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Beyond Eggs – Part 1
Beyond Eggs – Part 1
The Pros and Cons of Free Range and Mobile Chicken Pens
Well-managed chickens can provide eggs and meat as well as composting assistance, sanitation and pest reduction, soil amendment services, and entertainment.
But poorly managed chickens tend to focus all their talents and energy into very destructive pursuits, as you know if you’ve had your seedlings repeatedly dug up or your fruit trees efficiently de-mulched.
How can we harness all that chickens have to offer, in ways that keep everybody happy, healthy and productive?
Design and management for maximum integration
A major key—perhaps THE key—to making a Permaculture system work is the relationships between the parts (or elements) of the system.
A flock of chickens is an example of an element in a Permaculture system, and it can potentially have relationships with many other elements in the system that it supports/is supported by.
Anybody can stick a flock of chickens in the backyard.
But if you were approaching it from a Permaculture perspective (a holistic perspective) you’d carefully consider how to locate and manage the flock well so that ALL of the outputs it produces, or functions it can perform, are put to use in service of the surrounding ecosystem.
Healthy ecosystems teem with diversity, each life-form inter-connected with all the others in a complex web that would be weakened and compromised if just one strand were removed. This is what we are striving to emulate.
It’s the interactions, exchanges, and synergy between the components of the system that provide the stability, adaptability, flexibility, efficiency, productivity/abundance, and beauty that we find lacking in a monoculture or in a less integrated system.
With this concept in mind, this article Series will discuss:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Permaculture Chickens–6 Practical Lessons From the Evolution of Chickens
PERMACULTURE CHICKENS – 6 PRACTICAL LESSONS FROM THE EVOLUTION OF CHICKENS
One of the fundamentals of permaculture design is to observe, understand and work with natural ecosystems.
It sounds simple enough to apply permaculture principles to chicken keeping. Can’t we just observe wild chickens in their natural environment? The problem is, modern domesticated chickens don’t exist in the wild. Junglefowl are the immediate ancestor of chickens, however it’s not that simple.
Modern chickens were domesticated more than 8,000 years ago and have changed a lot as a result of selective breeding. To get a more complete picture, that accounts for the differences between modern chickens and Junglefowl, I’ve studied the evolution of chickens from the Asian jungle, to modern factory farming and chicken nuggets.
I have distilled this research into 6 lessons for a permaculture approach to happy, healthy, backyard chickens.
Evolution of Chickens
Before I jump into the 6 lessons for permaculture chickens, I’ll start by setting the scene with a brief history and evolution of the modern domestic chicken.
Junglefowl – The chicken’s immediate ancestor:
Domestic chickens can be traced back to Red Junglefowl, from South East Asia and India. Jungle fowl have small lean bodies and they only lay about 20 eggs each year.
If we trace chickens back even further, chickens are the closest living relative of the T-Rex. This makes a lot of sense because chickens go crazy for meat, hunt down insects and even small rodents. And check out this incredible video of a chicken grabbing (stealing) a mouse that was being hunted down by a cat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwtuoHyLEiw .
Domestication and family farming (1900s to 1950):
Junglefowl were domesticated around 8,000 years ago. Despite domesticated chickens being very different ‘physically’ to jungle fowl, studies show that genetic differences are actually pretty small. This study of the genetic evolution of chickens shows there are two important mutations:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
