• Interesting. I have been feeding my chickens ground flax seed and pecans (there are a lot of pecan orchards in the area so it's easy to get old nuts which I just smash and let the chickens pick through them). I don't have any quantitative data but I'm hopeful it produces healthier eggs. At minimum it produces very tasty eggs.
    •   If one in three households had enough chickens to eat your kitchen scraps, there would not be an egg industry in the United States. It would be completely non-essential. -- https://x.com/JoelSalatin/status/1984757129463337063
      
      I'm thinking of taking him up on it.
      • That’s sort of a tautology. If enough non-industrial agents had anything, there would not be an industry. Says nothing about whether that would be desirable or efficient to live among millions of residential chickens.
        • It's allowed in our CC&Rs, where pigs are not, because it causes very little nuisance (without roosters).
          • In the right place and time, rooster chicks would make excellent invasive python bait. Just a thought.
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    • I have noticed (with my intergenerational, perpetual flock) that different behaviors come and go. There seems to be a current one where if I feed them mixed scratch grains then when it's rainy they eat the corn and leave the wheat / barley to sprout before eating. I wish they wouldn't, it attracts rats!
  • This is great, but we must be quite close to a decent synthetic milk by now? It's just water, fats, lactose (possibly optional) and some proteins - no structure to worry about. It would cut out a lot of unnecessary steps.