Foraging for your chicken

Considering adding backyard chickens. There have been many posts on feed. I plan on only keeping 3-4 egg layers. But I'm considering foraging for my chickens while I'm on my walks or hikes. Does anyone have experience feeding chickens things like autumn olive, sumac berries or other types of wildlife food? I could easily find edible plants and nuts on my walks but wondered if typical food eaten by birds were also acceptable for chickens. Thanks, Aaron

Aaron,
I have been foraging for my chickens, bringing back all kinds of leaves, nuts and berries. I have had to teach them to eat lambs quarter, clover, etc (yes I take a bite and put the item in front of their beak), and once I do this, they are able to fend for themselves. If they don't like it, they just spit it out (like a toddler)! I have less than a tenth of an acre and have strategically let "weeds" grow for them to eat from and be less visible. "Click and Clack" especially like to cross the road to a neighbor that has not been able to tend to their yard to go cricket hunting!

Chickens will happily eat a lot of things, including a wide assortment of fruits, seeds, and greens. To get eggs, though, they need protein. The most natural and perhaps foreageable source of this is insects, worms and other small live creatures. I think you will probably save a lot of time and have better results by trying to arrange it so that the chickens can run around and find these for themselves....

My chickens love Autumn Olives

Wow. I've raised a lot of chickens and I've never foraged for them unless I was dead broke. LOL

I'm impressed!

Chickens eat grass, even. I would just go out and gather whatever is nearby and easy to obtain, throw it in the pen and see what they like.

Good to know. Need spring to jog my memory of what's nearby but how about pokeweed berries? They're everywhere.

Alder I don't think this will cost me much time since I usually go for a walk everyday. I plan on a run/tractor since I sit behind a desk for 9hrs/day Mon-fri. When I'm home I'll have them in a small paddock so a good foraging breed that can get insects would be another requirement.

Side note could/should I aerate the ground before I put them in a small paddock to increase chance of getting worms/insects? When I say aerate I mean take fork and just quickly poke some holes.

No, let them scratch. It will give them something to do instead of taking their work away from them.
They will love scratching through whatever you throw in, as well.

I forage or my chickens all the time! But I live in Hawaii, so I can't really suggest what you should look for during your walks.

Today on my way back from town I stopped to pick up a bucket of fallen mangos, a bunch of damaged feral bananas, a half bucket of feral papayas, half bucket of guavas, and a bucket of noni leaves and fruits. I got home to find two loaves of slightly moldy bread by my gate that someone dropped off. This all gets added to the various assortment of things harvested from my own homestead and garden. And in the afternoons the hens forage for themselves in their pasture paddocks.

Between foraging, what I grow myself, and what neighbors drop off I buy very, very little commercial feed. Basically they just get commercial feed during a bad weather spell or when I'm away from the farm for a couple days. Plus I put a small amount of scratch in their pens in the evening to entice them back from their pastures so I can close them in for the night in order to have them lay their morning eggs where I can find them.

Su Ba, if that stuff was laying all over the ground where I am at, I'd forage for everything and everyone! LOL

That's wonderful!!!

I don't forage for my chickens, I don't weed my garden, I prefer to think of it as a daily harvest of the natural bounty. I take a 3-gallon plastic bucket and a sharp trowel and fill it with dandelions, vetch, Carolina geranium, slugs from under the boards scattered about, prickly lettuce, a misplaced radish, trimmings off the chicory and collards, sowbugs from under a rock, and any other "weed" that doesn't belong as I walk along the hugelbeds. The chickens watch me with keen interest waiting for when I will dump the contents in their chicken tractor.

I suppose you could consider what I do foraging for my chickens. If I'm bushwacking parts of my property and notice that there is something that my chickens may find delicious, I will separate that stuff out and toss it to my hens to enjoy. The alternative would be it would end up in a brush pile or compost so I view it as value added. Pigroot/Amaranth is a common one I will separate out to use as feed. The hens will make quick work of the leaves/seedheads in no time.

I find dumpster diving to be the most efficient kind of foraging, for people or chickens.
That said , I definitely throw them "weeds" when I'm going to be  near their composting area.
They get green prunings of any kind, but no woody branches, not anymore.
The branches make harvesting  the finished compost too difficult.

They get mulberries from the trees that overhang their composting area, and I plan on adding elderberries this fall.
The husks of walnuts attract insect larvae, so I'm wondering what they might do to a bucket of of them.
Speaking of insects, I am tempted to import some live catalpa worms.
I have the trees popping up everywhere, but no worms.

My policy is: don't get chickens, but rather befriend people who are keeping chickens. (I know how much work chickens are in a severe winter climate -- no no no, no thank you.)

I regularly gather pails of chickweed and dandelion for my chicken-keeping neighbours. Sometimes from the garden, sometimes from other "untamed" areas on the property. The chooks love it, and I'm often invited to gather eggs while folks are taking a three-day holiday. One good turn, as they say ...