Forest Garden Poultry - Organic Feed for Free, Forage - An Overview Part 2

This is the second part of my introduction of how we use 'greenfood', forage aka free organic food for our poultry. If you have just arrived on this topic and want to go back to the beginning then Part One can be found here. Below is our hen Dorothy a year on from her arrival, older, larger and wiser. In the background you can see our neighbours' ducklings, we had moved them over for a holiday, as they were having 'pecking order' issues at home.

Big Dorothy - A Cautionary Tale 

This is a proviso I'm adding to my thoughts on forage, sharing my experience of having observed the behaviour of a bird seeing unlimited free forage for the first time in her life!

The third hen we added to our flock some years ago was a Wyandotte cross, we called her Dorothy. She was part payment for looking after our neighbours' homestead aka smallholding whilst they were away on holiday. Dorothy came to us from living on essentially a beaten earth pad with a few tufts of grass, a regular supply of table-scraps and an occasional large specimen of Sow thistle, thrown over when my neighbour used to hand-weed his garden. At the time of Dorothy's arrival our garden was in transition from an open and very weedy field, thus including many large specimens of sonchus oleraceus or Sow thistle. This plant has amongst its other names, Hare's lettuce, as both rabbits and hare are said to be inordinately fond of it. Well coming into a garden chock full of green-stuff, this was I guess, the first thing that Dorothy recognised and like a kid in a candy store, she ate a great deal of it and with interesting results. Sonchus oleraceus is both a medicinal and wild edible, one of its virtues is as a purge for the digestive and urinary system, being both a diuretic and a laxative. Thinking back on this now I am actually wondering whether Dorothy didn't in fact know of this property (having eaten it on a regular basis in the past) and was using it as such to cleanse her system before moving on to a new life? I wouldn't have put it past her. The moral of this story however, is that if you are rehoming ex-battery hens or moving a flock into pasture for the first time, or perhaps more importantly offering them a particular weed, which has medicinal properties then you would be advised to go easy on the volumes.

Bringing in forage - What, Where from and When 

The first thing I would recommend is a couple of good books, one to identify the plant, either by photographs or quality botanical drawings and an old fashioned herbal or a modern wild edible book. I think actually there is now an app, which identifies plants as you zoom in on them with a phone! We are what we eat but we are also what everything we eat eats and this goes for plants as well. Plants are used all over the World in phytoremediation projects,  to clear up the chemical and biological messes man has left and still leaves, behind him. Everything from nuclear dumping and disasters, to old mining spoil and industrial waste can be removed with precise plantings. Many forage plants, including chickweed, have the ability to absorb and even feed off toxins.  Always be aware, not only of where you are harvesting your forage but that the very abundance of any single plant in one area can be a tell tale sign of the quality or state of the soil.  Here for example above, is a beautiful alkaline meadow, created by my father to illustrate soil types

Furthermore certain plants although actually botanically the same, have the ability to subtly alter their chemical constituents, due to climate, water, light levels and soil   The whole reason why quality Essential Oils, for example, are chemotyped is because the exact same plant, such as  thyme, Thymus vulgaris can furnish eight separate and unique oils, which may be used therapeutically for completely different conditions and in completely different ways dependant on location and climate.

The other variable on plants is stress,  this can cause changes in the chemical make-up of a plant and in, for example drought stress, high levels of  nitrate. Stress to a plant can also cause it to increase its potential to produce anti-nutrients or insecticides, with which to protect it in its weakened state from predators. However nitrates are mostly of danger to ruminants and hens can certainly detect the bitter taste of certain toxins and anti-nutrients but it is better to be safe and not pick in times of drought.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

In the normal way a hen would forage in a forest, an open meadow or hedgerow, she would be able to pick and choose very freely and easily from a whole myriad of forage. If like me you are having to bring forage in then the key to this is variety. As the 15th century botanist and philosopher Paracelsus, often referred to as the father of toxicology described it:

'Everything is poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose makes a thing non-toxic.'

As an illustration of this, a paper I read recently, experiments to the trialling of dried chickweed as a leaf meal for farmed Tilapia was found to be not as successful as hoped because of an increased level of oxalic acid in the plant material. This is why I believe forage needs to be as varied as possible and why I am so lucky to have the mowings from a meadow rather than a lawn. I also plan each year to have all kinds of additional and forest garden forage which allows my birds to pick and chose what and when to eat. This is particularly important for me in the Winter, when neighbourhood forage is rarer and grass, when available less nutritious but there are still a lot of choices out there and many people are only too glad that you are saving them a trip to the dump. Witness the above photo taken this morning of my birds enjoying the bounty of a friend's sweepings from a wild garden.

In Conclusion

In an ideal world we would all have enough land to allow our poultry a vast tract of old meadow or woodland in which to forage, free from NPK fertilisers and potential toxins, both self-induced and man-made, however, with common sense and a good wildflower/wild plant identification book and herbalist's vade mecum, we can make forage work well for us and our flock. Over the past few months I have been researching and also collecting photographs and films of my birds consuming various home-raised/grown and neighbourhood sourced forage, which I will be sharing in the coming weeks.

If you have enjoyed this blog and found it interesting then please think about subscribing, sharing it and/or commenting. Please also feel free to ask questions. 

All the very best,

Sue

RELATED POSTS

 

Providing Forage for Organic Poultry Part 1

Learning from the past. If you are setting up a forest garden  to run your poultry through it, you are probably going to be short of certain wild pasture elements...read more

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 1 Grass

For centuries farmers and homesteaders raised poultry on a forage-based diet supplemented only by a handful of grain and the occasional table scraps..read more

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 2 Chickweed

Stellaria media an incredible food and medicinal for poultry, an in-depth look at this ubiquitous weed..read more

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 3 Tree Fodder & Tree Hay

The idea of tree fodder is inextricably linked with the changing landscape, the full domestication of animals, the concept of farming and the clearance of the forests... read more
 

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 4 Roses for Food & Forest

For me the rose is the quintessential forest garden plant, from canopy to ground cover there are so many to choose from ... read more

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©  Sue Cross 2016

Forest Garden Poultry - Organic Feed for Free, Forage - An Overview Part 1

If you are setting up a forest garden and intending to run your poultry through it, then you are probably going to be short of certain wild 'pasture-type' elements in their diet. I've already looked at bringing in grass, not only as a great source of nutrient and essential dietary fibre but also, as an additional resource, the uneaten greenery aids in the creation of the forest floor layer. This will in turn engender a suitable environment for invertebrates and foster the emergence of weed seeds.

On small farms raising poultry was often the preserve of the farmer's wife and 'egg money' went directly to fund the household budget. There was very little cost involved in keeping fowls as they were on what could be classed as a hen 'paleo' diet with table scraps, vegetables and some soaked or sprouted grains fed as the additional feed. With a small flock and a relatively large acreage, this feed was often only used as an enticement to get the birds into the coop in the evening and away from the fox. Organically raised poultry maybe today's recherché foodstuff but up until the First World War, all small farm country

-bred birds were kept this way. There was also a symbiotic arrangement in that the cattle kept on a farm would graze the grass to a level useful for the foraging poultry to find insects and other invertebrates. Old pasture also had a mixture of plants, with differing nutrients, there were also edible wild flowers and seeds and hedges providing further rich veins of nutrient. Once the hedges were grubbed out to make way for modern machinery that ecosystem vanished too.

In the handbook,  Practical Poultry Management written by James E. Rice and Harold E. Botsford, pastured 'green food' was already being referred to  as an additional foodstuff, in much the same way as organic food, once the only sort of farmed food available was/is relegated in mainstream supermarkets to the 'diet' or 'health food' section. In the 1947 edition of their book, the authors wrote this of green food:

'It is rich in vitamins and should supply any that are lacking in the other ration ingredients. In this sense it is a protective feed. A lack of it is often a cause of ill-health and low production. It acts as a tonic, stimulating the appetite and also aids the digestive tract in functioning properly securing for the bird a larger utilisation of the feed consumed.' 

It is interesting to note that although poultry had been pastured for centuries and the above book was first published in 1925, it would not be until a decade later or more from this date, that some of these vitamins would finally be identified and that one of the consequences of their having been so, was to usher in a packaged food for hens in the way of layer pellets.

The ability to analyse the nutrients; vitamins, minerals and amino acids, bioflavenoids etc.,. contained within the forage the bird selected for its diet, would eventually permit the rise of the synthetic vitamin, farm-cultivated protein, industrial minerals and feed additive enzymes. This in turn would enable the chicken to be removed from pasture onto deep litter and finally to be shut away completely severed from the land in the battery or broiler house. Intensive poultry production would also allow for the CAFO system to be self-perpetuating with skimmed milk, blood, bone and feathers becoming a major part of poultry food protein, vitamin and mineral content. In the U.K., for example and within a few short years of the World Wars poultry had gone from a peripheral farming exercise to one of intensive 'monoculture'. Even the linguistics had changed from Poultry 'Husbandry' to Poultry 'Science' and the Poultry 'Industry'. The idea of a bird foraging in a meadow for the whole or even a major part of its diet was out, now man would dictate what it was to eat. For most part too it would be the end of the meadow, hedges and pastured cattle, with vast fields of monocrop cereals, wheat, corn and in the U.S. ubiquitous soya, which was to become the next major alien ingredient to the poultry diet

The concept of using the products from 'rendering', however, was nothing new. The image of the feed bag above is reputed to come from a poultry breeder directory from 1891.

The idea of a food forest to me is not only to supply food for us but also to provide a return to as near as possible free-range foraging for our birds. Within the walls and hedges of our garden, there are several levels of potential foodstuffs from the floor, the sub canopy and the canopy itself. However, due to the actual size of our forest (1000m²) I am very much aware that green foods need to be brought in. To this end, we have over the years established various contacts which have allowed us to make up this shortfall. This includes 'harvesting' green-stuff from neighbouring gardens and fields.

Most people when they think about forage and free food will be thinking about the economic angle and of cutting feed bills but this is only part of the equation. At one of the organic farm open days we went to some years back, the main interest expressed by the conventional farmers, was in the minimal cost of veterinary bills per farm animal. The words of Hippocrates, of food and medicine being interchangeable should perhaps be taken to mean that food and medicine are one and the same because what good nourishing food does is prevent the necessity for ever needing the other. Green food such as chickweed, stellaria media is a medicinal herb, presently being trialled for all kinds of conditions and diseases but the chicken knows it as food. From observation, my birds also know not to over consume it, nor any other food item I present them with, which I find fascinating. That is of course unless there are special circumstances which I will discuss in the following article.

If you have enjoyed this blog and found it interesting then please think about subscribing, sharing it and/or commenting. Please also feel free to ask questions. 

All the very best,

Sue

RELATED POSTS

Providing Forage for Organic Poultry Part 2

Continuing an in-depth look into forage and discussing the what, when, where from and why...read more

 

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 1 Grass

For centuries farmers and homesteaders raised poultry on a forage-based diet supplemented only by a handful of grain and the occasional table scraps..read more

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 2 Chickweed

Stellaria media an incredible food and medicinal for poultry, an in-depth look at this ubiquitous weed..read more

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 3 Tree Fodder & Tree Hay

The idea of tree fodder is inextricably linked with the changing landscape, the full domestication of animals, the concept of farming and the clearance of the forests... read more
 

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 4 Roses for Food & Forest

For me the rose is the quintessential forest garden plant, from canopy to ground cover there are so many to choose from ... read more

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 5 Rose Petals

One of the main roses I use for both cooking, medicinals and which my hens very much enjoy is, not surprisingly, rosa gallica Officinalis, or The Apothecary Rose... read more

RETURN TO CONTENTS PAGE  
©  Sue Cross 2016