Chickens are a great addition to a homestead for many reasons. Primarily people think of chickens as a source of eggs and meat, but they can do so much more than that if you let them! While the food sources they provide are great, chickens can also act as natural pest control on your homestead and work far more efficiently than other methods. All of this also cuts down on the feed costs for your animals making it not just practical, but also economical!
Chickens in The Garden
While you don’t necessarily want to put hungry chickens in with your vegetables when they are small, you may want to let your chickens into your garden from time to time to eat bugs. Chickens will eat grasshoppers, ticks, aphids, and just about any other garden pest that may be crawling around. When you think about all the time you would need to spend hunting down and removing these pests, it makes sense that chickens can easily be a time save.
Chickens will eat what they want, so if you let them into an immature garden they’re eat the young plants. They can still eat your plants when they are older too, but this is easily avoided by keeping your chickens well fed with a good green run of grass or other plants. When you let chickens into your garden when they have had all they can eat of greens, they will instead prefer to look for insects and protein sources they might have picked clean from other areas.
While this might seem a bit suspect at first, trying it once is all the proof you’ll need. Chickens typically eat around 1/4 pound of food a day, but when insects are present in large quantities the birds will gorge themselves. It is said that the average chicken can eat up to 70 grasshoppers in a day and some estimate that they can eat nearly 2 lbs of insects in a single go (though this seems an overestimate to us!). A small group of chickens can completely clear a small garden area of pests in a matter of hours.
Just remember, when letting chickens into your garden, keep an eye on them to ensure they don’t get hungry for your corps as well.
Chickens In Your Lawn
If rotated properly chickens can help cut your grass. If left for too long in too small an area they will trim it down to the dirt. On the other side of this, if you let them graze too large an area, they won’t make much of a dent.
When you get this balancing act right you end up with a well cleared and trimmed patch of grass. Each chicken needs about 250 square feet for this to work out. While the grass cutting benefits are nice the real benefit that you’ll notice is that the chickens will clear your lawn of any harmful pests. Chickens will dig up lawn grubs, eat ticks, and totally knock down populations of biting insects.
The only downside here is that your lawn will be well fertilized with chicken manure. A small price to pay to reduce the pests, but you won’t want to roll around in that grass!
The Perfect Pest Patrol
A small flock of chickens kept well can be a life saver for your garden. You’ll have to keep an eye on them and can’t just free range your birds indefinitely, but it’s a small trouble to watch your birds in return for the great work they can do for you. We hope this helps clue you in that chickens are more than just food producers, they’re valuable partners in your homestead who can even help you with the chores!