Keeping a poultry farm along side a food farm will have been the perfect combination for me. I have longed wanted to own a poultry farm for many reasons. In the same way farming and gardening makes one self sufficient in terms of having what to eat, keeping a poultry can also provide us with some daily supply of animal protein. Besides we often make use of cheaply gotten poultry droppings as manure for our farms.
Most of the times when there is no money to purchase inorganic fertilizer, these manures have been very helpful in our farms.
Yesterday I made a stop by at a friend's place to check in the poultry to see if I can get some manure for my veggies. I have got a portion of my garden that has now been completely harvested and before replanting any veggies there I would like to first add manual and prepare the land. A Viability treatment before planting like this often makes it easy for my veggies to germinate and grow well .
Upon reaching the farm, there we're barely few chickens and other birds. My friend has found it almost impossible to keep the birds because of the high price of poultry feeds. She was already running out of business.
This place used to be filled with birds of all categories as you can see and she manages to keep all of them including the rabbits, guinea fowl and Duck. This has been her business for a very long time before this year when everything went on the high side.
I couldn't get any manure here as the fee birds here are only sparingly feeding.
We also went through her own garden and hand planted. I could spot different fruit trees and vegetables within the enclosed area. The garden space has to be covered and kept away from the birds in the cage but I guess that the stubborn rabbits prefers to eat off all the planted potatoes.
I can't say why rabbits now preferred to eat the vegetables and potatoes in the garden compared to the feeds they were being giving in their cage. They have dubbed out everything and emptied the garden.
Maybe a little more caution and caging of these rabbits properly will have made the garden veggies survive. There are probably holes where these rabbits use to sneak out of their cage into the garden space
My friend is so lucky that that live in their own property and have enough space to do these things. Keeping a garden can be cheap since all that is required is to purchase some seeds for planting. But I can see that raising animals and birds can be really expensive especially when we do not have enough to feed them with.