How many of you grow your own feed?

Please do not be shy to respond if you "only" have small properties. I don't care if you have thousands of acres or just part of one acre. This is all about hearing what different people are doing in different areas by different means. Besides, there's plenty of people out there that are green with envy over your guy's couple acres! Just remember that!

Ours is a work in progress. We have black soldier fly and maggot systems for chickens. That and compost turning. We grow mangel beets for goats and pigs. The pigs also get kitchen waste, garden waste etc.. We dry seaweed, nettles and comfrey for goats and we also have a fodder system. These don't completely replace hay and commercial feed yet, but we are working on it.

I don't. I expect them to hunt for their food. For us chickens are primarily organic pest control. Their next job is they break up manure patties and smooth the soil. After that they provide tens of thousands of eggs which we feed primarily towards our smaller pigs. We don't sell the eggs as they're more valuable to us as piglet food. We sell pastured pork and part of our pasture is pastured chickens. If you feed them they don't hunt - just makes for lazy hens.

-Walter

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

How many chickens you got?

300 to 500 here.

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

@Marinea: My question wasn't really directed with an interest in small properties over commercial properties. This question was more about seeing how many people are growing any sort of their own feed and the rest of the questions were more of a visual aid of the type and number of animals and size of the property that is sustaining and helping feed those animals. A lot of people on the forum will give random snippets of information about what they are doing. I put all those questions so I would hopefully get some well rounded responses with more information and people have been giving exactly that which is excellent and useful! Much appreciated all.

Now if I had to pick one I was more personally interested in, it would be smaller properties as I can never imagine myself running a commercial property. But that doesn't mean I don't admire people's large properties. I admire them for sticking with it, supporting local food and families, supporting their own families, and sometimes it's just continuing the family tradition. I may not agree with all the large farm model's methods, but if they have the animal's well being in mind then that's all I care about.

To those here that do the black soldier flies and worm bins, have any of you ever tried raising bins of cockroaches? At one point I was very involved in reptile breeding and was raising dubia roaches. From the research I did about the various types of bugs to raise, the dubias were an excellent choice because they have a high meat to shell ratio. That sounds silly but all it means is they have a lot of "meat" in comparison to their exoskeleton. Their harder outsides do provide calcium. They also have a pretty high protein percentage especially if fed anything with any amount of protein in it. In essence, anything you feed them, calcium, protein, etc. is exactly what they are jam packed with when fed to other creatures. They do well on scraps of just about anything you can think of but obviously garden waste is easy and works well. They breed excessively if just kept relatively warm. I used to buy large plastic bins and drill tiny air holes on the lid. Put a small heat pad on the bottom and put a bunch of old large egg carton sheets (or just cardboard/paper scraps, they just need to be able to hide). They live in them, hide in them when molting (the larger ones will sometimes eat the molting ones as they are very soft but this just provides the larger roach with more calcium and protein and I have never seen an indent in the population from them eating each other once in a blue moon), they breed fast as well. I know people are grossed out by them but when you raise them they aren't walking around on anything rotten and they don't bite or make sounds. There's also plenty of roaches (like dubias) that are not known for flying or being able to climb up well which is why bins and other slick surfaces are great. Never had a single roach escape.