Is there a list for "sustainable poultry?" Or "appropriate meats?" I'd
be interested in a list like that.
I don't know much about probiotics. We don't use them. I like to think
that the aquatic plants, weeds, and reclaimed water have homeopathic
properties. Salatin uses acidophilus. Below is a rambling note on poultry
feeds. Two recipes from Joel Salatin's work, and our own spin on it.
Correct me if I'm wrong anyone, but most commercial poultry feed includes
meat, blood, and bone meal from slaughterhouses. We stopped using feeds
with renderings a couple of years ago.
At my school's facility, public concern regarding "Mad Cow Disease," or
more precisely, transmissible bovine spongiform encephalopathy, seems well
founded. TBSE is caused by a prion, also known as a "slow virus" or
virino, and passes from mammal to mammal through the food chain. When
mammal offal is inhaled or ingested, e.g. incorporating sheep scraps into
cow feeds, the prions infect new hosts. English rose gardeners, who use
bone meal as a soil amendment, seem to be contracting human spongiform
encephalopathy called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in inexplicably high
numbers. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was very rare, only found in human
cannibals until a few years ago. Prions withstand cooking, and feeding
mammal renderings which may contain prions to poultry may be unwise. If
the poultry can't pass it on, the dust from the feed could still infect
workers.
Animal protein that our chickens do not make themselves comes from fish and
insects. Fish offal can be pelletized for poultry feed by freezing fish
byproducts in the solar freezer until there's enough to merit a mill run.
Fish skin, bones, heads, and entrails can be run through a pelletizing mill
with alfalfa greens. The pressure of the mill actually cooks the
ingredients while pressing pellets, which slows decomposition and reduces
odors. Landscaping with perennials along the pens can act as insectories.
Unlucky insects from these borders become part of the poultry diet.