Food for thought

Poultry eat a surprising quantity of food, so why not grow some of your own, suggests Andy Cawthray

- Andy Cawthray

Back in the old days, commercial feeds weren’t readily available to the backyard poultry-keeper, so kitchen scraps were an important supplement. While legislation prevents the feeding of kitchen scraps to chickens these days, it’s important to reflect on why keepers turned to feeding chickens unwanted food scraps. It is said that a chicken, on average, will consume one bushel of grain a year. This may sound quaint and achievable. However, a bushel is about 60lb or 27.2kg of wheat. In order to grow that amount, you need 1,000ft² or 17m², so it’s easy to appreciate why keepers of old turned to other sources of feed for their chickens. It’s also easy to see why there’s a need for commercial feeds in a smallscale or garden set-up; we simply don’t have the space to grow the required food for the flock.

That said, it’s perfectly possible to reduce your reliance on such feeds by growing some level of forage for your flock, and there are two approaches.

Firstly, don’t be overly tidy or clinical in your approach to gardening. Let some leaf litter accumulate in corners of the garden or behind the shed, allow annual weeds to grow in places that are less obvious to the eye and encourage some damp or boggy ground somewhere shady, or, better still, create a small pond or sunken water container. All of these techniques will bring insects, worms and molluscs into the garden on which the chickens will feed. The annual weeds will also provide a valuable source of greens, as well as a nutritional seed source.