Pigs, Taro and Chickens

Hi Maggie,

 ;) Welcome. And congrats for escaping the rat race. Woo hoo! 
 I'm not up in your climate but I just wanted to make sure someone got back to you. Have you gotten any responses?

-Ivy

Interesting comment posted on punaweb (by Jerry Carr) about our local farmers' need to "think out of the box" and grow their own chicken feed. In Jerry's own words:

"...The necessity of shipping in the feed was the piece of the economic picture that did in the Big Island commercial egg operations. It apparently cost more to ship the bulky feed than it costs to ship the eggs, even though the eggs are refrigerated. Nobody in Hawaii grows grain on a significant scale to my knowledge, and grain is the main base of typical commercial chicken feed. Grain is not, however, the only thing that chickens will eat, and it surprises me that no farmer, even on a relatively small scale, has thought outside the box and tried growing other feed crops for chickens. There are probably reasons, though.

It is possible to grow things that chickens will eat in a home vegetable garden, and it is also possible to let them forage if there is enough space and security from dogs, etc. I trade leaf trimmings, spent veggie plants, and sub-par produce from my garden to a neighbor lady for fresh eggs. Her chickens happily gobble up my offerings, and we are happy with our arrangement."

Refresh my memory, are any forum members growing their own chicken feed crops?

Linette is working on it, amirite? And I think Drwotty lets his free range.
It's def possible. 

At our egg farm in Ahualoa, we have studied how to grow chicken feed in Hawaii for a few years.  Everything learned is in the notes:
  http://ahualoa.net/chickens/

Summary: There is no single answer; Hawaii is diverse, so different things will work in different climates/elevations.  Nearly all grains won't work on any large scale; sorghum is a possible exception.  At lower elevations, papaya and coconut, if sufficient labor is available.  If near a restaurant or similar, then food waste is a major resource.  Azolla can help if you have a water body.  Local starches (taro, sweet potato, ulu) only make sense if, again, labor is abundant; there is a lot of digging and cooking involved in feeding a large number of chickens.

Keep in mind that the last large egg farm to give up, on Kawaihae Road, had "only" 40,000 chickens.  Where we live at 2500', we did not find any solution to feed 40 birds locally/sustainably, let along 40,000.

If chickens have enough free range pasture/yard/space, they can pretty much self feed.  However, you won't get the big egg production like the commercial operations have.  That may not be all bad, though, since with zero feed input, then all eggs - even a reduced amount per chicken - are basically free.  The problems with free range chickens is generally free range dogs and mongoose.  They will also free range into your newly planted garden if they can.

The dairy near us is growing feed corn for their cows.  They have acres of corn growing, but I don't think they would sell any corn to folks for chicken feed.

Chickens are very opportunistic feeders.  They eat bugs, slugs, frogs, baby mice, rice, grains, grass, etc.  Ours eat most everything although they don't seem to be fond of citrus or coffee berry.

Nearly all grains won't work on any large scale; sorghum is a possible exception. 

-bdiscoe

bdiscoe, does the lack of Hawaiian grain cultivation viability stem from economics (cost of land, equipment, labor, inputs, et cetera versus sale prices of grains) or is it rooted in the basic biology of the cultivars themselves (growing conditions needed in terms of soil types, moisture/dryness, light/dark photoperiods, vulnerability to pathogens, and so on)?

According to an article I read the Waikiki district on Oahu was once the best rice-growing area in the islands; Hawaii exported grain (rice) to the mainland until legislation aimed at discouraging inexpensive Asian labor adversely changed the economics of rice cultivation.

It's both - economics AND biology.  For example, rice was once grown in Waipio valley.  I had assumed that it stopped in the 1940s-1950s because it became vastly cheaper to import rice than grow it here.  But i was told that no, it was some blight or fungus that ended the cultivation.

It's entirely (technically) possible that Waikiki could become a rice production area again; one simply has to remove the buildings, restore the fields, then use the fresh water that a depopulated Honolulu won't be needing anymore to keep the rice fields fresh.  (BTW taro lo'i are similar in needing fresh water; problems develop in stagnant water.)

If you go back far enough, there are stories of wheat grown around 1850 on Maui on the saddle - one of the few places in Hawaii that is neither too wet nor too dry - so much that they exported to San Francisco during the gold rush.

But, this is mostly covered in my notes (you did read them, right? :) )  If curious for more detail, i highly recommend the Brewbaker UH paper on Corn (linked from the notes.)

As chooks (and my notes) point out, one can dodge most of the economic and agricultural challenges if one accepts small household flocks of  possibly scrawny, low-output chickens.  After all, that's what works through the entire third world.

Our 30 chickens are free range. We feed them bananas and old coconut meat. they need some greens, and banana greens are a favorite of our chickens. Our human food waste gets full of larvae after a few days, and when I dump it the chickens dig out all the good stuff. For a few years, I chopped up captured mongoose, which I affectionately called my sushi bar for chickens. They won't touch a whole mongoose, but they love it diced up.

Darn!  I just buried a perfectly good mongoose.  Oh wellos, the chickens can have the next one.

I think, as Ben mentioned obliquely, many of our agricultural difficulties are because we are trying to emulate the wrong folks.  Third world folks manage to do things without a lot of expensive imported foreign things, so frequently we can solve today's problems with yesterday's technology by following their example.  Jay's rocket stove, the wood gasifier and even our taro patches are all "old world" tech and it works great.

We can improve on the old world tech here and there.  Next time I build a trebuchet, I'm planning on using a carbon fiber pole.  That should hopefully not break like the last bamboo one did.

I'll go reread your notes again, Ben, it's been about a year or so since I read them last.  Is there a source for sorghum seed around here?  Isn't that also called "milo"?  I've got some area which needs some ground cover, I may try a cover crop of sorghum, harvest the grains and put the greens into compost, green manure or rabbit feed.

At one point the Easter Islanders came to rely heavily on chickens, after deforestation led to a loss of materials for oceangoing canoes for fishing.  Since we know Easter Island was stretched to the limit for food I would really like to know how they fed their chickens.  They certainly weren't importing grain.  If their chickens could produce eggs or surplus birds for food, surely we here in modern Hawaii could do as well.

An interesting tidbit; while they had their canoes, Easter Islanders ate more porpoise than fish!

Some one said they fed the chickens dog food. I was thinking it mite cost less than grain. What type of dog food and out of the sack or do something to it? I free range ours part time, but with all the "free range dogs" around I want to be near by. Would chickens eat cut up free range dog?

The local Wal-Mart here in Waipahu (Oahu) has 40 lb bags of chicken food.  Surprised me since we are practically in the city here, but not as much as the bags of wood-pellets surprised me.