Category: Chickens/Poultry

What is scratch feed, anyway?

Scratch feed is both a feeding method and a type of feed:

• Scratch feed as a feeding method: It’s scratch feed if you feed it by scattering it on the ground (hens reveal morsels of feed and move it around by scratching at it with their feet).
• Scratch feed as a type of feed: Whole grains and coarsely cracked grains are suited for feeding scattered on the ground, because they’re coarse enough for hens to find and pick up individual particles, won’t blow away in the wind, and won’t turn to paste or soup on wet ground. Appropriate grains are sometimes bagged up and labeled as “scratch feed” or “scratch grains.”

Why Feed Scratch Grains?

There are different reasons to feed scratch grains:

• Taming the chickens. A one- or twice-daily feeding of scratch grains will be met with eagerness by the chickens, and if you make them come right up to you to get the grain, it will make them tame. (Chickens fed only out of bulk feeders may never get used to you.)
• Getting a good look at the chickens. By running up to you, you’ll get a close-up look at the chickens, which helps you spot any problems they might be having.
• Getting the hens out of the nest boxes. Hens like to laze around in nest boxes after laying their eggs, and egg collection is faster and more pleasant if the hens decamp of their own free will because you’ve just offered them a snack!
• Encouraging and directing foraging. The chickens will pick up any other yummy edibles that are in the vicinity of the scratch grain, and a bribe of scratch grain will get them to forage when they otherwise don’t feel like it, such as during hot or cold weather.
• Encouraging feed consumption. Similarly, if the chickens are unwell or unhappy, such as in the aftermath of being chased around by a dog, their appetite plummets and their production falls. But chickens are social eaters, even competitive eaters, and they’ll eat if other chickens are eating — especially if it looks like the food might be gone if they wait! Encouraging this kind of mini feeding frenzy helps keep the chickens going.

How Much Scratch Grain to Feed

The rule of thumb is to feed no more grain than the chickens will eat in twenty minutes. That maximizes competition, which means that even hens who are feeling under the weather will be motivated to eat something. And it doesn’t leave any feed on the ground to be eaten by wild birds and other critters you don’t want to be feeding.

If the hens are happy with their normal chicken feed, they may be satisfied with a small amount of scratch grain. My 400 hens are sometimes happy with only a couple of quarts of whole oats. But the benefit is real even if the quantities are small.

If the hens seem unusually happy to see you (and your feed bucket), they may have run out of their normal chicken feed, or (rarely) there might be something wrong with it.

Which Scratch Grains to Feed

Here are some pointers about what kinds of grains to feed:

• Whole corn is fine for chickens older than about six weeks or so. It’s cheaper and keeps better than cracked corn. Normally, in the U.S., whole corn is the cheapest grain you can buy, and chickens like it.
• Cracked corn gets moldy fairly quickly, so use it or lose it. Coarsely cracked corn is better than finely cracked corn, even for baby chicks.
• Whole wheat is a wonderful scratch feed. Chickens get more excited by scratch grains that are different from what’s in their normal feed, and most feeds are corn-based, not wheat-based or oat-based, so that helps. Wheat grains are small enough that baby chicks can eat them when they’re a week old or so.
• Cracked wheat is can be a good feed, though I’ve never seen cracked wheat that isn’t too dusty and floury to be a good scratch feed. I don’t like it when my feed blows away on the wind before it even reaches the ground! It also gets moldy far more quickly than whole wheat.
• Whole oats contain compounds that stunt the growth of chicks, though they’re fine for chickens above six weeks or so. The high fiber content of whole wheat seems to inhibit feather-picking and cannibalism. Oats are often rather expensive, but I feed them anyway, in small quantities, for variety.
• Rolled oats have the same objections as cracked grains: it raises the price, shortens the shelf life, and since chickens do fine on whole grain, why bother?
• Commercial scratch grains. These are a mixture of different cracked and whole grains, usually not too dusty, but are typically too finely cracked for my purposes. (Let’s face it: I like feeding whole grains.) If that’s what you have available, use it.

More about Feeding

G. F. Heuser’s classic poultry nutrition book, Feeding Poultry, tells you everything you need to know about the nuts and bolts of feeding your chickens. Written long enough ago that free range and scratch feeding were still practiced commercially, it’s a wealth of otherwise forgotten information, useful to anyone who farms chickens on a non-industrial scale. I liked this book so much that I republished it myself, under my Norton Creek label. Check it out!

 

It’s March 29, and I thought I’d mention that the traditional period for using supplemental light to keep the hens laying is September 1 through March 31. By April 1, the increasing day length makes supplemental light unnecessary.

Farmers traditionally set the day length at 14 hours when using supplemental light. The days aren’t that long on April 1, when measured from sunrise to sunset, but it doesn’t take much light to stimulate laying, so that seems to even things out.

The big boys use a different algorithm: keep the day length constant at whatever it happens to be on Midsummer’s Day at their latitude, meaning that there’s just one night a year when the lights don’t come on at all. Those of us with fewer than a thousant hens probably can’t measure the difference, and the convenience of not messing with lights until September carries some weight.

We started using LED light bulbs this winter and were very pleased with them. We like them a lot better than compact fluorescents, which are fragile and tend not to light properly in cold weather. We found outdoor-rated bulbs at Home Depot for reasonable prices. Incandescent bulbs, being a nineteenth-century technology, are simple and reliable under farm conditions, but consume about eight times as much electricity as LED bulbs, and also last only a tiny fraction as long (in theory; we don’t know how long the LED bulbs will last in practice yet).

Anyway, since our henhouses are scattered all over the pasture, it’s just about time for us to wind up all those extension cords and bring them inside.

It must be spring!

My November poultry newsletter gives seasonal advice and more.

It’s been twenty years since Joel Salatin created the grass-fed chicken industry by publishing Pastured Poultry Profit$ in 1993.

The book has many praiseworthy aspects, one of which is that Salatin describes in great detail the methods he was using at the time, and the thinking behind them. Lots of people have copied his methods, with varying degrees of success. (Farming is like that.)

Something unusual happened along the way, and I think it’s something Salatin didn’t expect. Because it’s the only detailed book on the topic, his single example of how to go about raising meat chickens on pasture has been accepted by many as the only way, and sometimes this gets people into jams.

For example, Salatin’s method is to get the whole clan together a few times per summer, and butcher a lot of chickens. These are pre-sold to customers from near and far, who drive out to the farm. Fair enough. This is a good method if you’re not too far from town, have a workforce to draw upon, and can assemble a group of loyal customers who are prepared to receive chickens in large batches. We tried it, and it worked … for a while.

One sticking point is that we sort of ran out of relatives who were willing to slog through a long day of chicken butchering. We also had the opportunity to sell at local farmer’s markets, where we would sell a few chickens per market, which doesn’t mesh well with the marathon butchering sessions Salatin describes.

This was back when I was doing a survey of all the poultry books, magazines, and extension bulletins ever written, and I was intrigued by an article in a poultry magazine from around 1960, describing a farmer in Los Angeles whose shtick was “the freshest chicken in town.” He butchered chickens six days a week, all by himself, and delivered them to local restaurants. He sold 1,000 chickens a month this way. That’s pretty fast work! But if he handle 1,000 chickens a month by himself, Karen figured she could manage 1,000 chickens a year.

She’s been handling the broiler side of the business on her own for more than ten years now, so I think we can say that it works! We do two farmer’s markets a week, so she butchers twice a week, the day before the market. We have fresh chicken at the market, while our two competitors, who follow Salatin’s model more closely, have only frozen chicken — a side effect of butchering more chickens than you can sell right away.

Another way we deviated from Salatin’s practice is in broiler house design. Salatin uses very low metal houses, which are very hard to work with. Salatin ignores the old maxim of poultry houses, “make it small enough that you can reach every corner from outside, or big enough that you can walk around inside it,” and crawling inside his houses is a real pain.

So Karen invented a lightweight, easily moved chicken house that you can walk around in, made from lightweight cattle panels bent into an arched roof. This is infinitely better, and has been adopted far and wide. See my Hoop Coop writeup.

There’s plenty of room for additional innovation with pastured poultry! Or for the reintroduction of old ideas. For example, the most expensive pieces of equipment we use are the scalding tank (used to loosen the feathers) and the plucking machine. But in the old days, there was a technique called “dry picking” which didn’t use either of these. Alas, the technique is quite difficult to learn unless one is taught by an expert. I don’t know if any still exist. Karen has tried on her own without success.

Anyway, if you’re interested in trying your hands at raising meat chickens for profit, get your copy of Pastured Poultry Profit$, and expect that you’ll innovate from there to match your unique circumstances.