I found this very thorough and useful.
Does anyone have any tips that aren’t covered in it?
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Her one about rabbit feed is really good, too.
Very valuable information and calculations for someone who’s considering landracing livestock on a small scale for a family’s meat needs.
How to Feed Chickens Without The Feed Store (Growing Grains and Hunting)
3 min read
Just now
Published on Nov 02, 2024
This response is partially generated with the help of AI. It may contain inaccuracies.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Step 1: Understand Chicken Nutritional Needs
Key Nutrients
Step 2: Calculate Feed Costs
Step 3: Explore Alternatives to Commercial Feed
Step 4: Grow Your Own Chicken Feed
Feed Types to Grow
Step 5: Space Requirements for Growing Feed
Step 6: Calculate Costs to Grow Your Own Feed
Step 7: Seed Saving Techniques
Best Practices
Conclusion
Introduction
This tutorial provides a comprehensive guide on how to feed chickens without relying on commercial feed stores. By growing your own grains and understanding chicken nutrition, you can ensure your flock is healthy and productive while potentially saving money. This guide will cover essential topics such as how much feed chickens need, cost considerations, nutritional needs, and practical steps for growing your own chicken feed.
Step 1: Understand Chicken Nutritional Needs
Daily Feed Requirement: Each chicken typically needs about 1/4 to 1/3 of a pound of feed daily.
Key Nutrients
Carbohydrates and Crude Fiber: Important for energy and digestion.
Fatty Acids: Essential for overall health and energy.
Protein: Crucial for growth, egg production, and muscle development.
Minerals: Necessary for bone health and metabolic functions.
Vitamins: Important for immune function and overall well-being.
Step 2: Calculate Feed Costs
Annual Cost from Feed Store: Feeding 10 chickens can cost approximately $500 per year, depending on local feed prices.
Egg Production: Each hen can lay about 250 eggs per year, which translates to a significant return on your feed investment.
Step 3: Explore Alternatives to Commercial Feed
Fermenting Feed: This can improve nutrient absorption and reduce feed costs. To ferment:
Soak feed in water for 24-48 hours.
Use a container that allows for air circulation.
Feed the fermented mix to chickens, observing their response.
Free Ranging: Allowing chickens to forage can supplement their diet, but be mindful of potential limitations in nutrients.
Step 4: Grow Your Own Chicken Feed
Feed Types to Grow
Corn: High in energy; easy to grow.
Wheat: Good source of carbohydrates.
Peas: High in protein; beneficial for growth.
Oats: Great for energy and fiber.
Fish Meal/Bone Meal: Provides essential proteins and minerals.
Fresh Greens: Offers vitamins and minerals; can be grown in small spaces.
Step 5: Space Requirements for Growing Feed
Land Requirements: Allocate enough space for each type of grain. For instance, a small garden plot can produce sufficient grains for a small flock.
Considerations: Assess your available land and choose crops that thrive in your climate.
Step 6: Calculate Costs to Grow Your Own Feed
Seed Costs: Determine the cost of seeds for the grains you wish to grow.
Total Cost Analysis: Compare the cost of growing your own feed against purchasing it from stores. You may find significant savings.
Step 7: Seed Saving Techniques
Harvesting Seeds: Learn how to collect and store seeds from your crops to reduce future growing costs.
Best Practices
Allow crops to fully mature before harvesting seeds.
Store seeds in a cool, dry place to maintain viability.
Conclusion
Feeding chickens without relying on feed stores is achievable through careful planning and sustainable practices. By understanding chicken nutrition, calculating costs, and growing your own feed, you can create a healthier environment for your flock and potentially save money. Consider starting with a small garden to grow essential grains and gradually expand as you become more comfortable with the process. Happy farming!
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I would also add that this is also covered with the grow Biointensive community. And surprise it takes a fair bit of area and work. I am not saying don’t do it, but know that with your time added into the equation I don’t feel as bad not being 100% DIY on this front. The other variable is the cost of storage for this crops to cover you for the year. The cool dry protection and varmit resistant storage is quite expensive as well.
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I love the idea of having a wide area of forage available and a chicken / rabbit tractor that gets rotated through it. That seems like it would be very little bother, in theory.
But it probably only seems like very little bother – I imagine you’d have to bring water to them every day, for instance. If you don’t have easy access to irrigation across that wide area, it would mean hauling buckets of water every day.
Plus, if you’re talking about a big wide area and an unsupervised tractor, wouldn’t you have to be concerned about clever and/or determined predators figuring out how to get into the tractor?
Maybe not if you have a guard dog, I suppose, but then you’d have to grow enough food for the dog to eat, too.
The most obvious problem with that system is that most people just don’t have enough land. Plus, as she covers in the video, even if you do have enough land, you may not have a climate that offers forage all year round. A lot of climates have lush, green forage all summer and everything’s covered in snow in the winter. Or the reverse – the soil is empty, dry dirt during an arid summer and only lush with forage during the winter. (That’s my climate.)
Still, I keep looking at the idea, wondering if there may be some way I could make it work with only about a tenth of an acre reserved for a lawn.
Maybe a skinny tractor that was built to maneuver easily within the pathways of an orchard?
Maybe tying a bucket of foul-smelling rotten stuff on top of a chicken tractor, with holes poked in the bottom of the bucket, so that flies will lay eggs in it and the maggots will fall down to give the chickens lots of extra food to supplement their forage?
Maybe hoeing all bunny poop into the soil where they left it (just so it doesn’t get stepped on when left in place), and watering the lawn once a week (rather than never), would be enough to make the forage grow back quickly enough to make do with such a small space?
Actually, there’s a big question I have after watching that video that she doesn’t address. Just how cold can it be for chickens and/or rabbits to live in a tractor year round?
I did a websearch, and what I saw is that chickens can handle -20 degrees F without protection, while rabbits can only handle 30 degrees F. Is that accurate? If so, I could probably easily keep chickens in a tractor year round, but not rabbits. (My winter can dip as low as 7 degrees F.)
Although I suppose I could build my greenhouse in such a way that a rabbit tractor could be moved in there every night. I bet my tropical trees wouldn’t mind having some body heat generated under cover near them. That’s an interesting idea, but of course it would require setting aside a fair amount of greenhouse space for livestock to sleep in, which would mean less space for tropical trees.
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No, that is not accurate.
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Thank you! For cold hardiness in chickens and rabbits, what is accurate?
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I don’t know. When I had chickens, they were fine in sub-zero F in an unheated, but wind protected coop. Without protection though I doubt they would make it long at seven above. I only kept breeds with short combs because the big combs like on leghorns get frost bite, doesn’t seem to bother them all that much but I imagine it’s painful until it heals, and other chickens peck at it. Yuk!
I don’t know the cold limit for rabbits either but I’m pretty sure it’s lower than for chickens, and lots lower than mine. 
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My next-door neighbor has chickens in a coop that’s not insulated (three of the walls are chicken wire), but the back wall of it is her shed, so it probably is protected from wind. I can see wind protection being an important consideration.
I have another neighbor down the street who keeps chickens in a wide fenced area to free-range. I believe they live there year-round. I don’t think there’s much wind protection, but I could be wrong. The house is at the bottom of a hill, and so is the fenced area. There are also a fair number of trees.
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If it really doesn’t get colder than seven above and if it only does it for a day or two at a time, I imagine chickens would be ok with little protection, but I doubt they would like it. The twenty below without protection like you found in the web search is just ridiculous.
Ridiculous isn’t a strong enough word for the idea that rabbits suffer at thirty above. Rabbits are built for cold, that’s why we murder them to make hats. Thirty above is probably uncomfortably warm to them.
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When I was young I lived in Anchorage Alaska and we had both chickens and rabbits outside of course the rabbits were in a rabbit pen but the chickens were just in any like a wire coop with a thing over top to keep them from getting covered in snow
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I highly recommend Harvey Ussery’s 2011 book The Small-Scale Poultry Flock: An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers.
The video is rather negative on pasturing. It’s true that if the pasture is mostly supplying only greens, then the calorie value is low (though the micronutrient value is high.) But integrating chickens into systems (ideally woody perennial polycultures) designed to provide insects and seeds can provide a lot of calories. Rotating paddocks is important to give plants and bug populations a rest between chicken onslaughts.
I have a lot of plant species planned for paddocks in humid tropical Hawai’i, to be grown in essentially giant composting areas, where we can throw organic matter to be eaten directly by the chickens, and to break down and feed insects and worms whom the chickens can eat on their next rotation through that paddock. An overstory of trees and shrubs will drop leaf litter and woody bits to add to the mix, and especially seeds. Most species won’t grow in temperate climates, but mulberries (with their gazillion tiny calorie-dense seeds) can grow just about anywhere.
Researchers in Australia trialed chickens on seeds and fruit of hundreds of species: Upgrading the scavenging feed resource base for scavenging chickens Part 1 and Part 2
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Thank you! I will look at that book. It sounds interesting.
One thing I find very intriguing about chickens is that you can give them your fruits that have bug larvae in them, and the chickens consider the bugs to be a bonus. Since a fruit tree can produce way more calories than annuals in the same space, and the fruits that are infested with bug larvae would otherwise be thrown away, doesn’t that mean you can feed chickens effectively using apple bits infested with coddling moths?
I’ve read somewhere that silvopasture (putting some fruit and/or nut trees into a pasture meant for grazing animals, basically creating a savannah) can produce way more food than just pasture for the livestock to eat. It seems to me that having fruit trees, and letting the livestock eat all the bits you don’t want of those fruits, as well as eating your grass, would be a great way to produce more food for them in a small space. Bonus points if you have fruit you can harvest to feed them all year round (which is possible in many climates; there are plenty of edible small fruits that hang on their trees or bushes all winter).
Is that a reasonable idea, or do chickens (or rabbits) specifically need grain?
It doesn’t make sense to me that chickens or rabbits either one need grain, it’s just that’s what people have available to give them. They do the same thing with cows and pigs, but I don’t think any of them evolved eating grain as a significant portion of their diet.
I’ve never kept rabbits, but IIRC from my past research, they can happily meet all their needs from vegetation.
I haven’t done a thorough dive into the physiological reasons, but chickens have evolved to depend on calorie-dense foods. Approximate calories per pound (based on research I did around 2010) for different categories:
- greens and most veggies: 100-200, average about 150
- mushrooms: 160
- winer squash: maybe 200
- berries and fruits: 200-300
- roots: 200-400, average about 300
- meat: 500
- eggs: 660
- chestnut: 800
- dry beans: 1550
- fennel seed: 1600
- quinoa: 1700
I think cultivated grains are around 1800 calories per pound, and oily nuts in the mid-2000s. I suspect any small seeds will have comparable energy density as our cultivated grains. So chickens don’t need these grains per se, but do need a lot of something with higher density than greens and fruits. (IIRC, insects are generally high in fat, so may be more than the 500 calories/pound of my figure above, which is the approximate value for chicken and squirrel.)
Yes, I think this sort of integration is important for sustainability! The video you posted does a great job of breaking out the numbers, but the model of “monoculture over here to grow grains for the livestock over there” is flawed from a nature-mimicry approach. One just has to be realistic that at anything more than low-density stocking, chickens probably won’t thrive on silvopasture with just fruit and greens and a few worms in the apples. As designers, we need to ensure they have ample energy-dense food.
Side note and self-plug: I was paying attention to calorie density as I calculated just how much of our energy needs we were meeting on our .2 acres in Portland, OR. I concluded that claims made in permaculture and other circles about being able to feed multiple people from an acre are unrealistic. (People often grow a lot of vegetables and feel excited that they’re growing “most” of their own food, but in reality they’re only growing a small percentage of their calorie needs.) This is long at an hour and a half, but I gave a detailed presentation on our urban food forest design and implementation and results as of 2011: Self Sufficiency Five Years In.
Here chickens, assuming they aren’t eaten by coyotes or hawks and if they have plenty of space, will happily feed themselves. I don’t know what exactly they “prefer” but I’m sure aside from various plants and seeds, most of their calories and protein come from insects. They also like mice, voles, small snakes, frogs and who knows what else. It’s just their natural behavior to roam around and forage.
The problem is most of those things are only available in summer and summer doesn’t last all year so if you what to keep chickens you have the problem of what to feed them in the winter.
The woman in the video says you can solve that problem for ten chickens by planting, tending, harvesting, processing and storing various grains from 5,380 sq feet of space. She also said corn is the best because you can get four plants per sq ft. 
Along with that you need to raise fish, or go fishing and process fish meal, or as a substitute you can go hunting or pick up roadkill. 
I started to wonder, despite her fine researching and video editing skills if she ever actually kept chickens or planted corn.
I agree.
Do chickens eat mice?! 
Can they keep rodent populations down, just like cats do?!
Mice are certainly available all year round in my climate, and so is forage. We have grass available all winter, and bindweed (unfortunately) available all summer.
I’ve seen some people online saying hens will eat bindweed – have you experienced that?
I really, really want the answer to be yes . . . 
Hmm. I’ve been collecting seeds from my lawn because they’re prickly and stick to my socks, and I don’t want them poking me while I walk. They represented a fair amount of organic material, and I didn’t want just throw them away, so I was planning to convert them into biochar once I got my firepit working. But maybe I should stick those into sealed buckets and keep them in the shed as potential livestock feed instead! (If they mold or otherwise spoil, I can always return to Plan A and convert them into biochar.)
I was hoping by collecting those seeds, the grass with the prickly seed heads wouldn’t come back, and I could sow a bunch of edible weeds in its place. Unfortunately, the grass seems to be either perennial or really good at self-seeding, because no matter how many seeds I gather, I can’t seem to get rid of it. 
While that’s an annoyance because I’d rather replace the grass with edible weeds that do NOT have prickly seed heads that poke me, that may be a good sign of its vigor as potential livestock forage.
I doubt they are as good at it as cats, I’ve only seen them with a mouse they caught themselves a couple of times but if you throw them a mouse from a trap, they go nuts. Actually, one chicken grabs it and runs and all the other chickens chase it trying to grab the mouse. This can go on for quite a while until one finally swallows it or it gets ripped apart. It’s funny to watch but I almost wonder if they don’t spend more calories in the effort than they get from the mouse.
We don’t have bindweed, so I don’t know if they eat it or not. We have a lot of henbit which I call creeping charlie and I’ve read they love it, but mine didn’t touch it.
There is food available in winter, as wild turkeys I assume, have about the same dining habits as chickens and they find food in winter, but chickens are apparently not quite as skilled as turkeys.
If they are pinned up chickens will eat every single green thing, but I’ve never observed closely enough to know what they prefer when foraging. Except for vegetables, they like about all of them and seem particularly fond of hot peppers.
Henbit tastes pretty good. I can see why they like it. We have it as a weed (well, more of a welcome volunteer) in winter and spring.
Wow, it’s delightful to hear they are happy to eat so many things!
(Wry laugh . . .)
I was about to ask if they would eat leftover bones after I make bone broth (because then the bones are soft and easy to squish – I usually bury them in the ground, since they break down in the soil within only a few months). But then I realized I often make bone broth with chicken bones. Would cooked down chicken bones, uh . . . be inhumane to give chickens to eat?
Chickens will eat almost anything including chicken. I don’t know about the humanity of it.
I get a kick from some of these discussions, not just about chickens but it often cracks me up the most.
I grew up with chickens, quite a lot of them. We let them out in the morning and closed the door behind them at night. In wintertime at about daybreak, we gave them cracked corn, mostly bought from the feed mill, some traded for. If mom said, “one of you kids get me a chicken for dinner” she didn’t mean go to the store.
We did name particular ones sometimes, but we didn’t put hats or diapers on them, and we didn’t let them in the house. If one got hurt, we ate it, if one got sick, we killed it and threw it over the hill. If minks came up from the creek and killed one, we laid on the roof of the coop with 22 rifles all night until they stopped.
In spring we took broody hens and locked them in little cages made of tobacco sticks stacked up kind of like a log cabin and gave each about a dozen fertile eggs. They were locked in there until a few days after the chicks hatched so we had to feed them. Then we just turned them all loose. Usually, each one and her babies would go back to their little cage at night but sometimes they just went out and hid in the weeds somewhere, sometimes they never came back. Sometimes we would trade chickens, mostly just roosters, and sometimes give chickens away. Aunts and uncles, grandparents, neighbors, everybody and they’re dogs had chickens back then.
More recently when I kept chickens it was a real hassle. One reason was they are hugely destructive to the gardens with they’re obsession with scratching and digging not to mention the pecking and chomping. I couldn’t figure it out, we also had gardens back then and they didn’t bother anything like that. Here, I couldn’t let them out much at all, let alone just to roam all day, and I think it’s gross and unhealthy to keep animals penned up all the time.
Then I realized where I live now is just a small, cleared yard and gardens surrounded by trees and shrubby areas. Back then we were surrounded by much, much more cleared, mowed and pastured land. They liked that a lot more I think, they roamed much farther, and I guess just didn’t have time to mess with the garden. Here they didn’t go into the tall grass and weeds where they couldn’t see around, or into the woods where they couldn’t see the sky, or the shadows. For a chicken, there be monsters in places like that.
One thing in that video that did catch my attention was the part about fish. Having to buy food was another thing that annoyed me about having chickens now. but chickens do like fish just fine, if you clean fish and toss the carcass they will fight over it like it’s a dead mouse. I like fish, fish aren’t all that hard to raise.