Eight Acres

There are many options for feeding your chickens. For a while we thought the solution was chicken layer pellets, they are uniform, so the chickens don't pick through them, but you never really know what's in them, and they are usually a relatively expensive option.  Read about a few other ideas of feeding chickens (some for free!) over on my Chicken Tractor eBook blog . By the way, my chicken eBook is now available if you want to know more about backyard chickens and using chicken tractors.  More information over at the  chicken tractor ebook blog .  Or you can get it directly from my shop on  Etsy  (.pdf format), or  Amazon Kindle  or just send me an email eight.acres.liz {at} gmail.com. What's the eBook about? Chickens in a confined coop can end up living in an unpleasant dust-bowl, but allowing chickens to free-range can result in chickens getting into gardens and expose them to predators.  A movable cage...

One of our goals is to set up our farm to be self-sufficient, mainly because that the cheapest way to do things, and also because it means that we don't have to rely on external sources to provide what we need.  A weak point is the chickens.  Even though they provide us with plenty of tasty eggs and meat, we still have to buy grain to feed them, so that's not exactly a self-sufficient system.  I've been on the lookout for ideas for food that we can grow for the chickens to at least replace part of the grain we but for them. a couple of hens tasting the mealworms One thing that does make a difference is allowing the chickens to free-range, they eat far less grain.  I wrote a while ago about feeding the chickens only corn and sunflower seeds .  Since then I've read more about chicken nutrition, as it seems that they do need meat, or at least the amino acid methionine , as it is not found in significant proportions in grains or legumes.  The theory is th...

Finding the right chicken feed has been an ongoing problem for us...... For a while we thought the solution was chicken layer pellets, they are uniform, so the chickens don't pick through them, but you never really know what's in them.  I finally realised that the big label on the sack advising me not to feed the pellets to ruminants was due to the waste animal material in the feed, that's why the protein content was so high.  I don't exactly have a problem with feeding meat to the chickens, but when I don't know exactly what meat products are in the pellets and when the cattle are hanging around trying to eat any spilled pellets, I don't think its very safe.  If you look hard enough, you can find vegetarian pellets, but some of these contain soybean to boast the protein, and I'm not too happy about feeding that either.... We gave up on pellets and started buying a nice mixed grain produced by our local stock feed store.  Unfortunately our chickens ...

Each morning and afternoon we walk around our property with white buckets of animal feed.  Some animals are happy to eat their own feed, but others wonder what is in the other buckets, this can make life difficult when walking past Bella with a bucket of chicken food! The Chickens We have been very lazy and feeding the chickens the cheapest layer pellets.  I suspect that is part of the reason why we are getting so few eggs.  I read the back of the feed sack the other day and noticed "animal protein" in the ingredients, followed by the big bold instructions that I shouldn't feed the pellets to any other livestock.  It occurred to me that this warning is most likely due to whole "mad cow disease" scare and the regulations that were introduced to prevent offal (particularly brains) being fed to livestock of the same breed, so I assume that the chicken pellets contain scraps from the meat works and that's why I shouldn't feed it to any other animals.  I h...