Let’s talk farming PRODUCING BROWN EGGS THE INEXPENSIVE METHOD By Manny Piñol

Backyard chicken raising to produce brown eggs, or white eggs, from free-ranged hens has always been considered a losing farming activity.

The reason mainly is the prohibitive cost of feeds as measured against the number of eggs harvested on a daily basis.

You see, the ordinary native or mongrel chicken found in the countryside today could only produce about 80-100 eggs a year.

Sold in the market for P10 per egg, the most that a native hen could earn a farmer is P1,000 a year.

Now, if the farmer uses commercial feeds for his backyard chicken which consumes 50 grams of feeds daily, he would be spending about P432 for the feeds of each hen on a year basis.

That’s not appealing considering that the farmer will have to contend with poultry diseases, mortality and the cost of transport to the market.

In my farm now in Kidapawan City, we are trying to rediscover the traditional methods of raising chicken using indigenous feed materials to supplement what the hens need for laying.

Following the example of ambulant duck raisers who to one ricefield after another to allow their ducks to feed on palay chaffs left in the fields after threshing, I have asked my farm hands to gather the palay chaffs, locally called “uron-uron,” which are thrown into the yards.

The chicken love to scratch and pick out the chaffs with little grains inside which they eat lustily.

There’s one thing organic brown egg producers should be reminded of: if you would like to produce organic brown eggs, you will have to make sure that your palay chaffs or “uron-uron” comes from rice farmers who practice organic farming.

This is one feed material which is readily available and free which a backyard chicken farmer could use in his brown egg production.

As we go along, I will post more information on what other indigenous feed materials are available for the backyard chicken raiser.

Since I have just adopted this practice in my farm, I will also update followers of this page if there would be remarkable improvement in the egg laying of the hens who are given feed supplements using indigenous feed materials.

https://fb.watch/aK80SajI-e/