Here is what we do. We cannot let our chickens roam because of all the neighborhoods dogs run wild. So we gave them a nice pen that they can run around in comfortably.
We grow a small patch of sorghum for seed and turned the rest into silage. Sorghum seed has an estrogen in it and we use it to boast their production in December and January if we are short eggs. Just a handful will double our egg count in 2 days. If they eat to many sorghum seeds the yolks will get pale.
We also feed alfalfa that we grow in ¼ acre fields and is hand stored in feed sacks. If alfalfa is handled by hand it keeps its leaves much better. This will make orange yolks.
We have an old line of yellow dent corn that is yellow to red in color. The chickens will produce deep orange yolks from it.
We raise giant amaranth for the seed heads and they eat the leaves too.
We let the sunflowers self-seed and get about 100 heads every year to feed.
We raise squash and gourds for the market and what we don’t use we feed. We also raise cabbage and broccoli that we feed all of the scraps. Our extra cabbage we store upside down covered in leaves.
We raise about a 1/10 acer of spelt or oats. We make the stooks and the top sheave tends to sprout here in Ohio humidity. We pile the top sheaves next to the chicken pen and feed a couple a day usually in July. The chickens will clean it all up and leave the rest for beading.
We have 2 small plots that we grow green chop for them. It is planted with dandelions, alfalfa, perennial rye, plantains, red clover and white clover. We use a small push lawn mower. It has a perfect little handle on the bags to carry it to the chickens or cows. We also cover crop with annual rye. We were getting green chop in March last year!
We raise duckweed in kiddy pools that were get given to us. We keep 2 minnows in each pool for mosquito control. We dry the duckweed on a black tv dish that was given to us. We use the dried duckweed to eliminate molds in prepped feeds in the summer. When we have extra we feed it straight to them wet.
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