There are many advantages form integrating poultry into your system.
Lets look at a few, chickens will eat your house hold scraps, scratch the soil aerating it in their search for insects, grubs and seeds,they also provide eggs meat and fertiliser. Unfortunately they don't care if it's your flower garden or were they mess up. So chickens need be managed and need to free range. There are a couple of methods that have been known to work.
First rolling cages
Cages wide enough to fit easily between rows of what ever you are growing, and 6-10 feet long open on the bottom. Nesting boxes and water container are placed at one end with a lid to make it easy to collect the eggs and fill the water. Wheels are mounted on the four corners. Four or five chooks in each of these, the cages are then moved daily down the rows, the chooks cleaning a different section each day. This can be improved with a sola panel and a geared down windshield wiper motor. Thus when the sun shines the cage moves it self down the rows very slowly, covering more area and eating insects, fertilising and aerating as it goes. This also keeps the chicken out of sensitive produce.
Where produce is not grown on the ground, orchards and tree crops chickens can free range and be fenced in, how ever they need to have nesting boxes and be caged at night to protect them from foxes, dingos, snakes ect. Good success has been had free ranging chickens in bananas were the chickens have been known to eat cane beetles a problem userly treated with toxic chemicals.
There has been extensive resurch over seas with caged chickens over fish ponds. The waste food and manure is droped into ponds to feed the fish and fretlise aquatic plants. Please check out your links page for a report on this resurch.
Ducks are not as damaging to ground crops and will sort carefully (fairly) through the plants seeking out those tasty bugs, ducks on the whole don't scratch so don't aerate and don't destroy young ground crops. Duck eggs are not as saleable as chicken eggs however they make the best cakes. There are also problems associated with ducks in aquaculture projects so the duck the pond should be separate from the fishponds.
Geese graze so they will keep the grass down and are also excellent watch dogs if any stranger human or animal comes around they make a lot of noise and will often chase away much larger animals humans included.
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