Well... chickens are amazing creatures. Chickens that focus on egg laying (chicken not harvested for their meat) produce an amazing amount of protein. They are capable of laying massive amounts of eggs. Have you seen the size of the eggs that come out of their back ends? Proportionally, they are huge! Each one of these little birds has the potential to create a substantial egg in a little under 26 hours. That's incredible! What's even more impressive is that their bodies do this on basically nothing. The average chicken can produce a significant amount of eggs on a diet consisting of table scraps, chicken scratch, and the odd bug it finds out on the farm.
It is my hope to follow the cow mob grazing technique with chickens. This is called "stacking" or "layering". It is what happens when you can successfully marry two enterprises together. For instance: cows may graze an open field, but have trouble finding anything to eat in a wooded area on the perimeter. Introducing pigs to the outlying wooded area of a field layers the productivity of your farm. You are then able to run two operations simultaneously and in essence harmoniously. I would like to try and do this with cows/chickens. Cows are able to graze down and plow up the land pretty efficiently. Their large hooves puncture the ground and stir up the bugs in the earth. The chickens are able to come behind and capitalize on these bugs. They scratch the surface and eat the bugs that come out of the freshly tilled land. In addition, cows leave behind a patty that is teaming with insect larvae. Chickens break up the patty and eat the larvae out of it. The by-product of their messy snack is that they spread the nutrient rich patty across the ground. The ground thrives because of the relationship!
Chickens also disperse their droppings across the pasture. The mixture of cow manure and chicken droppings in the soil is explosive for the soil. The combination of nutrients being infused causes the rapid recovery of nutrient depleted soils. And all of this takes place from simply following your cows with some chickens. The question then becomes, "how in the world do you get chickens to follow cows?"
Enter the chicken tractor. Now, I'm not sure who gets the credit for this invention. There is so much diversity on this topic that I feel comfortable not even attempting to cite the original source. But I will say that there are many young entrepreneurs such as John Suscovich who are blazing a trail in chicken innovation. One would think that chickens, cows, and pigs have been around for so long that there is not much to innovate. That would be faulty thinking. With the invention of the electric fence, moldable plastics, complex plumbing systems, all of these fields are ripe for innovation to spill forth. That rant aside, a chicken tractor is basically a movable house for chickens. This is one from foodcyclist.com .
The chickens spend each day on fresh grass out in the sun. At night they are recalled to their chicken tractors for safety. Their cage protects from the environment as well as predators. A mesh electric fence keeps the chickens in one given area.
We are only in the research and development stage of this process, but the early reports look promising. This is something that we will keep you posted on as we develop it a little further.
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