If you want to make some money buy a dozen horses! LOL

easy to grow grain

People down the road had chickens. The fed them roadkill, anything they could find along the road. The more maggots the better.

Thanks for all the feed back fellas!!

you have to eat 3 times to store-bought eggs than you do the ones that are raised on the farm for the same protein

Thats not true. All eggs have on average, 6 grams of protein.

blown knee,find that hard to believe.

You can get more interesting colors of eggs from your own chickens too.



Keith

When I had six hens, I gave them a bushel of shelled Crowder pea hulls one day. Scared the heck out of five of the six birds. Think they suspected snakes. One hen would approach a hull carefully, peck it violently, and throw it across the pen. The other five would then join to kill that injured pea hull. Wish I had made a movie of it.

My feed from Rural King is $10/bag. We free range from 6am-8pm every day too. This saves a lot on the feed bill. When I was not getting paid (during the government shutdown) we fermented our feed to make it go farther. Garden and kitchen scraps are tossed to the birds daily, as well as all the deer carcasses.

How do you define alternative feed to an animal that eats practically everything?

A Hog behind every cow and a chicken behind every hog

get a few bales of green alafalfa to feed em in the winter along with scratch grain

If chickens eat animal carcasses and your a trapper id think your feed cost issues would be solved

Also,consider growing your own mealworms.Easy to do and great protien for winter time.

There is some satisfaction goin to the hen house gatherin up a dozen eggs....and i have nuff german russin recipies that only require eggs and flour that raised my dad through the depression.. granny made strudels,knifla,croutbunbushkins,and amny more..... and the best egg noodles....bring on the depression...im gonna have chickens!!

I got Chickens :}

EXACTLY!!!!


AND. Don't you have a Mills Fleet farm? ...the layer crumbles are 9 to 11.00 per 50# bag
I just bought Good layer crumbles at a mill today Hubbard brand for 12$ Eggs dont cost $2.00 a dozen either only keep 2 year olds and under

Build a box with a hardware cloth bottom on legs to get it off the ground a foot or two. dump 3-4 inches of wood shavings over the hardware cloth. fill that up with meat scraps from your local butcher or wherever. Cover with an inch or two of shavings to keep the smell down. Flies lay eggs on rotting meat, maggot crawl down into shavings to pupate, eventually fall through hardware cloth bottom onto ground, voila instant chicken feeder as long as it’s warm enough for flies. Adjust meat and shavings ratio so it’s not dripping goo. Refresh shavings once a week into compost pile, chickens pick through the bugs and worms that attracts, secondary feed source. Then stop at your local breweries and see if you can get all their spent grains (can be hard to do because i’m not the first person to think of spent grains). There you have it, never buy chicken feed again.

Eggs straight off the nest work better in a dirt hole better than store bought too.