Chicken Story Part 2
“Wait,” says my friend Pam. “So far you haven’t told us how the chickens are helping with the horses.”
Every morning, one of the first chores is scattering chopped corn or scratch feed for the free range chickens. Our two-year-old granddaughter enjoys calling, “Chick chick!” and throwing out handfuls. Hens appear as if by magic. When an apprenticeship family comes, even the youngest and shyest child can tackle this task. If we forget, the hens follow us about, complaining, as we measure out the horses’ grain or feed the miniature dairy goats.
“The chickens’ job is to clean up.” I instruct the newbies. “Throw the corn where there is manure.” Walking around the barnyard and the fields, the children hunt the right spots to entice the chickens to get to work scratching and composting.
“How about on the manure pile?” asks one.
“Sure!” I lead the way to the long more-or-less straight line of manure, dumped wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load over the past year. We had started at the end near the barnyard and gradually extended toward the road. But now, the first section looks like someone set out potting soil. The chickens have done their job. As we have time we cart the composted loam to our children’s garden project.
All right, Pam concedes. So the chickens are good at helping compost. And horses produce lots of compost material. So what? Many horse owners don’t even garden. So why should they run out to get some free range chickens? What are they so good at helping with?
And the answer is . . . PARASITES!
It used to be, horse owners routinely dosed their horses every two months with a rotating smorgasbord of wormers : Fenbendazole to Moxidectin, Pyrantel Pamoate to Ivermectrin or Praziquantel, and back again to the Fenbendazole. After awhile, the small and large strongyles, ascarids and bot worms and even tapeworms began to adapt. Resistant strains developed. Once-effective treatments no longer worked. Horses died. Even worse, some horses passed on the new super-resistant worms to other equines. Savvy veterinarians began instructing their horse-owning clients to back off on the wormers and instead transform their horse keeping. Number One: Remove all manure from the pasture so that hatching parasites hovering in ambush don’t infect and re-infect your horses. I once saw a video which magnified and slowed down the action. The parasites actually lie in wait for the horse and basically leap at him when he gets close. Ugh and double ugh.
Wait, what? ALL the manure from EVERYwhere? Me with my little wheelbarrow and manure fork? Do you have any idea how much waste each horse produces? Multiplied by a herd, how much work and/or equipment it takes to clean up and remove all the manure from all the pastures? And besides, isn’t manure supposed to be good fertilizezr? I am supposed to remove every speck of manure, store it somewhere for a year, and then spread it again if I want to utilize the nutrients to replenish my pasture? There has got to be a better way.
Enter free range chickens. Combined with pasture rotation. And sunshine. We divide up our limited pasture into five areas. Give or take a few days, each week we turn the horses out of the present pasture and onto the next. Meanwhile, the chickens scratch and peck and eat bugs and worm eggs, cleaning up the parasites as they break up the manure. By the time the horses rotate back weeks later, the manure has for the most part been cleared of nasties and transformed into soil. Thanks to the chickens, I spend more of my time playing with our horses, teaching children-- and enjoying an abundance of rich farm eggs.