter months when the birds come into the tunnel after the in season four tomatoes and cucumbers we then bent them down on a deep layer of peat moss as a carbonaceous nappy for their high nitrogen manure and we produce hundreds and hundreds of cubic meters of compost that fuels our no dig market garden system and mulch is all our tree systems in our silver pasture lanes so we get all those benefits - so I'm not saying this is better that is better I'm saying they're totally different and it's a little bit blase to chat about raising birds without grain it's like it's a lovely idea but it fits very specific context like a commercial compost grower or homesteader who's just got a few birds for those of us raising egg and meat birds on pasture we reap just as many benefits if not arguably many more and the inputs are actually possibly a lower if you do full cost accounting so there's no right or wrong way to do it Nick all comes down to your context in the resources available to you and what you're trying to achieve financially now it's a numbers game like any enterprise but particularly so with eggs it's all down to fine lines and numbers now we've shown it can be very profitable and it's hugely ecologically rewarding to run birds on pasture especially behind other larger livestock I've said in many videos before you never underestimate the power of chicken it's such a tool for small farmers because of the sheer animal density animal numbers that you can have on a small piece of land many of our past participants have gone off and set up great pasture poultry enterprises and I'm excited to go around Europe next year and see some of those and film them for you and share more stories I know that a lot of you love to see those things more on that later in the winter I've got some pretty epic news to announce you all but yes you can find out a bunch more in our online training we have planning spreadsheets where you can plug in your egg sales price your fee cast your bird cost your electricity costs etc and it spits out all the numbers it's a game-changer just amongst you know it's one piece out of massive amount of information on that training there's really been helping people all over world so you can find that in the links below if you're interested and don't forget to plan hard and do good ok that's it for today folks I hope that clarifies a few things gives you something to think about our egg Mobile's have retired here in Top Fuel for the winter hens up in the greenhouse I'll show you some videos of that over the winter time and I wanted to just say we're ten days left now of our crowdsource campaign for regenerative agriculture on Kickstarter it's a project we love on Kickstarter so easy to find if you type in regenerative agriculture on Kickstarter calm we've waste quarter of a million euros already and that's an amazing achievement thank you all so much for your support and I'm super excited to get that book out to you very soon and just to let people know that books funded in the campaign will be sent out hopefully in December time you'll get them in December or January other work than that if you don't support in the campaign I won't have books for sale and tall March or April time so it'll take a lot longer to get it if you support the campaign on Kickstarter with an e-book option then you'll get that in November or early December so that's the quickest way to get the book we're also offering combinations of e-books and hardcover copy books and we have lifetime access to our online training for less than a thousand euros that's getting a full overhaul next year huge amount more content of farms as I go around Europe looking at some of the leading examples in all areas of regenerative agriculture on the big road trip connecting people and sharing amazing information our training will only go up in price and so I highly recommend that as an option to get on board if you want to have lifetime access to that training we'll see you in a video soon thanks folks bye for now [Music]

Channel: Richard Perkins

Views: 88,938

Rating: 4.902977 out of 5

Keywords: ridgedale, ridgedalefarm, pasturedpoultry, richardperkins

Id: 3ucIRzAwZN4

Length: 21min 54sec (1314 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019