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Anybody can stick a flock of chickens in the backyard.
The result will be fresher eggs than you can get anywhere else, plenty of entertainment, and, in most cases, a progressive and terminal de-greening of the backyard.
These may be healthier chickens than those kept in large commercial systems, but they are not living in a healthy ecosystem.
In contrast to the typical bare-ground backyard chicken coop, healthy ecosystems teem with diversity. In them, each life-form is inter-connected with all the others in a rich and complex web that would be weakened and compromised if just one strand were removed.
To move backyard chicken-keeping away from barren, bare ground and towards the model of a healthy ecosystem, we need to consider how to manage the flock so that all of its functions—the chickens' behaviors and their manure—are put to use in service of the surrounding ecosystem.
This means designing and locating your chicken housing carefully, and managing the flock deliberately, with your whole garden or farm ecosystem in mind.
Then, along with your fresh eggs, you’d have:
This is a work in progress; as time goes by I'll write more in depth on the ideas for growing your own live, fresh chicken foods that are briefly listed in Part 3. These are some of the topics I expect to cover as time goes by:
These will all be published as posts as they're written, and added to the downloadable PDF that you can find below.
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The PDF will be updated with the new posts as they're written.
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Well-managed chickens can provide eggs and meat as well as composting assistance, pest reduction, soil amendment services and entertainment. But they can also be incredibly destructive, as you know if you’ve had garden beds dug up or fruit trees de-mulched.
How do we harness all that chickens offer, in ways that keep everybody happy, healthy and productive?
...Deep litter bedding for chickens approximates the forest floor environment they evolved in, builds their health, provides them with entertainment, and captures fertility for soil building. Here is why we decided to try confinement on deep litter with no outside foraging.
...The best way to have healthy, happy chickens is to integrate them tightly into a thriving, bustling ecosystem that benefits from their presence, rather than allowing them to spread out in a sparse ecosystem that they steadily degrade because it is unable to support them.
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