Commercial Kitchen Scraps for Chickens and Rabbits and Compost

There is a local restaurant here that is most known for their buffet. They do have a regular menu to order off but the buffet is the main attraction. I googled and searched the forums here and I wanted to solicit new feedback as I could not find a comparative post. This is the place, they publish their menu on FB and the local radio 107.1 everyday. https://ltok.com/restaurant

I made a connection with the owner's son, who runs the restaurant. He offered me the kitchen scraps. This would be all the buffet leftovers from the previous day and I would pick up daily. It could range from fried catfish to mac and cheese to salad greens to desserts.

It sounds like he has done this before and was disappointed because the staff separated the food and then the person getting it refused to take all of it or did not come regularly. I would feel obliged to take all that he has due to this unless it was a major issue, which it could turn into. I will be direct with him and let him know this upfront.

He estimated that volume would be 2-10 5 gallon buckets a day. Who knows until I make it through a month to find out. Close to 10 buckets on weekends and less during the week. I have 24 layers and 2 roosters. I plan to hatch some eggs and I have a large compost area. Total compost volume available would be 750 cubic feet. 0.7 cubic feet in a 5 gallon bucket. That is what I have walled off. I have raw land to work with on top of that.

I also have meat rabbits to eat all the greens.

Initially, it is an exciting proposition because of being able to feed the chickens and all of the compost we would generate.

The negatives could be too much volume to deal with. It is institutional food so non organic and gmo stuffs. Time and gas, also a positive because of meeting new people and making new connections though. We don't measure our lives on a spreadsheet so it is more based in doing things with a cheerful heart that bring us joy than what it would cost in $$$. That may help or hurt some of the pros and cons.


What are your thoughts on this? Have you tried it before?

Personally, the volume and frequency makes me feel that it could get overwhelming quickly.

Consider that a chicken roughly consumes a quarter pound of food a day. They will not make as big of a dent at their current numbers than I would feel comfortable if I wanted the animals to be the primary source of waste conversion.

If you want to create and tend a growing compost pile, you would get a heck of a lot of volume from this place. I would want to ensure I had plenty of cover material to prevent smell and flies.

Perhaps this would be an excellent time to consider keeping pigs as they would be a great consumer of scraps!

The problem with this sort of kitchen waste is the massive amount of sodium salt that is entrained in the waste. Aside from that, the bio matter must obviously must be recycled -- but good gracious, the sodium salt is enough to kill a horse or maybe an elephant.

So you can't dump it in the compost, because the salt will stay in your soil and poison it forever.

The classic solution, methinks, is a pig.

First, yes we do something similar but on a *much* smaller scale.

1. We only take "pre-consumer vegetable scraps" - no meat and nothing served and then scraped off a plate. This has to do with local bylaws, but it reduces the risk of getting a lot of stuff that would attract yet more rats.

2. It takes some training to get the staff to understand that 'things worms won't eat" shouldn't go in the bucket and over-all they do well, but rubber bands from fresh veggie bunches, and some plastic do sneak in. Thankfully, more of the "little labels" are now biodegradable - they used to be plastic and I'd find them years later in the compost. I think all the city composting programs have helped shift that problem.

3. Chickens shouldn't eat moldy food, so one has to watch that a bit. They mostly want the green leafies, so we tend to toss that to the chickens and things like carrots and mushroom  bits go to our composts. Depending on the season, we tend to have duck-shit contaminated wood chips that need composting. Layering that with veggie scraps really helps it compost better. We're dry in the summer, so the veggie scraps add a lot of moisture to the heap.

4. We use buckets with lids which we rinse and return, the restaurant is only a little over 5 km away, and we only have to pick up twice a week.  We often have some other errands that need doing, so normally it's manageable, however for the last year, Hubby's been away for 6 weeks at a time, and even twice a week can get tough for me, because there's so much else extra I'm having to manage.

5. Managing the balance between "greens" and "browns" in the compost is hard for me at the best of times. Overall, the 4 to 8 buckets a week, helps me in the right direction.

This is my situation - you have to evaluate your own pros and cons.

A lot of good things have already been mentioned such as pigs, pests, correct ratios, etc. though I'd like to touch on something else.

Josh Hoffman wrote:... the staff separated the food and then the person getting it refused to take all of it ...

This has me worried. If I'm picking up the subtext correctly, it sounds like you might not be getting separated scraps.
From a buffet which might contain meat, if nothing is separated, you could potentially get chicken in with your greens...

To quote Willy Wonka: "But that is called 'cannibalism,' my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies"

I've seen chickens eat chicken, raw, cooked, and on-the-hoof so to speak. None of it makes me warm and fuzzy inside.
If nothing else, the proximity to diseases is exponentially larger within the same species.
I don't allow my chickens to eat fowl of any kind.

I recommend caution.
I fed my last batch of birds non-organic grocery scraps (mostly lettuce, no meat) and only had marginal success.
Personally, I would avoid this scenario despite the seeming positives.

That said, if you're really really keen on the idea, I echo others in saying: get a few pigs.
They don't need a ton of room.
You might have success with a "PigPort" - a 240 square foot car port filled with deep bedding:

Thank you guys for the expert feedback and please keep it coming if you have anything else. I had not considered some of the points you are making about salt content, etc.

To paint a clearer picture. They have a breakfast buffet on Sat and Sun. Dinner buffet on Fri and Sat. Lunch buffet 7 days a week. I would be getting a little 5 days a week and more 2 days a week depending on how they do.

The food I would pick up is what is left in the buffet pans once the dining room closes every day. It may be fairly easy for them to separate. They would take the buffet pans and put the contents directly into buckets. I now have some more questions to ask on what is possible.

The talk of pigs brings up another question that I just posted here: https://permies.com/t/274223/Pig-Reference-Book

Incase anyone has a recommendation on that question.

Pictures of the actual buffet I am talking about:

Over the years folks here on the forum have considered something similar.

Some folks have consider making a business of collecting waste from restaurants, groceries, etc:

https://permies.com/t/67174/composting/free-cheap-food-wastes-restaurants

https://permies.com/t/95654/composting/run-composting-business-familiar-commercial

https://permies.com/t/124721/permaculture/Composting-lbs-Food-Waste-Ashley

https://permies.com/t/51733/composting/composting-large-amounts-fruit-veg

I hope your venutre works out for you.