Playing With Dirty Nasty Things

Ayden and I did something a little different yesterday. We made a house for our new bumper crop of home-grown chicken food: mealworms! Dirty nasty little creatures whom I refuse to pick up with my bare hands. Yes, the pretense of farmer is probably blown with that one unfortunate admission. Good thing she didn't put THAT in the newspaper article! As you can see, I even made my child hold the mealworm for the picture.Anyway, I am experimenting with ways to supplement my chickens' feed in a sustainable manner. It is hardly sustainable to pay Joe Blow to grow chicken food for me at outrageous prices, outrageous gas usage, and outrageous use of anti-sustainability farming methods. Some of you might be wondering what on earth I am talking about when I say "sustainable." Wikipedia defines it as,

"Sustainable agriculture refers to the ability of a farm to produce food indefinitely, without causing irreversible damage to ecosystem health. Two key issues are biophysical (the long-term effects of various practices on soil properties and processes essential for crop productivity) and socio-economic (the long-term ability of farmers to obtain inputs and manage resources such as labor)."

Make sense? A truly sustainable farm makes a perfectly circular cycle: it grows the food to feed the animals, who in turn plow the earth and fertilize the fields as they do so, so the farmer can plant the crops to feed his family and the animals... and the cycle continues. Thats how you truly turn a profit, because when you remove one of those elements, you leave a hole that then needs to be filled, either with commercial animal feed or by adding fertilizer and expending the crude oil to till the land by hand.

So back to the mealworms. If I can offset even 25% of my chickens feed by growing it myself in a very labor INexpensive manner, such as mealworms, then thats a wonderful thing. Just be glad I'm not doing maggots (...yet?). Yea, I said it: maggots. I can't move on here without giving a rundown of how easy THAT is! You take any container with a lid, drill holes in the top, sides, and bottom, place any ol' rotting animal carcass you might have lying around (roadkill, anyone? anyone?), hang it a few feet above the ground, and the flies come and "blow" it with eggs. That means they pump that sucker full as a tick with fly eggs. Then a few days later the eggs hatch, feed on the carcass, then escape through the holes in the bottom in an attempt to go to ground where they will turn into flies and go on to perpetuate their species. Well, when they fall through those holes there is not a soft earthy landing pad, but a sheet of, oh, lets say tin roofing. They fall onto this and get gobbled up by the chickens, who consider this fine dining at its best. Free nutritious chicken food, and you get the added benefit of wiping out an entire generation of flies. Now if I could just talk my husband into letting me pepper our land with rotting animal carcasses...

Now that everybody is sufficiently grossed out by maggots, I can move on to the mealworms and you'll probably like the idea of them so much better that you would not object to curling up on the couch with a mealworm and watching a good chick flick. I raised a small coffee can of mealworms for my iguana when I was in highschool, so I'm not overly riddled by anxiety at the undertaking. I took one of these nifty plastic gray boxes we found behind our favorite gas station, and Ayden and I drilled ventilation holes in the top and sides. I even let Ayden use the drill. Shhhh... don't tell Daddy! Then we poured about 1/2 inch of chicken feed in the bottom for worm food, 2 old potatoes cut in half for food and to add moisture, and then topped the whole concoction with two containers of mealworms purchased at the pet store.
I bought 500 regular mealworms and 100 giant mealworms for $12, roughly the cost of a bag of chicken feed. Unlike chicken feed, though, these little boogers will rapidly multiply. They will go from being these nasty little yellow segmented worms, to nasty little white alien looking cocoon things, to slightly less nasty looking beetles that will lay 500+ eggs which will then turn into 500+ nasty little yellow segmented worms. You get the picture. And what do I have to do? Make sure they have chicken feed, a piece of vegetable or fruit, and thats about it! I'll probably divide them up into a few different bins so that I have various generations ready for consumption.And the best part about it? When it comes time to feed the chickens I don't have to sort or handle the worms at all, just dump it all out and let the hens eat it all, worms, beetles, feed, and potato. Life is sweet. And yes, this is my sweet child posing with a mealworm. *full body shiver*