014 – Chicken Presentation

In this podcast, Paul gives a presentation based on his raising chickens article. He talks about how he came about writing the article and how people reacted when he first released it.

First he goes over what bothers him about how people raise their chickens. He doesn’t like when people say we have to keep them in a cage or else they will ruin the garden. He says well you are probably keeping something from the chickens then. He also doesn’t like when chickens don’t see the sun and haven’t lived in a green area for years. He gets angry about vegetarian chickens as well.

He explains how he rates each entity or farm in a variety of factors. Some of them include: vegetation factor, money factor, polyculture factor, bug factor, poop factor, work factor, confinement factor. He first goes over the factory farm and where it falls on all of these scales and then talks about how the coop and run falls on the factors. Next he puts the Bullock brothers’ place onto the scale. Next he talks about the chicken tractor. He describes the actual structure of it and then the philosophy behind it. He then explains his problem with this strategy. Next he discusses truly free range chickens. He then goes into the Salatin’s pen.

Finally he gets into his ideal system, the paddock shift system. He discusses his experimental process and how he came upon his final design. Basically, he can give 9-10’s for each factor with this system.

The last thing Paul discusses before the audio craps out is how to deal with predators.

Relevant Threads

Respectful Chicken Harvest
Meat Chickens
Geoff Lawton’s Chicken Tractor on Steroids

Relevant Videos

Respectful Chicken Harvest Video Part 1
Respectful Chicken Harvest Video Part 2

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