Growing Feed?

I have thought on this.

If I grow the grain and it is not enough for the chickens AND us, then I will eat the chickens. If there IS enough for the chickens AND us, then I will eat the eggs.

Either option sounds more interesting than a vegetarian diet!

Bump.

.....Alan.

Alan, when you say "forage" does that mean you plant it and let the chickens just eat it where it is without harvesting?

We are in a big wheat producing area, so I know it grows well here. Could a person dedicate a 1/4 acre to wheat and just let it sit and "re-plant" itself every year? I guess what I'm asking is would what the chickens didn't eat reproduce on its own?

I think you will find that the chickens will do a very efficient job of harvesting nearly every last grain of wheat, if allowed to free-range in the stand of wheat. IMO, you would be better off to harvest the wheat and replant what you need to grow the next year's crop, and keep the chickens OUT. If the grain is kept from birds (domestic or wild), the seed heads would drop to the ground and re-seed like any other grass, but you would not have the control over where it sprouted, giving you thick and thin patches. Also, unless you are planting GMO wheat and using Round-Up to kill the weeds, they can eventually crowd out your wheat, or at the very least, make it more difficult to harvest and clean.

I grew a small plot of wheat in my main garden this past year - just as an experiment. I planted the seed (hard red winter wheat) in late October, IIRC, and it grew wheat grass all winter. I do allow the chickens to free range a bit when the garden is fallow, so they did keep the wheat grass mowed for me. In the spring, after the chickens were confined to their own run, the wheat took off and grew, giving me a decent harvest in July. I'll be planting wheat, barley, naked (or hulless) oats and regular oats for harvest in 2010 - wheat and barley this fall, the oats in the spring.

A few things I learned from this experiment - for home use, it would be more efficient for me to plant the grains in wide rows, with soaker hoses running through each row and paths for me to walk through and weed the grain (weeds going to the chickens or goats). As I garden organically, it was difficult to get into the plot to weed, and using sprinklers to irrigate is wasteful of water. Plant your seed more thickly than you think you'll really need, and cover it with a scattering of straw to keep it from the crows until it is established - I lost a lot of seed to crows and other birds. Don't add more seed in the spring if you see bare patches in your plot - it doesn't mature at the same time as the fall planted wheat, and the yield is very poor in comparison. Make sure that when you plant whole wheat from the feed store, it really is whole WHEAT, not mixed with barley seed! I had to sort every stalk by hand to get wheat for baking and barley for soup (and pure seed for this fall) - on the other hand, I now have organic wheat AND barley seed to plant. Co-planting carrots with the wheat didn't work - the carrots didn't germinate...not sure if it was the mixed planting or the seed, as I generally did not have a good carrot year. Planting the wheat where the potato patch had been worked out fine - the volunteer potato plants didn't seem to affect the wheat, and I'll have a few more pounds of taters than I would otherwise have had.

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I toss out older veggies to my chickens. I notice that they have to beat my calves to it though. The calves love tomatoes and sliced cucumbers.

I have enough wheat stored that I am sure I can keep my chickens alive. The calves might have to live on hay through the winter - no grain. We would hate to do it, but we could hand harvest hay and put it in tightly packed stacks - feeding it as needed.

Another thing we have thought about - keeping the pastures we have now in top condition so they can go longer without intervention. We are looking for the longest-living grasses and legumes also.

Yes, let the chickens harvest it.

Here's a photo of that experiment:


That is a bag of game plot mix, a bag of whole oats that I use for feed, and a pound of mustard seed. I tilled it up, broadcast the mixed seed using my lawn fertilizer, then covered it pulling a board behind the riding mower but I could have done it by hand just as well. It was a drought year that year so I had to irrigate until the stand was established. This year we got enough rain I wouldn't have needed to do that.

I won't bother with the game plot mix any more. I've since discovered that ordinary feed oats sprout well enough to get the job done and a few handfuls of mustard or turnip seeds mixed in (fairly cheap in bulk at the farm supply). Possibly I might mix some rye in (grass or grain) if it looks like we might get really low temperatures that year. I don't have enough experience growing grain wheat to say, but I'm sure we've got some folks like DaleK and others who could advise as to how well that would work.

.....Alan.

Thanks for the replies.

Our chickens (all layers) free-range, so in the spring, summer and most of the fall they have green grass (a large lawn with no fertilizer or herbicides used and pasture ground with grass and alfalfa), bugs and wheat supplement. If I grew my own wheat for winter use, I'd have to keep the chickens out.

I was kind of thinking of a "no work" method of providing a food source during winter. Like maybe something seed bearing that would grow and die off in the winter, but leaving enough for them to forage on their own. Is there anything like that out there?

I did find where someone uses their greenhouse in the winter to grow forage crops and raise worms for their chickens. It looked interesting but of course would be work. Not that I am lazy; just want to work smarter not harder.