Chickens and Eggs

Yesterday Arthur and I rotated our chickens into a new pasture. It took about 3 hours to relocate and detangle the vines from our temporary fencing but now our chickens have lots on new green stuff and bugs to eat. We had wanted to completely free range our chickens and move them around in chicken trackers like I’ve seen on the permaculture chicken video but our property is still too rough and un-developed for this approach. So we’ve built a central chicken coop that will have 4 rotating pastures for our chickens. We’ve used electric fencing with a solar charger to keep the mongoose and dogs away from the chickens. This worked well until recently when the solar energiser stopped working so now we’ll be putting up permanent fencing.

Right now we have 44 chickens laying about 30-36 eggs a day. And we have another 49 chickens who will start laying within the next month. We feed them about a quarter pound of feed per chicken per day and they have about 5-6 hours of free ranging per day. I’d like to be able to reduce my feed costs and increase the food available to my chickens through foraging. I found a great website in Australia that has some great info on planting plants for chicken foraging. I’d love to be able to order their Clucker Tucker Seed Mix but its difficult to import seeds and so far the agriculture department has not been able to provide me with info on what I can plant here in Fiji for my chickens. So I’m going to experiment with planting my own mix of mung bean, blue pea, mustard seed, sunflowers, radish, cowpea, and bak choy. These are all plants that I can plant in Fiji and that the seeds are readily available.  We’ll see what the chickens will like and go from there.