Fork Mountain Farm

We’ve raised a number of flocks of meat chickens and layers over the years we’ve been at Fork Mountain Farm. I have learned some things. This is an attempt to document some of that.

I first got into raising meat chickens after reading Joel Salatin’s “Pastured Pountry Profits.” The book details the production of pastured meat chickens. The method uses “cornish cross” reared in chicken tractors and fed a supplemental feed based on grain and soy. The book also teaches how to slaughter chickens on the farm and how to market them. It is a very useful and thorough book that I recommend. When anyone speaks of pastured poultry, they are probably talking about the Salatin methods. I recommend this guy as a speaker too. He’s good to listen to.

Our first deviation from the Salatin method was to try letting the chickens run over a larger space enclosed in electric poultry netting. This method also worked well and since I worked in the city weekdays and could really only be at the farm on weekends, it worked better. Lucia, my wife, fed the chicken, and once a week I moved the flock from one spot to another. The 50 chicken flock had a 3200 sq. ft enclosed area for 7 days, then another for the next 7 days and so on. In the chicken tractor method, we had 50 chickens in a 64 sq ft. area and we moved them every day.

We had been reading all sorts of negative information about soy products and decided we would like to try to raise the chickens without the use of soy. The organic feed dealer we used in Cold Spring, NY advised us that we were asking for trouble by raising those chickens without soy, but he was willing to provide it to us if we ordered a large enough batch of feed, so we bought the minimum 1000 lb order and proceeded.

Within a few weeks we had lost about 40% of the flock, so I switched back to a soy based feed and we stopped loosing chickens. It appears that the “standard” American meat chicken has been bred in such a way that is cannot survive without the “standard” chicken grower feed based on soy protein. I guess is lucky they can survive outside of a cage. They are really industrial, engineered chickens.

I was able to feed the remainder of the soy-less feed to our layers. They are a heritage breed, a mix of Buff Orpington and and Rhode Island Red. They ate it up and jacked up their egg production to boot. That made me wonder about using a different breed of meat chickens.
These chickens were primarily for our own consumption and we prefer dark meat from our chickens so I thought we could give the heritage breeds a try out even though they have less white meat.

After consulting with the hatchery about chickens on a soy-less diet, We got 2 batches of
25 of “Red Bro” and “Gray Meat” chickens. The hatchery was not familiar with concerns about soy, but they thought the breeds we got would have the best chance of growing well on a soy free diet. They were right. The normal “lifespan” from hatching to slaughter for these type of chickens is about 12 weeks. That is, on a conventional soy based feed diet, they reach 5 lbs (market weight) in 12 weeks. On a soy free diet they reached 4 lbs in 12 weeks and we slaughtered them at 14 weeks weighing, on average, about 5 lbs.

When I talk of soy based and soy free diets, I do not mean to imply that the chickens ate only the chicken feed. They all the bugs and other forage they could. I had their pasture half in a forest and half out. They had beech nuts and maple seeds in their diets. they had lots of bugs and grubs of various kinds and I saw the chickens arguing over unfortunate snakes and mice that had wandered into their pasture.

What we did not try was a completely forage based diet. We have a friend who keeps layers on a forage only basis and they do fine. Those are mostly Plymouth Rock chickens, but it does demonstrate that there are chickens who could be raised entirely without supplemental feed.
We have tried this ourselves in the summer, when forage is good, we have let the chickens eat just forage for a couple of months. They do just fine, though they don’t produce as many eggs. I would like to experiment with a really old heritage breed suited to meat production to see it I could raise them on forage only.

There is a problem, I am told, with forage only chickens. They take much longer to reach slaughter weight. Older chickens are tougher than younger ones, so the forage only birds might be tough and stringy by the time they reach the table. I would like to see for myself what they are like.

The work I’ve seen on soy has shifted my ideas about what constitutes the ideal chicken. A forage only bird, at our farm, would be raised in an organic manner without GMO feeds as well as being soy free. That is next year’s work. I intend to find out what a forage only chicken is like by growing some.