Commercial chicken feed is hard as heck. Just out of curiosity I took a piece of the dry corn out of their grain and tried to eat it. It was unbelievably hard and difficult to get chewed up; I had to spit it out after I chewed on it for a minute. I got to thinking, "in a chickens natural environment, they wouldn't have dried grain to eat so why should they here." I then started soaking my scratch grain in water for a day before I feed it to them.
I am a big advocate of using models in nature for farming and gardening. The intricate processes of nature have worked for millions and billions of years, or however long, so who are we to think we can come up with something better. This hard-as-a-rock feed has to be difficult to digest and limit feed conversions. Since I have been soaking it I have noticed a slight decrease in feed consumption.
With my tendency toward modeling nature on my farm, I want to get completely away from feed, except for winter maybe. They will be free ranging pretty much where they want scratching through leaves and sticks and what not, getting bugs and worms for protein and grass and weeds etc. for their plant material. That's another thing about chickens; they are omnivores so this vegetarian diet that some folks are feeding their chickens these days is not something they would be doing naturally.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Evolution of chickens.
Okay, I haven't posted in a while not that I have anyone subscribed, but anyway. On to chickens.
I got the idea that I could breed a more primal predator resistance back into chickens. My logic here is that if I don't do that much to protect my flock from predation, other than reproduce and enhance what would be their natural habitat, they would re-learn natural defenses to predators.
I could do this by breeding my own chickens from commercial stock but with little intervention as far as protection growing up. I would have to supply them with a brooder, food and water early on but after they got out on their own I would pretty much let them fend for them selves. By doing this, the ones that still have a good roosting instinct, for example, and would still roost in trees would have the gene that was lost by the ones that got eaten by roosting on the ground, thereby eliminating the bad genes.
Roosting and brooding are two of the main survival instincts that have been bread out of chickens, especially brooding. You can't hardly find a commercial hen breed that will tend a nest of eggs and hatch any chicks. I have a couple chickens that prefer to roost in a tree rather than their chicken house. I let them roost and range wherever they want. (Although they prefer the chicken house on cold nights.) They know where their nests are and always come back to lay their eggs.
I am not sure if by trying to breed natural predator resistance back into them I will just breed all around wildness. By doing this I might make it impossible to find all their eggs because they have laid them in nests in brush piles. I suppose we will see what happens. I am working on an incubator and deciding on what chicks I want to buy.
I got the idea that I could breed a more primal predator resistance back into chickens. My logic here is that if I don't do that much to protect my flock from predation, other than reproduce and enhance what would be their natural habitat, they would re-learn natural defenses to predators.
I could do this by breeding my own chickens from commercial stock but with little intervention as far as protection growing up. I would have to supply them with a brooder, food and water early on but after they got out on their own I would pretty much let them fend for them selves. By doing this, the ones that still have a good roosting instinct, for example, and would still roost in trees would have the gene that was lost by the ones that got eaten by roosting on the ground, thereby eliminating the bad genes.
Roosting and brooding are two of the main survival instincts that have been bread out of chickens, especially brooding. You can't hardly find a commercial hen breed that will tend a nest of eggs and hatch any chicks. I have a couple chickens that prefer to roost in a tree rather than their chicken house. I let them roost and range wherever they want. (Although they prefer the chicken house on cold nights.) They know where their nests are and always come back to lay their eggs.
I am not sure if by trying to breed natural predator resistance back into them I will just breed all around wildness. By doing this I might make it impossible to find all their eggs because they have laid them in nests in brush piles. I suppose we will see what happens. I am working on an incubator and deciding on what chicks I want to buy.
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