were our grandparents actually feeding chickens… or just feeding winters?

I grew up seeing hens loose along creek bottoms, hedge rows, and old windbreaks  not penned tight, not fed heavy all year.
It makes me wonder: in the Midwest, was grain really for chickens… or was it insurance for frozen ground and snow cover?
From April through first hard frost, the bugs are thick, seeds everywhere, pasture alive. A good foraging breed works dawn to dusk if the land is right.
So here’s what I’m curious about  especially from folks who remember pre-industrial scale homesteads:
If you’ve got acreage, water, hedgerows, and rotation  is year-round feeding a modern habit, not a necessity?
I’m not talking about selling eggs. Just a household dozen, slower and seasonal.
Curious what folks in Missouri  Kansas  Iowa  Nebraska actually saw work  not what the feed store says.

Lenora said, So here’s what I’m curious about  especially from folks who remember pre-industrial scale homesteads:
If you’ve got acreage, water, hedgerows, and rotation  is year-round feeding a modern habit, not a necessity?

Welcome to the forum/

To me, chicken feed helps add vitamins and nutrients that chickens might not get if they only forage, especially in winter.

I am not sure there are many pre-industrial folks still living.

Here, in the 1960s and I guess before, everybody had lots of chickens. They were not penned up at all. They were not fed much at all except in winter when they got some cracked corn in the morning and maybe a little more as they came back to the coop at night. Coyotes, foxes and bobcats were almost totally absent back then because they were shot or trapped to near regional extinction.  If one was spotted, every boy much over 8 years old was handed a rifle and put on patrol. Owls and hawks were very rare for the same reason and more so because of DDT. The coop was closed up at night against minks and weasels, which I guess were harder to eliminate.

I do mean lots of chickens. Baked chicken, fried chicken, stewed chicken was on the table at least once a week, all year along with the occasional turkey or goose. When mom said, you kids go get me a chicken for supper she did not mean, go the store.  Eggs were on the menu one way or another almost every day. I don't remember what happened to excess eggs, maybe some were sold or given away or traded.

I don't remember much worry over breeds, but I do remember some breed names.  Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds and bantams just lived together.  They were just identified by body type. A big fat chicken to bake, a skinny one or an extra rooster to fry, an old fat one to stew.  Roosters were commonly traded between families or farms. Broody hens were identified each spring and locked in their own little coops with a bunch of eggs, she and her brood were fed until they were big enough to be turned loose with the others, but I don't remember what. I think the type of chicken that dominated a flock was controlled by what roosters were chosen to keep living but there was always a big variety.

I think what I remember was about the last of it. DDT was banned and by the 1970s many farms were abandoned and especially in more hilly areas land was left to begin reforestation. I guess people didn't need their chickens anymore or their vegetable gardens, it was easier and more stylish to work in a factory. All the predators began to rebound.  Now, if you tried to keep chickens that way, you would soon have no chickens.

I'd suggest you check out a copy of this book: https://permies.com/t/265718/Free-Range-Survival-Chickens-Florida

Mark Reed wrote:Here, in the 1960s and I guess before, everybody had lots of chickens. They were not penned up at all. They were not fed much at all except in winter when they got some cracked corn in the morning and maybe a little more as they came back to the coop at night. Coyotes, foxes and bobcats were almost totally absent back then because they were shot or trapped to near regional extinction.  If one was spotted, every boy much over 8 years old was handed a rifle and put on patrol. Owls and hawks were very rare for the same reason and more so because of DDT. The coop was closed up at night against minks and weasels, which I guess were harder to eliminate.

I do mean lots of chickens. Baked chicken, fried chicken, stewed chicken was on the table at least once a week, all year along with the occasional turkey or goose. When mom said, you kids go get me a chicken for supper she did not mean, go the store.  Eggs were on the menu one way or another almost every day. I don't remember what happened to excess eggs, maybe some were sold or given away or traded.

I don't remember much worry over breeds, but I do remember some breed names.  Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds and bantams just lived together.  They were just identified by body type. A big fat chicken to bake, a skinny one or an extra rooster to fry, an old fat one to stew.  Roosters were commonly traded between families or farms. Broody hens were identified each spring and locked in their own little coops with a bunch of eggs, she and her brood were fed until they were big enough to be turned loose with the others, but I don't remember what. I think the type of chicken that dominated a flock was controlled by what roosters were chosen to keep living but there was always a big variety.

I think what I remember was about the last of it. DDT was banned and by the 1970s many farms were abandoned and especially in more hilly areas land was left to begin reforestation. I guess people didn't need their chickens anymore or their vegetable gardens, it was easier and more stylish to work in a factory. All the predators began to rebound.  Now, if you tried to keep chickens that way, you would soon have no chickens.

I have an unusual set-up - an old farmhouse on 5 acres that has been surrounded by urban sprawl. The sprawl keeps away coyotes and foxes (and deer!) leaving only the neighborhood cats and occasional stray dogs to worry about.

But the hawks are everywhere. When I free-ranged during winter, they were taking what felt like a chicken a week.  

I remember my grandparent’s chickens from the seventies.

One set was in northern Nebraska, lots of tree cover around the homestead (coop next to the firewood lot), and they sold eggs and cream commercially to the local creamery.  They fed enough grain at night to get them back into the coop and stay warm during the winter. Grandpa also would cut sod or sprout grain in the winter when there was snow so they got extra greens. And the bad pumpkins and squash from the root cellar.  It seemed like a lot of feed to carry for a five year old, but not really a lot of feed for a couple hundred birds.

The other set was in southern Nebraska, no tree cover and huge hawk and fox pressure. They had a HUGE run with netting right next to the garden. All the weeds and scraps would get tossed in from the garden, and they would be let out into the garden in the off season. They probably used twice as much feed per bird, but considered it cheaper than replacing predation losses.  

I cannot say how preindustrial folks managed their poultry, though I expect they were not giving the chickens any more inputs than they had to - I imagine people were considerably thriftier and more frugal.
The chickens at our place are totally free range (many have been gotten by predators over the years).
We feed them scratch-grains daily, all year- they habitually expect it.  However, it is really not very much - a little handful per bird.
I notice them busy scratching for their daily bread most of the day, and I think the vast bulk of their food comes from their own efforts.  Weeds and worms and grubs and bugs...
I have read (maybe from another thread on Permies?) that farm kids a long time ago would have a regular winter chore of trapping/hunting/finding small game - for the chickens to eat.

The only time I feed the chickens a sizeable portion of grain is when the ground is covered in snow or frozen hard, or if it is pouring rain and they won't come out of the woodshed.

I believe if we were careful and fed them more fancy grain they might give us more eggs, but they seem to do just fine on free-ranging with a tiny bit of grain.
Though, it is probably very dependent on your location and what is available to them from the ground.

Keep in mind that chicken breeding has come a long way in the last two hundred years and now we expect chickens to lay 300 days of the year.  That wasn't the case.

I have a few game fowl and they are much more like premodern chickens: smaller, faster, slower growing and the hens produce 50-100 eggs per year - not grade a large either.  They're not suited to commercial production but they are suited for survival... Better that is.  They're still chickens and no match for a raccoon at night.

And it was uncommon in the past to just raise chickens, you'd have cows and horses and hogs and all of these bigger animals left waste that the chickens could scavenge, whether digging through food scraps or even manure.

But again, the chickens weren't as resource heavy so basically you never fed them intentionally except as you say some corn in the winter and to maybe to get them to like the coop

When i researched this topic, i was hoping to raise game fowl like this (and it does work) and i came across a post where someone asked their grandma what they fed their chickens during the great depression and she replied "you eat chickens you don't feed them"

If you're going to try it, hopefully you have a good dog to keep predators away.  That will go a long way

Martin Mikulcik wrote: I have a few game fowl and they are much more like premodern chickens: smaller, faster, slower growing and the hens produce 50-100 eggs per year - not grade a large either.  They're not suited to commercial production but they are suited for survival... Better that is.  They're still chickens and no match for a raccoon at night...

When i researched this topic, i was hoping to raise game fowl like this (and it does work) and i came across a post where someone asked their grandma what they fed their chickens during the great depression and she replied "you eat chickens you don't feed them"

If you're going to try it, hopefully you have a good dog to keep predators away.  That will go a long way

Very good points Martin.  However, as others have mentioned, a little grain as bribery to get birds (in my case ducks and geese) into safe night housing is an approach I use and refuse to feel guilty about.

I will add that chicks raised by a real chicken mom have much better odds of living a low input life than incubator hatched industrial layers.

And I will back up the comments about ecosystem. We used to have plenty of family around on a homestead which would have helped to discourage some of the predators. A dog was *very* common for security. My farm has mostly just 2 of us, and no dog, and piles of very hungry aerial predators. We use portable cages for our chickens, or there would be no point.

My Grandparents eh?
So, england, great depression, ww2, and rationing well into the 1950s.   More or less the main transition from medieval style farming and market gardens to 20th century style, in that part of England.

There was a lot of poching in the villages, so chickens left to forage would end up in someone elses pot,

So what did they eat?  Grain, often cracked grain, usually stuff too old or ratty to sell for human feed.  Kitchen scraps if there was any, weeds, lots of garden weeds.  Forage from hedgerows and ditches.  There was something the family called "cress" that could be harvested from the ditch in large armfulls every few days and was tasty to small livestock. And sometimes they grew inedible crops like kale over winter for livestock or would buy some from a farmer.  Even in starvation times, kale was not seen as human food until much later.

Christopher Weeks wrote:I'd suggest you check out a copy of this book: https://permies.com/t/265718/Free-Range-Survival-Chickens-Florida

I have only read excerpts from the book, but as I suggested above, ecosystem is everything.

I visited Kawaii years ago. They had a very bad hurricane tear the Island up a decade earlier, ripping up many backyard coops and letting all the chickens loose. These birds had a strong heritage of "Cock fighting", so not the gentle chickens we tend to raise where I live. These birds have been wild and self sustaining ever since. There are signs telling tourists to be careful with their driving and that these birds are loved members of the Island Family, but I'm not aware of any official protection rules.

A friend of mine visited a Caribbean Island about 10 years ago. Again, there were self-sustaining chickens free ranging. These chickens did have official government backed rules about not injuring them, as they were seen and highly valued as self-sustaining bug control.

There are places near me, where without considerable protection, the chickens wouldn't live long enough to "wild" themselves to the point of being a self-sustaining population, let alone if humans were predating their eggs or them for meat. Hubby's industrial chickens don't even have the smarts to evade a Raven attack, let alone Eagle, Coon or Mink. At this time, Hubby values high, reliable egg production over keeping inputs down, and we provide farm fresh eggs to community members, some of whom have had a weekly pick-up for at least a decade.

There are absolutely smarter, better equipped for survival breeds of chickens if you want to increase your free ranging system. A friend's current pick would be Seabright Bantums. But I won't be trying it any time soon with Hubby's Industrial hens! It would be cruel in my opinion.