 What I'd like to talk about today is something that I'm very excited about, almost to the point of being a little bit nerdy, and that's what is all of the things that you can feed chickens and get acceptable production out of it, and particularly, what can you feed chickens that grows as close as it can to my front door. So those will be the things that we're talking about. So I mean, I just ask, how many other people out there are excited about egg laying chickens and all the myriad of things that you can possibly feed them. What I have discovered over the last three or four years is you can feed an awfully lot of things to chickens, and they may or may not lay eggs. It's one of my first introductions to alternative agriculture is not all alternatives are good, but many are. So we all have something in common. What I'd like to talk about today is going to involve some tables and some graphs and a little bit of science, but I would really like that to be a secondary thing, something that is important kind of on the background, something that we go back and reference occasionally. But what we're really doing as farmers is we're following our dreams, we're following our excitement, we're making a discipline of following our excitement, and that will eventually be the gift that we give to other farmers. That will be our contribution to making agriculture more local, more sustainable, more decentralized. So the title of my talk is The Cheapest Way to Make the Best Egg, and you guys will permit me, I'll just read from my notes a little bit. The word cheap in the title, it refers to three points. One of them is having a financially sustainable operation with the lowest possible overhead. Overhead is not a good thing, you don't want to have a lot of overhead. A high overhead usually to me means risk, and it also means a lack of freedom in decision making. I'll often have to do something that I know will make profit instead of something that I'm kind of excited about toying around with, which is a great reason to write a Ceregrant, which is what I did for this study. We wrote a Ceregrant, everyone is familiar with the Ceregrants, right? So it's something else that I think is important in agriculture is you don't combine your farm venture that you're counting on to pay the bills with research, that those two things are kind of going separate headings, does that make sense? If you don't know that it's going to make a profit, then it's probably best to write a grant or do it in a very small scale so you don't go too far out onto the limb. I think it's okay to go a little bit out, but not too far out. Just a second, not just yet. Another thing that means cheap is the effort expended. I've worked on some farms where we just worked too hard, and not my own thankfully, other farms that I've worked on, and I don't think that excessively high labor can fall under the heading of sustainable, because if it's just too hard and you get a little bit burned out, then you might quit, and that's not sustainable agriculture. And lastly, cheap. Cheap is coming from the earth's perspective. How much are we going to ask the earth to give us in order to maintain a human created system? So, let's see, I'm just going to, oh yeah, press that button. There's just a couple of organizations that I have found helpful to me in finding markets for my products. One of them is the West End Price Foundation, and I won't go too much into them right now, but just to let people know that they exist, they help farmers find markets for their products, usually animal products. You can hit it again, buddy. And in the world of animal products, there's a whole host of legal issues. And here's an organization where if you sign up, they can answer legal advice. Is it legal for me to raise home process chickens and take them to Illinois from where I live in Missouri? Answer's probably not. So, but they can help you with a lot of things and explain some of the legal issues and kind of wade through the nonsense that most people don't want to mess around with. You can hit it again, big guy. And then this is just a little snapshot of our farm. This is my son, Noah, with our herd of pigs when they're bigger. We have a grass-fed cattle. This is my daughter, Zia, holding a Thanksgiving turkey that's getting ready for the harvest of that bird. It's probably about this big now. And then one of the more creative things we did with pigs is we raised our pigs on a high-protein forage turnip and field peas, as well as a little bit of cracked eggs from the chickens this year, and that made up the bulk of their feed for the first half of the summer. If you guys are at all interested in alternative pig production, we can talk about that afterwards, too. They just like to throw out there that there's a lot of possibilities in the world. You want to hit it again? Okay, go backwards one. That's this one. There you go. So, in 2003, I read a book that had a very inspiring message for me. The name of the book was Cultures of Habitat, and its take-home message was, what do I do to live within the offering of my habitat? My human habitat. What is my habitat offering me that I can kind of run my life on? And that led to me starting to ask more questions about chicken production and pig production. What it really led me to was, how many bugs can I get my chickens to eat? Because, as I'll talk about later, pasturing chickens is a great idea, but we can't rely exclusively on pasture for what's called a monogastric, an animal with just one stomach. That would cover turkeys, pigs, chickens, people. We're all monogastrics. That means that we're not ruminant, and everybody knows what a ruminant is. It has a rumin. It can break down the cell wall of grass and can find protein and nutrition there. But since a chicken can't do that, what you're usually doing with pasture is there's a wide range of qualities in pasturing a chicken. It goes all the way in a gradient from the chickens get nothing from the land. They live outdoors, but sort of in what I call the scorched earth policy of chicken farming, they just kind of stand on a black spot, which you could call a pasture, but they're not getting anything off of it, all the way up to very quick moves following a herd of cows, allowing the chickens a great diversity of habitats to go be little hunter-gatherers. That's what you want them to do. You're sending your flock out to hunt and gather. And if you can give them some fence rows, some bushes, some trees, but mostly following cows. That's what I've found to be the most successful. So, since chickens can't eat that much grass, what we're really looking for is to create bug habitat. And then, since generally speaking they won't just live on bugs unless you're a really good insect farmer, we're going to be looking for the simplest, most local grain that you can get a chicken to consume while not dropping egg production to unacceptable levels. On our farm we start out with wheat. Wheat is locally available. It's non-GMO, if that's important to you. It's small enough that it doesn't require mechanization to grind. The chicken can consume it whole. Also, the wheat that we use is a 12% protein, which makes it 4 percentage points higher than the most common field corn. Modern-day field corn is pretty close to 8% protein. So very low in protein. So if you start out with wheat, chickens are looking for something like 16% protein. So at a 12% wheat, the chickens are already halfway up. Am I making sense? You guys follow that? So while wheat is 12% protein, and that's halfway from 8 in corn to 16 is what the chickens need, it's still only halfway there. And that's where you use bugs. You can be an insect farmer. You can do red wiggler worms. You can do black soldier fly larvae. I don't have any experience with those things, but I think they're intriguing. The simplest thing that we could think to do in the summertime was to try to get the chickens to follow a herd of beef cows. And in doing that, the beef cows would eat the tall grass down to short grass. It would remove most of the cover for grasshoppers and crickets. And they would also drop cow pies. And then flies would lay maggot larvae in that, and the chickens can actually find those maggot larvae. So in a sense, we were still cultivating our fields, even though there wasn't a plow involved. We were using the cows to help us create something that would be worthwhile to the chickens. So, hey Noah, hand me that folder. That one right there. Thanks big guy. Good job. Oh, that's okay. So since alternative agriculture people end up sort of being curious and quirky people, it's kind of nice to have other organizations that you can call, so as not to reinvent the wheel all the time. And one of them that I would call sometimes, if I may show you, is the Alternative Farming Systems Information Center in Beltsville, Maryland. We actually have. I'm sorry, I forget your name. Katie. Katie works there, and she really loves people to ask her questions about alternative farming systems. Right, Katie? Okay, good. So I called them up, and I was looking for a way to feed chickens using perennial crops, using no-tillage, right? I wanted to see what I could do using perennial fruit crops, such as wild plums, nuts if possible, apples, there's tons of perennial crops that I would like to see if I could get chickens to eat and still lay eggs. So I called them up and asked if there was any information, pre-1900s, pre-World War II sort of thing, and they sent me a very wonderful article that I recommend to anyone who's interested in feeding wheat to chickens. The name of it, it's a very long name, whole wheat versus mixed-layer diet as a supplementary feed to layers of foraging in a sequence of different forage crops. I'll show you anybody who's interested, I'll show you that later. But it takes place in the University of Arhus, which is in Denmark in the year 2006, and what they did was they got two flocks of modern hybrids, which are a light-bodied, very productive modern bird, and they raised them up to the point where they were starting to lay eggs, and then they separated them into two groups. One group just continued to be fed regular chicken feed, and one group was switched over to wheat and oyster shells. And then the other really interesting thing that they did in order to not have to buy more off-farm feed, which is expensive, they planted three food plots. Raise your hand if you guys know what a food plot is. You're familiar with the idea of a food plot. People use them for deer a lot. They'll plant turnips out in the woods or something. But what these guys did was they had three cultivated food plots that they tilled and planted with the idea that they would pasture their chickens on those food plots and then hopefully not have to buy them more feed. They had the first one of grass and clover in the spring. They did field peas, hairy vetch and oats during the summer, and quinoa in the fall. Then, Mark, you can grow quinoa. I don't believe it would grow very well in the Midwest. It kind of likes the high-altitude, low-humidity sort of environment. And the other thing I thought was kind of funny was quinoa is a real high-dollar crop, and if you can successfully grow fields of quinoa, you'd probably make more money not feeding it to chickens. It's like feeding almonds to chickens. They'll love it. They'll eat it. There are lots of eggs, but in the end it's a hobby. It's not going to be a business because of the expense of the almond. So, did I explain that clearly enough? Do you guys follow that? Two groups of chickens, both groups are on pasture. It's the same pasture, and the pasture is their cultivated food plots. One's getting fed chicken feed, the other's getting wheat. I don't know how you can hit that button again. And this is what they found. So, if we can see, I'm not very interested in the top and bottom parts of the graph. I'm more interested in the middle. So, black dots are chickens getting chicken feed. The white dots are chickens getting wheat. And we can see what happens. Give me five. Good work. So, one of them, the one where they get the wheat, it really drops down. But then, very importantly, it comes back up. And you can see that for the remaining two-thirds of the experiment, that both of them are laying competitively well. You see they kind of go back and forth, who's winning, the egg-laying competition. So, if, hey, let me talk for a minute. If I may say, if I may ask, why did that happen? Have we got any guesses? Getting used to the change in diet was a really big thing. There's two factors in getting used to a change in diet. One of them is getting the chicken to recognize wheat as food. The chicken is a wonderful animal. It is not a brilliant animal. And I say that with real respect for the chickens. I really respect them, but part of respecting them is realizing that they have a certain limitation. And that is recognizing immediately that this is to be eaten. So, part of it is psychological. It took them, they had to get hungry enough to start eating something they didn't recognize. The other part of it, which I think is interesting, which is a very important point in alternative feeds, is part of it is physiological. So, the other feed they were getting was pre-ground. That means that their gizzard did not have to work hard. The gizzard is this very strong muscle and they eat rocks and it just grinds it and grinds it. The rocks in their gizzard are essentially their teeth. So, it grinds it up. Now, if your chicken is eating a very well ground meal, it will probably not have a very strong gizzard, which if you're just planning on giving it chicken feed may not ever be a disadvantage. But in this moment, they had to allow that gizzard to get strong enough to do the work of making the wheat ground up so the body could get the goodness out of it. So, that's a physiological difference. A similar thing happens when you really start dumping milk in an animal's feed trough. I mean, if you live in a place where you can get waste milk, lactose requires something called lactase to break down. And as I understand it, lactase needs to be incrementally built up in the body. So, if, for example, you have pigs that have only eaten pig feed, all of a sudden you have five gallons of milk a day that you can give them, it's still good to meter it into them so their bodies can build up the lactase. Otherwise, it won't really do them a lot of good, if that makes sense. Let's see. Do you want to do the next one? Yeah, go ahead. So, let's see. One important thing to check when you start giving wheat to an animal, you can tell when their gizzard has reached the point that it's strong enough to grind it up just by doing a very simple manure check. If you look where the chickens have been and you can see specks of wheat in their manure, then I just think you're a person's buying the wheat for fun. They're not actually eating it, it's passing through them without them receiving benefit. So, just take a couple of moments, look at the manure. If you see chicken manure, then that's great. Their gizzards are strong enough. If not, you can either just wait it out because they will get strong enough eventually, or you can start giving them grit and the grit will help also. So, that brings me to the experiment that I wanted to do this summer. The experiment that I wanted to do was really based on what they did in Denmark in 2006, but I wanted to do it here in the Midwest. Part of the reason for that is the Midwest is such a giant bio-region. If you can discover something alternative that's successful in the Midwest, you've potentially offered another arrow in the quiver of a lot of farmers. So, we decided that we were going to do essentially the same thing, only there was going to be a couple of variations. One of the variations was they were just giving straight-up wheat to their chickens. We thought that they would be able to assimilate it better if we sprouted it. And what we were trying to do was avoid the downward spike, where we figured the gizzard had to catch on or catch up. So, all we would do is we also wanted this to be a cheap and easy and available means, so nothing really expensive and hard. We get a five-gallon bucket and we fill it about two-thirds of the way up with wheat, and then we fill it up to the top with water. And then, after we let it sit for 24 hours and soak, then we transfer it to a bucket that we've drilled holes in the bottom of. All the water can run out and then, in this, it can sprout delightfully. You can let it sprout as long as you want. You can let it sprout if you want until, when you dump it out, it is a perfect cylinder of wheat woven together, which is quite beautiful. And, you know, a little green on the edges. Or, if it's very hot in the hottest part of the summer, we had trouble with mold, right? We would essentially create a giant ball of mold and there's something called an aflatoxin, which is very bad for chickens, and I can't identify that on site. So, we decided that, in lack of being able to identify or sample aflatoxins from our samples, from our wheat on a regular basis, that we would just give it a one-day sprout, which means we would soak it and then let it sit for a day and just begin that process. You know, the tiniest little white shoot and the tiniest little white root would come out. But, after that, you know, we would feed it to the chickens. Also, in our study, we would add a calcium supplement, calcium phosphorus supplement, and a little pinch of salt. Also, I guess just to let people know, chickens have a very low tolerance to salt. You can kill a chicken with too much salt, much quicker than you would think. So, it's just something to know. They need a little bit, but they can't have a lot. I had to say, we learned this the other day when a friend dumped a whole bunch of homemade play-doh into his chicken pen and they loved it and they ate it and they all died. So, anyway, don't feed play-doh to chickens. Let's see. The other thing that we did that we wanted to deviate from the University of Arhus is we wanted there to be two different kinds of chickens. I've always really loved the thought of the old-fashioned breeds. I thought that would be a really wonderful thing to do with decentralized agriculture is chickens are one of the things that production farmers are not breeding for themselves. You can breed your own heritage turkeys, your own pigs, your own cows, your own sheep, but very few people are breeding hybrid chickens. So, I wanted to see if we could use an old-fashioned breed that we could breed ourselves and in that way rely on our community or our own farm more. Yeah. Yeah, very soon. Why don't you click it again? Oh, this is something I forgot to say. This is a table which shows the nutrition of sprouted wheat. I received this after we had already started the study and in reading it, I can't tell if I've done the birds a great service or not. If sprouting the grain is actually a net benefit or a loss. You see what's happening is the protein is rising, but what's happening is the wheat is filling with water. So, while its protein is rising, its water bulk is also rising, so what you have is sort of a lateral move, right? Not really a giant jump towards more protein or anything. It does make it more palatable and it does make it more digestible, but for me the jury is still out whether or not sprouting it was a big help. You can tell that for some reason it helps the ruminants, but it's not helping the monogastrics, and while you are creating protein, which is really great, what does it cost to run the machine, right, of that seed germinating is it takes energy, it's burning calories, it's burning starch in order to fuel that transformation. So, now I'm going to just step back a moment. So, I'm talking about the four flocks of chickens that we put on pasture. We essentially wanted half of our birds to be modern hybrids. We wanted half of our birds to be old fashioned, and then we divided those groups in half, right? So, there's four groups now. We've got one group of modern hybrids eating chicken feed, one group of modern hybrids eating sprouted wheat. We've got one group of Rhode Island Reds, an old fashioned standard breed eating chicken feed, and one group of Rhode Island Reds eating wheat. Okay? So, have I confused everybody sufficiently? I'm trying my best. Let me go forward one. So, there's a picture on the left of the Rhode Island Reds. They're a heavy body or bird, which means they probably will tolerate cold better, but they'll tolerate heat less well. Yeah, you got to go? Okay. Okay, great. Actually, let's give Noah some applause. Good work, Noah! Yay! Okay, so, the hybrid chickens, they're called the red sex link, and the reason for that is you can tell their gender at the point of hatching, which is important in the egg laying industry. You don't need a whole bunch of roosters. They are a lighter bodied breed, which means they tolerate heat better, but probably cold less, right? Hey, Noah, she'll come back. You can just have a seat in the back or up here. Mom will come back. Okay, thanks for being patient with our little family exercise. Can you press the button again? Okay, so, we also decided to do some rotational grazing since we didn't want to till our land. Our land is pretty heavy clay, and generally speaking pretty hilly, and I think that's a bad place to plow, that combination of things. So, what we decided to do was we'd let the cows go first, and then the insect, the fly larvae, has a four-day incubation time in the cow patties, so we would try to follow the cows at four days slower. And this is just a little bit of our rotational grazing. We made five-acre paddocks, and then we could just move the cows to that. Go ahead again, buddy. And then this is our management. You guys familiar with Joel Salatin? Yeah, we modified the Joel Salatin portable pins for broilers. We made them three feet high, and we sort of enjoyed that extra foot because one of the purposes of the comb of a chicken is to dissipate heat, and if their comb is right next to the top, the top of the shelter, then there's that layer of dead air space and the heat of the summer where it's really hot just underneath that corrugated tin. And we wanted there to be some breeze to move that out. We also wanted these things to be as multi-purpose as possible. So in these things, sometimes we raise broiler chickens, sometimes we pasture egg layers, and sometimes we put turkeys in them. It'd also be possible to put rabbits in them. We built a larger version of that and made out of oak 4x4s, and we put pigs in it, and then we pull the pig tractor around, which is a really fun way to kill the grass where your electric fence line is going to be. Let the pigs do it for you, right? And then we surrounded the whole thing with portable electric fencing, and anyway, we'd move the whole thing twice a week. And the reason that we'd move it twice a week was that we really wanted to give them as many crickets and cow pies and clover. We just wanted to keep them moving. What we were essentially doing is in agriculture, you guys probably have noticed this, there is two very simple possibilities. One of them is that you provide a lot of labor, and the other one is you provide a lot of capital, right? So in this model, we were going to do higher labor, lower capital. He pressed it again. The fence on his layers. Yeah, he's always changing it around. He does some really awesome things. He's got something called the Eggmobile. It's a chicken house built on a hay wagon, and then he moves at great distances. And I've done a hybrid of what he's done with the Eggmobile in years past, meaning that we built the chicken coop on the hay wagon and then we circled it with the portable electric fencing. And the reason for that is it's really important to control the movement of animals to have successful rotational grazing. If you can't control their movements, then what they do is they all run off to the fence row to find their hidden bat cave to lay their eggs. And then when you're mowing three months later, you find this mountain of eggs, right? Not that that's ever happened to me, but. The other thing that happens is predators. I definitely don't want to be at war with nature. I will trap raccoons. Last year we lost 150 chickens to raccoons, so I started trapping. But generally speaking, I don't want to offer the wildlife incentive to come closer. And the way that I imagine a predator's mind working, and I think this is true, is they're going to practice an attack routine, you know, where they'll find their wildlife corridor of a fence row usually, or a stand of tall grass or a creek bed, and they'll get as close as they can to the chicken coop. If they can do that, and they can really figure it out, like this is how I'm going to get a chicken, then they'll probably figure it out. So what we would do was we would either move the egg mobile great distances so they can never figure the pattern out. And so the chickens never figure out, like, hey, this bozo is going to come and steal my eggs every morning, which they realize. Or if I know that this guy's going to come and take our eggs, I'm going to sneak off into the fence row and lay my eggs. And we've really experienced both of those things, so there's a lot of options, but I don't want to get too carried away with all the options of raising chickens. We had an enormous drought this summer. This is what the pasture looked like in May. This is what it looked like in August. In between roughly May 15th and August 15th, I think we received, like, an inch and three-quarters of rain, usually in half-inch or quarter-inch intervals, which is not really enough to offer the grass much of anything. What do you push the button again? Yeah, sure thing. This is a temperature graph. Chickens have a higher body temperature than people. They're 103.5 as opposed to our 98.6. And they've got a downcoat on all the time. It makes them very sensitive to heat. I have better egg production in January than I do in July and August, usually. Once the drought really got started, we had a heck of a time putting those solar electric fences, getting the step-in posts to actually step in. So we gave up and we just decided we were going to move them from following the cows into a shady fence row. And then we stopped letting them out of these. So their range size decreased enormously with the drought. We didn't actually think that was a terrible disadvantage because they spent the entire time in the shade. They wouldn't really stray out. There was a big change in their range size. I don't think it was terribly detrimental to their egg production. And if you guys have a chicken coop, it's very important that in the heat of summer that chickens are not forced in direct sunlight. They'll do their pasturing and their grass eating morning and night. They absolutely have to have a lot of shade. And it will be exponentially better for the chickens if their shade has shade on it. That will make a giant difference in egg production. You want to push the button again? We ran into a couple of problems, particularly with the heritage chickens, unfortunately. I really wanted to see them succeed with flying colors. And the ones that were eating wheat ended up doing a terrible amount of tail picking, which you could call heat stress, but the ones that were eating chicken feed did not. So I'm led to believe that the same kind of bird, the variable, was the feed. The ones that were eating wheat had some sort of deficiency. Chicken feather is made almost entirely of an amino acid called methionine. And I suspect that the under supply of methionine in the wheat, they realized the sustenance of the feather and were trying to take that in. After several weeks of feather picking, rather grisly, but they moved on to each other's toes, a few of the chickens had their toes eaten off, which was rather dreadful. But shortly after we started noticing this negative behavior, the drought broke. August 15th, roughly, in La Plata, Missouri. And we got, oh, an inch and a half of rain. And shortly thereafter, I believe it was Hurricane Irene came through. And the temperature dropped greatly. We received six gentle inches of rain. And that was the highlight of our summer. Did we hit the button again? So, oh yeah, do you have another question? That stopped the feather picking. Yes. Yeah, they entirely recovered. The only ones who didn't recover was the ones who were missing a toe. But that was only two chickens. All the feathers have grown back. The wounds on their feet have grown back. Yeah, the thionine added to poultry foods to try to avoid that shortage. That's been organically approved now. Great. Because there's not a natural source of thionine that's reliable enough. So you can actually add methionine. Yeah. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, part of our study was to see, yeah, you can go see. Part of our study was to see what can we do with just wheat? You know, well, we know that wheat has a certain undersupply of lysine and methionine. We wanted to see if, like this study from Denmark, those chickens were able to find the methionine and lysine elsewhere, other than the feed. And we wanted to see if they could do it with crickets and earthworms. What we ended up finding was that, yes, they could if the daytime high was lower than 85 and there was a certain amount of moisture in the ground. If there was a certain amount of moisture in the ground, the earthworms would come up to the surface. The crickets would do whatever they do. And the chickens would eat them. But when it really started cooking, I think that not only could they not find adequate insects, but I think that their body was actually less efficient because they were undergoing stress. And I think that they were burning up nutrients quicker than they could get them. So anyway, average chicken weights, we did this as a measure of animal welfare. We wanted to see, are the ones who are just eating wheat emaciated and we didn't find that. We found that, yes, they were slightly lower, but not statistically significant lower. We found their body weights to be good even though their production was not good enough in the summertime. And then we start moving into our other graphs. Now, whenever you see a graph, I always encourage people, don't try to see the whole thing at once. Pick one line and follow it and they just kind of play with all those numbers. Easily what we see is that these are all hybrids. The ones eating feed laid more eggs. The ones eating wheat laid less eggs. Now, that's what we're going to see all through, all of our graphs, roughly the same thing. Here is the heritage birds in the worst of the heat. They entirely stopped laying, right? It's very bad for all my customers at Hive in Columbia. Kind of the same thing everywhere. You see them rebounding though. You see them starting out good, bottoming out and rebounding. You see this stopped on, what is that, August 29th. We continued taking data after we made these slides and we'll show you that in a minute. And these lines just keep on going back up. Kind of like a smiley face shape. Get your head out of the light. And if I may make a hypothesis that I don't have data to back up, it would be that the drought really did a number on the insect populations. I called up a field entomologist at the University of Missouri here in Columbia. And I was just looking for some validation for my theory that there just weren't bugs out there. I'm used to walking through the cow pasture and basically a cloud of grasshoppers is jumping around and you can see earthworm casings on the ground. You can hear crickets at night. And then the heat of the summer, that was absent. So I called an entomologist and he said that they were experiencing a 99% drop in insects caught in nocturnal light traps. So a 99% drop. That's pretty a significant drop. And that's what you're seeing here. So what I also saw as the lines continued upward is it appeared to me that insect populations were more resilient than the Chicago Commodity Board. So the insects would recreate their own populations faster than the Commodity Board would drop prices to an acceptable level where farmers kind of across the board can make more money. The insects will help you more. No, those are amounts of eggs laid. My theory that I was going to bring up was if we experienced a more normal summer, I know there's really no such thing in Missouri as a normal summer, but we have a few patterns that we can work with, right? If we get our, I don't know, I think our area gets 35 inches of rain annually. If we get an inch of rain a week or two inches of rain a week, if we don't go more than 35 days with an average daily high over 90 degrees, that the insect populations would only be gone for a four-week window somewhere in the drought, right? That almost always comes in late July and sometime in August. So the insects will stay resilient for about the first two weeks of a six-week drought, is my theory, and then there would be a four-week drop-off in insect populations, at which point, unless you have an adequate source of protein coming from somewhere else, you just switch back to regular chicken feed. That makes sense. It's a pretty simple solution. You use, it would be possible to use the wheat plus pasture and insects whenever Mother Nature is going to allow it of you. And whenever she's not going to allow it of you, go ahead and feed chicken feed. And that's what I kind of decided in this study would be an all right thing to do. The other thing that would make me really want to feed chicken feed is if I was really busy with something else. Because as I said, I picked a higher labor strategy of moving these pins twice a week. It takes a couple hours to get them all moved, you know, two or three hours. And if you don't have time for that, then you're better off just feeding chicken feed because they have to get those insects. Here's a total production thing. Now, this was done in August when the curve on the graph had just started to go back up. And I'll let you know that, so this was most of the way through the experiment, but I took the same table only, I don't know, halfway through it, and the numbers were not that much lower. So if you can imagine that they laid most of their eggs before the drought started, and where it was particularly obvious was this group and this group were the wheat-fed groups. Both of these are hybrids. Both of these are heritage. So you can see that the heritage laid less and the wheat-fed laid less than their counterpart. Does that make sense? So this number only changed in the last 50% of the experiment by 100 eggs. In the first 50%, the first half of the time, they laid 728 or something eggs. So they only laid another 100 eggs in the last half. So when you do the cost-benefit of actually taking this, before the drought started, I believe it was these guys were by far my most profitable group. I think that my notes say that while these guys were laying something like 20% less eggs, their feed bill was 65% less. So that is a wonderful thing for my perspective. Then what I guess I learned in the experiment is that in an insect-dependent study, when there's no insects, cry uncle start going back to feeding chicken feed. You want to push the button? Yeah. This is another cost-benefit sort of thing. It just shows how much the eggs were costing me. I sell my eggs for $3.50 a dozen, usually to high-v's grocery stores and health food stores. So if you see A and B, they were running me $1.54 and $1.36 per dozen. That's good. So that's basically two bucks that I could make. C, the heritage chickens, they were eating chicken feed, which was more expensive, and they weren't commiserately laying enough eggs to make up for the expense of their feed. So I was actually losing 51 cents a dozen off of those silly chickens. And then D, it'd still make a dollar. Just use your feed cost. That doesn't count any of your other costs, correct? Yeah. My distribution was pretty cheap, and cartons are 24 cents a carton. So, yeah, anyway, just looking at the feed cost. You had to get the chickens, and you have to have water, and you have to have all that. Yeah, yeah. The way that I do the acquisition of chickens is after a year, or a little bit more than a year on the property, we harvest them all and freeze them, and then sell them as soup chickens, and they, compared to a broiler chicken or a fryer made in soup, an old spent hen will make 10 times better soup. So we can actually, after a year and two months of keeping them on the farm, they will have grown slightly in body size, which is meat, and we'll be able to sell them for more than we bought them for as a meat product, as a soup product. So the last year's, I call it the graduating class, last year's graduating class buys the next year's crop of chickens. What are those heavier light-breed chickens? I eventually decided I liked the light-breed chickens for egg production. Well, a lot of people do, because they eat grass, but I would just, you know, where do you, what do you do, sell them to a soup board? I sure do. Maybe I'll tell you all about it. I'll just wrap this up, if you don't mind. I'd be happy to tell you about it. You see the graphs continuing, going upward, all except for A. A was the hybrid chickens eating chicken feed, and they, of course, never experienced quite as low of a summer spike. So when the day length started to decrease, their production started to decrease very slowly. And our farm, right around here, it's, I think it's September 1st, or something like that, that the chickens start needing a little bit of supplemental lighting. They need to have 14 hours a day in order to really have good production. What's happening is there's a gland that's able to measure day length. And if the days are very long, they think it's mating season and they're going to lay a lot of eggs. And when the day length starts to drop, their desire to reproduce and create eggs drops. So a light in the chicken coop is an important way to get the most eggs for your feed bill. In the future, I have kind of daydreamed about using something called a biopod to create black soldier fly larvae. I think that would be a really fun thing to do. And in that, you could do something like go to a public school or a nursing home or something and just get their food scraps and then change that. You know, it's kind of a complicated process, but you essentially change that food scrap, which could be free into black soldier fly larvae, which becomes your protein. And then you can stick with the wheat if you want to. Something like that. And then you're using an insect to help you compost. And then you can actually seed this thing with an insect seed pod. You just drop the insects in there and about three weeks later, they're reproducing. Or you could use a homemade composter so they might get out of a grumb or a grub. You probably could. Another thing that a person could do is red wiggler composting worms. I don't know anything about those two things, but I'm intrigued by the possibility of being able to feed those things to chickens. A few parting points. How am I doing time-wise? Five minutes. Okay, I'll go real fast. If you have a small flock of chickens in your backyard, you can lay down cardboard or plywood and leave them there for several days and then when the chicken is standing close to it, lift it up and there's most certainly going to be crickets and worms under it. They'll love that. When you're mowing your pasture, you can leave little mohawk kind of strips and that'll drive all of the grasshoppers into those long skinny strips. They think they're very cleverly hiding but they're not and the chickens will find them. You can also do the same thing with grazing if you don't mow by moving your fence posts. If you have step-in fence posts for electric fencing, you can just move them so as to leave that strip of grass. Most importantly, I like to tell people to talk to other farmers, to call other organizations, find out what other people are doing or have done and then it might work the same or different but it's nice to get an idea of what you're getting into before a person sinks a lot of money into something. A couple of great places are like I said, the Alternative Farming System Center. There's an organization called ATRA. Have you guys heard about ATRA? There's a great organization called ATRA that has tons of publications. This one that I just brought up that is probably going to make everybody's head spin if they look at it long enough is from a pamphlet that I got from ATRA. It's a very comprehensive pamphlet. It's called Pasture Raised Nutrition and it has a lot of good stuff in it including management of the chickens but what I like to say is in looking at this, don't look at this as like this big overwhelming cloud of numbers. I have a couple of ants who just love to do complicated Sudoku projects or crossword puzzles. They love that like mental riddle and that's really what this is to animal farmers is we know what a chicken needs to be at peak production and laying. That part is known information but what we don't know is there's a million and one ways to get there. I've tried different things with black walnuts, with sunflower seeds. You can feed acorns to chickens if you can remove the tannins from them. All sorts of things are possible but just kind of keep that creativity open in your heart kind of our ability to follow our quirky excitements and that's where I think we'll really contribute to the world of sustainable agriculture. Say again? Matching a better grape product than wheat like amaranth or millet to the nutritional requirements. Yeah, I think that amaranth would be a wonderful thing to learn more about. There's a lot of things that would be I picked wheat because of its easiness to get. I don't know of a source where I can get cheap amaranth right now. That's an important thing. We're paying $10 a bushel, 60 pounds for wheat and I don't have if I were to get a bushel of amaranth seed it may be $50 or something. So that jump in price is kind of significant to the record keeping edge. Yes, that is a wonderful idea and if a person had land which they could try to grow something like that on that would be great too but a person would still I think need to weigh the benefit of feeding amaranth to chickens to if they can refine it being able to sell it to like an alternative grain market. I think that would be an important consideration.