Healthy, Happy Chickens
How to keep chickens (and your backyard) healthy and happy
If we want healthy food it needs to come from healthy ecosystems. In a healthy ecosystem there are no barren, dead areas, everything is balanced and interconnected, and the "waste" from one kind of living thing is food for another.
To move backyard chicken-keeping towards this ideal of a healthy ecosystem, we need to manage our chickens so that their scratching and manure are put to good use. Then, along with your fresh eggs and entertainment, you’d have happy, busy chickens, a greener back yard, a lower feed bill, and the satisfaction of knowing that you and your chickens are building soil, sequestering carbon, and taking the best care you can of your place on Earth.
The following posts cover the Pros and Cons of Free Range and Mobile Pens, the Advantages of Deep Litter, How to Keep Chickens Happy in Confinement, and Deep Litter Composting With Chickens.
I hope you find them useful 🙂
Beyond Eggs – Pros and Cons of Free Range and Mobile Pens
Chickens can either be very helpful to gardeners, or incredibly destructive. How can we harvest all that chickens have to offer, in ways that keep everybody happy, healthy, and productive?
Beyond Eggs – 8 Advantages of Deep Litter Housing for Chickens
Deep litter bedding for chickens mimics 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.
Beyond Eggs: How to Keep Chickens Happy in Confinement
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.
Deep Litter Composting With Chickens
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.
Chicken behavior, and musings about a kinder world
As well as helping us put real food on our tables, backyard chickens can also help us attend to the lonely part of us that's tired of being separate from nature and longs to be reconnected. And the sad, hurting part of us that wants to focus more on kindness, and less on conflict.
Of course, any living thing can do that for us, not just chickens. But since they're so common in the backyards of people who care about sustainable, ethical living, chickens are a good place to start. The following posts cover how hens mother their chicks, how chicks mature toward independence, how roosters involve themselves in the lives of hens, and what all this has to do with our desire to call in a kinder, more connected way of being in the world.
I hope you enjoy them 🙂
Broody Hens and Musings on Inter-Connectedness
Why our efforts to address ecological destruction aren’t working yet, and how backyard chickens (or any other living thing that you care for) can help.
Mama Hens and Baby Chicks
Doesn’t happiness – even “just” the happiness of some hen in a backyard hen house somewhere, count towards a more whole, more beautiful world, a world that has a little more rightness about it?
How Roosters Care for Hens (and what happiness has to do with regenerative agriculture)
This post shares the funny things one of our roosters gets up to, and it concludes the Backyard Chicken Series with the question, “Can good husbandry, regenerative agriculture, and morally right living, be defined in terms of happiness and connection?”