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.
- Managing chickens holistically so that they enhance your garden or farm rather than de-greening and de-mulching it
- Pros and cons of free range, mobile pens, and deep litter systems (Part 1)
- How a deep litter system approximates the forest floor environment that chickens originally evolved in, resulting in better health for the chickens and their environment (Parts 2 and 3)
- A list of ideas for keeping chickens as busy and well fed in a large deep litter run, as they would be if they were out free-ranging (Part 3)
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.
Download this Series as a free PDF
The PDF will be updated with the new posts as they're written.
Here are the posts that have so far been published in the BEYOND EGGS Series
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.
...
An earth-floor, deep-litter system has big benefits for the health and well-being of chickens, and it’s also the easiest way I know to build an ongoing compost creation system in which most of the work is done for you. This article shares what we’ve learned about deep-litter composting since we built our new earth floor chicken shed in 2019.
...