On Fri, 25 Nov 2005 10:06:ginny wilken  wrote:

>On Friday, Nov 25, 2005, at 07:24 US/Pacific, Adrienne Smith wrote:
>
>> I've been buying organic eggs for years -- various brands -- I decided
>> to check into what the chicken feed consists of since virtually all
>> organic eggs are touted as High Omega 3 these days.

>> Does anyone know 1) what the normal diet of chickens should be; and
>> 2) any good egg brands available in nyc?
>>
>>
>
>Well, I'd certainly say that all of the above are NOT natural:) I feed
>my chickens a combination of some grain, no soy, lots of seeds, like
>millet, rape, sunflower, safflower - I give them a blend of pigeon mix
>and wild bird mix. In addition, they get tons of produce trim, green
>grass and clover, bugs and worms, lots of snails and slugs - and raw
>meat. This is the best I can do, living in town where I cannot
>free-range them openly. They are in a large pen, on dirt, and dig and
>move it around endlessly, foraging.
>
>I have never seen a brand of eggs anywhere that feeds what I would
>consider a prototypical chicken diet. I know they are certainly not
>vegetarians!
>
>ginny

Chickens were originally a jungle bird from SE Asia. Remember the island
of Bantam in Indonesia and you'll never forget that. Their natural food
is, therefore, greens and the prolific invertebrate life that can be found
by scratching in the leaf mould etc. As for grains, they are about as
natural for hens (UK), chickens (USA) chooks (Australia) as they are
for Homo sapiens.  They naturally live in groups of just four to six hens
with one rooster and keeping them in larger numbers causes stress
and unnatural behaviour like pecking the feathers from their fellows.

I'm like ginny, a city dweller, and I have three chooks, but I have more
space. Last autumn I brought in 250 bags of autumn leaves
and tossed them into the chook run. Over winter, the chooks scratched
around and found a steady supply of woodlice, earwigs, spiders,
mites and colembola. And like ginny, I feed mine meat - usually
fatty scraps which they adore. Also like ginny, I give them grain
over summer when the grasses have died back. Just now (late spring)
the grass seeds are fully formed but soft and green; the chooks
are already plucking those they like, not waiting for what Homo
sapiens understand as ripening.

But they also eat vertebrates - as I discovered just today: I was
shifting some logs and disturbed a young mouse that darted out
into the open. One of the chooks was as quick as the mouse and
grabbed it in its beak and shook the squealing animal till there
was no life left in it then fed on the remains. Well, I knew birds
were descended from dinosaurs, but I saw evidence of that today
in my own back yard.

Omega-3s get into the eggs via the plants the chooks eat (or,
secondarily, through invertebrates that themselves have eaten
plants containing them). It works the same for fish - they get
their omega-3s from plants or small marine life that have fed
on plants that produced the omega-3s.

You don't need a lot of land to keep chooks. Here's an image of
what's called a "chicken tractor":

http://www.greenerpastureschickens.com/backyard.html

It's not ideal in terms of giving the poultry a Paleo life, but it
has the potential to be far better than the unnatural lives
most chooks have on poultry farms.

Keith