CONTINUING WITH FEED.....

When I was talking to my new friend in Cambodia about poultry feed, he said something that surprised me. He stated that the villagers he knew, did not know that poultry could eat "greens". He thought they had to eat a prepared feed mix!

At first thought, this IS shocking, but think about bottled water and the huge, inaccurate and expensive snow job the bottled water sellers have done on the entire world! Sure, in much of the under-developed world, most of the water is not safe for those of us from developed countries to drink, but for a New Yorker to be paying essentially $3.00 a gallon to be drinking bottled water that is nothing more than filtered New York City tap water poured into a plastic bottle is absurd! Yet one major bottled water seller does exactly that and "savvy" New Yorkers shun the free drinking fountains for this $3.00 a gallon treat!

So for agribusiness to convince virtually uneducated villagers in Cambodia that poultry needs bagged feed is not much of a stretch and begs my favorite paraphrase: "Shame on you --------" (fill in the blanks with the corporation of the hour)!

So, poultry can eat greens, which is probably how the surviving dinosaurs managed to evolve into today's birds in the first place! Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms is one of the champions of the pastured poultry movement. We personally think that is the very best way to feed your poultry. However, many poultry flock owners do not have the time, space, resources of climate to pasture their poultry all the time. This is why I developed our feed mix. I never will advocate feeding a prepared mix over what Nature provides, so long as She IS providing it!

So greens of almost every kind can be eaten and nutrition derived from it.

I also discussed with my Cambodian friend, using maggot traps. These are essentially buckets with some kind of rotting, or soon to be rotting animal, animal parts, fruits, or vegetables placed in it and hung in the poultry yard. Soon, flies lay their eggs in the "fly food", maggots hatch, burrow out if the holes in the bucket and fall on the ground, where they are eaten eagerly by poultry!

Again, he told me there is almost nothing left of animals used for food (nose to tail cooking), or fruits for that matter! Well, there is always SOMETHING humans won't eat, but the flies will, so I suggested THAT is what be used in the maggot traps.  Maggot traps are not only an excellent source of cheap, easy to provide protein for your flock, they are also great fly control devices! Flies lay eggs, hoping to reproduce, but the maggots get eaten by the flock and as the adult flies die off, the overall fly population decreases.

As far as greens, fruits and vegetables go, some will always have inedible (to humans) parts, or will spoil. THIS is poultry food. Cut grass (not sprayed with pesticides), vegetable tops, leaves, stems and so on, all is great poultry food supplement! Even the stalks of the rice plants in Asia and elsewhere can be chopped small and fed to poultry. What they do not eat, gets raked into piles to ferment, or compost and the poultry will root through that looking for new bugs, sprouts and larvae. They do it here in the desert, so the Asian tropics would be a breeze!

People need to re-educate themselves away from the dis-information that corporations and agribusiness have conditioned us to over the last 50 years or so. We need to question everything and help those too ignorant of things, to begin to question as well.

When I see Mexican mothers feeding newborns Coca-Cola because some unregulated ad campaign told her that she should........ or an American "stocking up" on bottled water because a tropical storm threatens, instead of filling the bathtubs, sinks, pots and pans with water that in many cases is superior to the bottled water and 1/100th of the price...... small poultry flock owner loading up on "Crapolina" feed, walking through acres of grass and wildflowers to carry the bags to his coop....... it angers me!

It angers me not because they are doing it, but because they have been conditioned to do it! In her heart, every Mother is being told that her child should not drink a soft drink as a newborn....... every American over 40 made it there by drinking tap, hose and even lake water with no ill effects. The water is SAFER now, so why the $3.00 per gallon sippy bottle? AND..... every bird got to 2016 by eating seeds, grasses, bugs (and in the case of chickens everything they could get their beaks on), so why now do they need bagged food with a checkerboard design on it?

THEY DON'T! But we need to re-learn many things to survive what is coming from the combination or groundwater depletion, climate change and the stresses from NINE BILLION humans (2050). Hopefully, this blog and others, can help!