So, having no money to work with we had to come up with a strategy for feeding the chickens.
We're able to get large bags of oatmeal using food stamps so they have eaten mostly that. (Before you get your panties in a bunch... you can buy food plants with food stamps so i figure food for my food animals is also fair game, and we're also left with absolutely no other choice.) Oatmeal is about 11-13% protein. That's a fair average for about any grain. They can survive on that but it's too little protein for them to really thrive.
This is where Mealworms come in. Mealworms are one of the things we intend on raising here to help supplement the extra protein that our chickens need.
We tried this last year as well, using oatmeal as feed for the worms as well. It was going well until we had some pretty bad mite issues. This year I've learned what to do about mites in your needlework trays. It's as simple using split pea flour in a 10% mix with the grain your feeding.
We were able to get a ton of live worms, beetles and a full, 50lb, bag of wheat bean for free off of Craigslist to get us started. They even threw in 50lb of layer feed!
This was a real blessing as it gave us a great start!
We still haven't raised enough to start feeding them but here's what we've done so far.
We built this rack out of scrap lumber:
I had to buy the tubs. These are just small dish tubs. I got them at Dollar Tree for $1.25 each. I got 40 of them last year.
This rack holds 36 tubs. I built it for 0 money. Just old 2x4s (some from pallets, some from scrap lumber I find locally on occasion) and a circular saw. Is ugly as hell and works like a charm :).
From the beetles we got for free we've been able to make 5 new trays of eggs. (One per week)
We've also started aging pupae into new beetles. I can give more details about all this if anyone wants it.
Once we've finally got a great succession going well be able to stay feeding these to the chickens. For now they are still only on grain.
I'll continue to update our progress with mealworms as it goes. For now it's working great and we are expanding every week with new eggs and pupae.
by Michael David
Co-founder of #thealliance and loyal since before the egg.
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