Sam Shade

Just ordered some bamboo from them. Very excited to have another evergreen feed source for the goats.

I really enjoy throwing voles, rats and roaches that we trap around the house into the chicken coop.

I'm trying to grow some of the aquatic weeds the fishermen want to kill - cattails, duckweed, water lotus. Massive amounts of easy to grow animal feed.

I have muscovies and chickens.

The muscovies are easier in that they are great foragers with lower water needs than other ducks and they readily reproduce at rates that predator pressure can't usually match. If you have a couple acres you can let them roam and that's pretty much all you need to worry about.

Problem with them is they are not super versatile. Good meat but lean and a little tough if you let them run wild. They only lay in spring. They also are hard to contain, making them a more stubborn threat to gardens than chickens.

So I prefer chickens and would gladly do away with muscovies if I had to choose between them.

Norris Thomlinson wrote:Good topic and good list!

When I lived in Portland, OR, where fennel was more or less a weed, our chickens eagerly ate the seeds from stalks I cut and carried to them. I didn't do it enough to estimate how much poundage they would eat per season. Chickens can self-harvest mature seeds from plants, or you could harvest and store to ration out through the winter. I wrote a post about this way back when: Fennel seed as a calorie crop.

I also wrote Integrating Chickens Into Your Food System.

If cowpeas grow well for you, they should be a valuable feed.

Elaeagnus berries with seeds may be valuable.

A guy on YouTube was trying to grow okra for seed.

I've seen chickens eat raw sweet potato, though I don't know how much they would really eat.

I'm still experimenting with this, and don't know how well it grows in temperate climates, but I see potential for rice bean, *Vigna umbellata*. It shatters small rice-grain-like seeds which I assume chickens will eat. The "Green" variety from ECHO grows as a vine, so it may work well to grow it on the paddock fencelines. Some can fall into the paddock and be eaten, and hopefully some will self-seed from just outside the paddock where the chickens can't reach it.

Mulberries are probably a protein crop; my understanding is that chickens relish them more for the gazillion tiny seeds than for the sugars.

I forget what website first made this "click" for me, but chickens require a diet with a majority of calorie-dense food. A supply of greens and fruits is important for nutrition, but mostly they need seeds and meat. (Roots are intermediate in calorie density.) At my current homestead (in Hawai'i), we're developing poultry paddocks with heavy canopy and not much ground vegetation. (The main predators here are mongooses who ambush chickens but aren't much of a threat if chickens can see them coming.) Some of the canopy will drop food for the poultry (mulberries, Jamaican cherries, cassava seed, acacia seed), but the main contribution of all the canopy will be leaves and branches and roots feeding the soil food web and generating worms and insects for the chickens and ducks. We'll also throw all kinds of biomass in, whether directly edible or not. We can occasionally harvest finished compost/soil to redistribute the nutrients elsewhere on the land.

This isn't super relevant to those in temperate climates, but it's a fantastic study from subtropical Australia which I can't believe I didn't discover until a year ago, of how eagerly chickens ate seeds of hundreds of species: Upgrading the scavenging feed resource base for scavenging chickens part 1 and part 2.

Thanks. I've enjoyed your blog - great resource for getting past the underappreciated hurdles to self-sufficiency.

I'm pinning a lot of my hopes on sorghum and amaranth as calorie crops I can direct sow in the wilder areas of my property. Amaranth in particular is prolific as a weed on my property and readily self seeds. I've heard it has anti nutritive properties uncooked, but I've got a fire pit right next to the coop so I was planning on easy amaranth porridge as one of their winter staples.

Millet, sesame, and sunflower are some other seed crops I have planned but I'm not anticipating big yield on those. Sunflowers almost always get vacuumed by the wild birds.

For other calorie sources I have some mature hickory/pecans that I've never gotten on top of harvesting (squirrels usually get the best). I want to try cowpeas if they can handle neglect. Fennel goes on the list too.

I would love to get more meat in there. The challenge with meat in temperate climates is the bugs just about disappear in winter. If only I had a way to pipeline cockroaches from the house to the coop.

My goats do their damage in bits and pieces - give then enough targets and they don't girdle any one tree.

Though most of my trees are privet shrubs which are close to invulnerable.

As a cheapskate who dislikes going to tractor supply, I've long dreamt of raising all my own chicken feed.

This year I'm going to go for it and hopefully by year end I'll have all the crops and systems in place to kiss tractor supply goodbye (other than an infrequent bag of oyster shells).

I have 25 chickens. Two roosters (one leghorn and one buff orpington), and the rest mostly buff orpington hens with a few barnyard blends mixed in. They have a decent sized run and get let out occasionally for a late afternoon jaunt when I accidentally leave a door open.

They eat about 2,000 lbs of feed/scratch grain a year supplemented by kitchen scraps and random toss ins from the garden.

Here's the plan and I'll try to post updates as I go. I'm dividing the plan up into 2 halves, first the warm weather stretch from April to October, then the cold stretch from November to March.

WARM SEASON

Proteins:

Duckweed (also counts as green) grown from pond
BSF larvae (two self-harvesting tubs in the run)
Whey (from our two Nigerian dwarf goats)
Rabbit/bluegill entrails (from biweekly harvests from pond and rabbit colony)

Carbs:
Mulberries (massive tree directly adjacent to run)
Chickpeas
Pigeon peas
Dent corn
Buckwheat
Melons
Tomatoes
Chinese yam bulbils (vine up the coop and drop right in the run)
Sunflower seeds
Elderberries (grow like weeds)
Ground cherries
Castaway apples, plums, peaches, figs and pears from the food forest

Greens:
Moringa
Basil
Kale
Zucchini
Turkish rocket
Comfrey
Sweet potato greens


COLD SEASON

Here it's less useful to divide into macros as I have fewer greens in 7b winter and my high protein supply takes a big hit too (fish stop biting in pond; BSF disappear). So my hope is that a diversity of storable foods with balanced nutritional profiles will get my birds through the dormant times.

Root crops:
Jerusalem artichokes
Sweet potatoes
Mashua tubers
Yacon
Chinese yams
Mangel beets
Parsnips

Stored grains/vegetables:
Amaranth
Sorghum
Millet
Various moschata squash
Dried chickpeas.

Misc.:
Kale
Privet berries
Chocolate vine
Beet greens.

And of course continual supplementation from animal harvest and dairy byproducts.

There's a lot of harvesting and cut and carrying involved in this plan, but thankfully not too much labor in growing it - these are mostly low maintenance (most are already growing on the property), low irrigation crops in my zone. Additionally, many are perennial and the annuals are easy to save seeds for (or self seed like amaranth).

I'm not stressing about protein percentages because I feel the birds will be able to pick and choose what they need if I give them enough quantity and variety. The rest will be compost.

If this works hopefully it will be a template for others trying to do the same in atemperate climate.

Josh Hoffman wrote:

Sam Shade wrote:But now that I have some space and some goats I welcome all edible invasives. Goats are really the key here - their ability to strip and devastate makes them a great match for  anything that grows out of control. Irresistible forces vs immovable objects.

How about pigs and bamboo?

I haven't been blessed with a pig yet, but I would love to find out. I've heard they're good at clearing bamboo shoots to keep groves from taking over new areas.

When I lived on less than 1/10th of an acre and I was trying to make the front yard presentable, I hated the little reedy bamboo that had taken over.

But now that I have some space and some goats I welcome all edible invasives. Goats are really the key here - their ability to strip and devastate makes them a great match for  anything that grows out of control. Irresistible forces vs immovable objects.

As an urban prairie dweller, I can recommend working land within the sprawl.

I don't have to worry about deer in my gardens and the biggest predators other than stray dogs are raccoons and opossums.

If you're trying to sell, you are surrounded with potential customers.

Tree trimmers and landscapers are everywhere and give free mulch. Ditto restaurants and food businesses with expired food/scraps for your animals.

There's a surprising amount of green space in urban areas especially in more depressed metros.

The big downside is much more restrictions on the kinds of animals you can keep and the kind of stuff you can do. Animal aromas, noisy roosters, etc. All that stuff can get you in trouble with code enforcement.

But good relations with neighbors does a lot to mitigate this. If no one complains about you, you won't have many problems.