Chickens should never be fed just one type of food. They need variety in their diet. Using worms for chicken feed is a good idea as long as it isn't taken to excess.
Trying to feed your hens just on insects is a bad idea. Mostly through scratching in the ground. Chickens can dig quite big holes in the ground looking for tasty worms and insects. They also seem to have an innate ability to find compost piles and if you have ever tried to do any gardening or digging with chickens around you will notice they all stand around like hawks waiting to pounce as you turn the earth over.
So when I first started keeping chickens I learnt most of what I know from an ancient old keeper who had kept poultry for nearly 80 years. One of the things he had next to his hen house was a large wooden barrel kept about half full of compost. Every day he would add leaf litter and the veg scraps from his kitchen to the top. A few times a week he would turn over the top and throw a handful of worms to his chickens.
For him it was just one more way to supplement the hens diet with interesting nutritious food that was easy to produce for free. To produce earthworms for chickens all you need is a container to hold your compost, worms, food scraps and some kind of bedding. The bedding can be shredded newspaper, composted manure, fallen leaves, or just about any organic, compostable material. Try to avoid using too much highly acidic leaves like pine needles and oak leaves as the worms don't like them as much.
Not all hens will eat earthworms and the reason is normally quite simple. Hatchery reared birds and started pullets will normally have been raised in huge commercial brooders and then finished in sheds before being sold and the reason is they never had a mother hen to show them what to eat and sometimes have never been outside to scratch in the ground and find any.
They have only ever eaten pellets or chick food and it may take some time for them to learn and some may never eat worms. Its believed that earthworms often carry a series of other parasites inside of them that can be detrimental to the chickens' gut health. They instinctively know what is bad for them in many cases. Chickens can and will eat almost anything, but it isn't usually a good idea to let them do so.
Consuming earthworms can give chickens gape worms and intestinal parasites. Gapeworms are tiny parasites setting up shop in the trachea where they cause breathing difficulties and eventually death. Affected animals 'gape' for air when the load of worms in their throat gets too high and the windpipe ends up getting blocked. All chickens should be wormed with a propriety product according to the manufactures instructions on a regular basis.
I have found that the best land with the greatest number of worms and the largest ones is not arable land but cool, moist pastures. Worms also multiply in gardens as they seem to prefer the light dug soil. By going out with a light at night, in damp, warm, calm and mild weather, the worms may be seen in multitudes all over the walks and grass-plots.
Build log and leaf litter piles with plenty of organic matter and harvest from them every few weeks. Some birds like the lapwing and some others, stamp upon the ground with their feet, to cause the worms to come above ground.
There are actually worm charming championships in the UK where the best charmers compete to get worms out of the ground just by tapping on the soil. Avoid putting meat scraps, citrus, fats, dairy, or dog and cat feces into a compost pile. For a tidier approach, three pallets wired together with one open side make an ideal area for corralling compost, though some wily hens have learned to use the pallets as a jumping-off point to escape their pen.
If this happens, try confining the compost to an open-sided chicken-wire enclosure held up with T-posts within your chicken yard. For a quicker and more scientific approach — where the pile generates heat and rapidly breaks down to produce compost suitable for gardens — you will need a least a cubic yard of material enclosed on all four sides. Layered together, the pile should be moist but not soggy.
For obvious reasons, the compost heap must be accessible to the birds if the goal is for them to eat biota. It never hurts to sprinkle a calcium source, such as ground-up oyster shells, among the other materials in a compost pile — not necessarily for composting down but to give the hens a nutritional boost. Keep in mind some foods are toxic to chickens, notably avocadoes and dried beans, which should never be fed directly to poultry.
Besides, the birds are unlikely to eat the compost itself, though they may pick at various vegetable scraps. What chickens love is the insects and worms — the biota — attracted to the waste. This provides a high-protein snack as well as healthy habits such as scratching through the material. If you purchase something from this page, I may receive a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.
Earthworms are an excellent choice for fishing bait and duck feed, but what about for human consumption? In China, people have been eating earthworms for centuries. Even now, locals in China and Taiwan prepare unique dishes with the earthworm as the main ingredient.
For example, earthworm soup, a traditional delicacy, is still offered in some restaurants in the Guangdong province in China. Recently countries in Western Europe have begun to produce edible earthworm products like canned earthworms and earthworm biscuits. Within the last 30 years, earthworm culture has begun to replace fish meal and soybean meal as animal feed on a commercial scale due to the earthworm containing elevated levels of protein and other nutritional compounds. Like their human counterparts, not all chickens have the same taste in food.
However, in general, chickens love earthworms and other insects. They also love eating human foods like cabbage heads , yogurt, etc. If you are liberally feeding your chickens with the commercial feed, they may be less receptive to worms and other bugs and insects. Some hatchery-reared chickens are raised in commercial brooders and finished in sheds before being sold.
Also, worms are cold-blooded and breathe through their moist skin. I knew that even in my mild zone 7 in North Carolina an aboveground worm bin meant the worms would spend winter too cold to be active. And if the bin dried out in summer, compost production — and worm reproduction — would suffer.
Few things motivate me like a design problem. So I buried this problem; an in-ground worm bin was the way to go. The surrounding soil would keep it warmer in winter and cooler and damper in summer. Of course, I also wanted to keep the cost as low as possible.
I poked around the inventory behind my house. Behind the garage I found a scrap pile of pressure-treated posts and pickets from past fence projects, a tattered screen door, a used soaker hose and some wire-fencing scraps. The wheels in my brain were turning. It was also accessible for a wheelbarrow so I could shovel out prime compost once a year.
Additionally, it was just a few feet from a gallon rain barrel. Measure and Dig the Hole An area measuring roughly 3-by-6 to 4-byfeet and about 1 foot deep makes a worm bin that can swallow lots of organic waste and grow thousands of red worms.
I recommend using an old screen door for a lid, so you can: Create a bin that matches the dimensions of the door. Modify the bin to meet the dimensions of the door.
Or custom build a screen door that matches the dimensions of your bin.
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