Written by Chris Leslie
Smart gardening, material reuse, and other easy tricks incorporate your flock into an eco-friendly approach to animal husbandry.
Because of the negative effects of industrial farming on our ecosystems, opting out of this system and keeping your own chickens is an environmentally friendly poultry option. What breeds of chicken to keep, or whether to let them go free, is more or less neutral from an environmental perspective. However, the choices you make with and for your flock can help your small farm be as green as possible.
Fertilizer machinery
One of the easiest ways to make your chicken coop as eco-friendly as possible is to combine it with a vegetable garden. Not only will this allow you to reuse chicken droppings, but chicken droppings can also replace some of the worst chemicals used in gardening.
The first and foremost benefit of chickens in the garden is as non-stop fertilizer producers. Anyone who has tried to clean out a chicken coop will know that these birds do nothing all day long except produce high quality, nitrogen-rich compost.
By fertilizer, we refer, of course, to chicken poop, which can easily be composted and used as a non-toxic, nitrogen-rich fertilizer. This will not only save you money; It will also ensure that you are not adding to the potentially toxic waste that the commercial fertilizer industry creates.
To make the most effective compost, you can spread fresh feces in your garden, or you can compost it first, which has the added benefit of speeding up the composting process for whatever else you might have in the pile. Because it has such a high nitrogen content, you won’t need to spread it as heavily as you would with other manure-based fertilizers. You’ll also want to do some research on your plants before you get too stuck with chicken poop compost. Some common garden plants, such as tomatoes, can easily overeat nitrogen, and eventually all of your plants will suffer from having too much nitrogen if you overdo it. Fortunately, other common plants like squash, cabbage, and broccoli can strip nitrogen from the soil and thrive in nitrogen-rich chicken manure.
eating machines
Another great benefit that chickens can bring to the garden is that they are non-toxic, natural pest eaters and weed killers. Chickens love all kinds of plants, and especially love to eat insects and bugs, so they’ll be more than happy to rid your garden of unwanted intruders of both kinds.
You should know, however, that chickens are eating machines, not born gardeners. They will readily chew on beneficial worms and beetles such as grasshoppers and flies, and may even eat ripe tomatoes rather than the weeds around them. I certainly didn’t realize this the first time I let chickens into my garden, but they must be carefully controlled to make sure their presence is as beneficial as possible. There are many ways to do this, including fencing and human supervision, as well as managing their time in the garden so that they are never among the overripe and more tempting plants. Even if you decide not to let birds directly into your garden, they can still help you reduce waste by chewing on weeds or rotten vegetables you feed them.
Even with these challenges, using chickens in the garden is still an overall more environmentally friendly option than using many of the chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers on the market, which can generate toxic runoff and may be hazardous to human health.
Material reuse
One of the best, easiest, and cheapest ways to make your flock as environmentally friendly as possible is to reuse materials wherever you can. This can start even before you get your flock, by building a coop out of recycled or salvaged wood scraps. Old furniture and leftover lumber from other projects are great starting points for this. I’ve had a lot of luck asking local businesses for old pallets or other scrap lumber; They often have no other use for them and are happy to part with it.
Once you’ve finished building your coop, don’t throw away leftover wood, chicken wire, or hardware netting. All of this will come in handy down the line as you need to patch and repair the barn and perimeter fencing. Scrap wood can also be used to build a “jungle gym” or other structure that your birds can climb and explore, especially if they are not allowed to free range and need some extra exercise and enrichment.
Predator audit
Another great place to repurpose materials is to make deterrents and toys for your flock. Old CDs, broken mirrors, and shiny ribbons can be effective deterrents for birds of prey; Cardboard tubes of toilet paper or paper towels can become treats for seed rolls. Some keepers have even found that their flocks love to tap on their old children’s toy xylophone, so you never know what your flock might be entertaining!
Just make sure that anything you plan to leave in your coop or running area does not contain toxic paints or varnishes or small parts that birds might ingest or remove. If you’re not sure, feel free to skip DIY — there’s no Pinterest-worthy project out there for your girls.
Reduce wastage
For all the good recycling and reuse on the planet, the best thing of all is to reduce the amount of waste you generate in the first place. Fortunately, not only are there many easy ways to reduce the amount of waste your flock produces, but a backyard coop provides you with some great opportunities to reduce your family’s waste level, too!
One of the main ways to reduce waste (and save a lot of money) is to limit the amount of electricity you need to keep your birds comfortable. You can always lower the amount of electricity you use to heat and cool your coop. Reduce your heating requirements by making sure the barn is well insulated in the winter; A thorough inspection in the fall can help you find any places where drafts could get in, so you can plug them in with scraps of wood, rags, or other insulating material before the cold really hits. Ensuring that your coop is well ventilated in the summer will also reduce your need for electric fans or other cooling methods, as well as being better for the respiratory health of your flock.
using left-overs
Another major source of waste in most homes is food waste. Your chicken will be happy to help you solve this problem! While there are some human foods, such as alliums (onions and related plants), citrus plants, caffeine, and alcohol, that you should never feed your flock, there are plenty of foods you might never think they would eat, like bones and guts of fish, that they will actually love. Just be sure to look out for anything you give them, and not feed them anything processed, salty, or spicy. And remember that most of their nutrition should always come from foraging and suitable forage.
Raising chickens is a great way for everyday people to contribute to making the planet a better place to live in, and even following some of these suggestions can help make that decision more impactful.