Kitchen gardens, from small to commercial scale, can be fertilized through chicken composting. This simple design builds fertility continuously by sourcing chickens to do the work they enjoy and do best: scratching, eating insects, and eating weed seeds. From this, we get eggs, meat, and fertility, and the plants grown using this method will produce at a high rate and provide nutrient dense fruits and vegetables.
Anyone can follow this system. Small urban versions on just 16 square meters can supply an average of one cubic meter a month, enough to fertilize 1000 square meters of garden. Larger systems, using 30 chickens, can produce a cubic meter of compost a every week, enough to keep ½ an acre rich and fertile. And, commercial systems, with 50 chickens, can account for two cubic meters of compost a week, sufficient for fertilizing a full acre of land.
The compost piles begin with bedding under the chicken roost. Every week 1/3 of a cubic meter of bedding is put under the chicken roost, where they manure it. At the end of the week, this bedding acts as the base of a compost pile. Atop it goes 1/3 of a cubic meter of large animal (cow, horse, sheep, goat, etc.) manure, and on top of that should be 1/3 of a cubic meter of food scraps and/or weeds from the garden.
In the coming week, the chickens will naturally disassemble this pile, spreading the outside as the inner core heats up. At the end of the week, the pile should be reassembled, putting the spread material at the core and the old core at the edges. A separate, new compost pile should be created with that week’s bedding. This process repeats, adding a new pile and turning the old ones, every week. After five weeks of this process, a pile is compost
For an urban “chicken tractor on steroids”, one compost pile is turned all week and another is contained in a cage. At the end of the week, the caged compost pile is set free, and the spread-out compost pile is stacked into the cage. This cycle repeats for six to eight weeks, providing two cubic meters of compost every other month for a total of 12 cubic meters of compost a year. The 16 square meters of chicken tractor can provide complete fertility for 1000 square meters (1/4 acre) of garden production, as well as provide 8-10 eggs a day.
To create these compost piles, lawn clippings and pulled weeds are added under the chicken roost for 6-8 weeks, where they are manured and begin the composting process. When ready, the bedding from beneath the roost is removed, stacked with manure and food scraps, and put through the composting cycle (one cubic meter in the cage and one being spread). The process of adding bedding beneath the roost begins again.
Within a commercial garden system, the 50-chicken tractor runs in the center of large garden beds. The beds can have polytunnels over them in cold climates, or they can have shade cloth over them in desert climates. Or, they can be covered with productive deciduous or evergreen vines on trellises. The gardens should be separated by two-meter paths, allowing for machinery, and these paths can be shaded with productive trellises, too. These systems will feed humanity, and they never lose fertility if the engine is kept running.
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Video Summary
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Geoff Lawton presents a highly efficient chicken composting system designed for both urban and commercial scales. By utilizing chickens to naturally turn and process organic matter, the system creates a continuous \"engine of fertility\" that produces nutrient-dense compost while providing eggs and meat, ensuring sustainable, high-yield food production.
Hi, Geoff Lawton here.
I'm in a large kitchen garden,
and this kitchen garden is fertilized
by a chicken composting system.
It's a system that works from small
to large commercial applications.
It's a design that builds fertility continuously.
It's guaranteed to work
because it's an engine of fertility
created by design by applying the action of chickens.
Now, you also get egg production,
and you can also have chicken production
because you can incubate the eggs
or your chickens can go broody.
But the main function is that the chickens
are put to work at what they do best,
which is continuously scratch
and continuously consume insects and seeds.
And most of those seeds are weed seeds, or they can be.
Now, they're not on the ground.
The fertility is on the ground,
and it's continuously producing.
It's producing at an extremely high rate
of both volume, potential diversity, and nutrient density.
So it's one of the best food production systems
that I've ever seen, and anybody can follow this system.
You can easily produce one cubic meter of compost
once a month with a small urban system
that only covers 16 square meters of ground.
On a commercial level,
you can produce one cubic meter a week
or up to two cubic meters a week on a larger system.
30 chickens will easily produce one cubic meter of compost
every week of the year.
That's 52 weeks on half an acre,
2,000 square meters of production,
or two cubic meters covering a whole acre of production.
If you follow the process carefully,
what you do is you design a system
where the chickens roost on top of organic matter,
mulch, straw, any of your basic
high-carbon mulch-type materials.
And it needs to be at least one-third of a cubic meter.
After one week of those chickens
manuring onto that material,
it's included in a compost pile as the base layer.
On top of that is an equal amount of animal manure.
That can be cow, horse, sheep, goat,
any of the large animals.
And then on top of that,
you have to gather or accumulate one-third of a meter
of food scraps or weeds from your garden,
or a combination of both.
They're put in a pile and the chickens are set to work.
They naturally go for that pile
and turn it over and spread it and disassemble it out,
leaving a hard core in the middle and a spread outer edge.
One week later, you reassemble that
with the spread material in the core
and the core on the outside,
so they naturally allow you an easy way
to turn it inside out.
You perform that every week
and make a new pile of materials every week.
You fill up your chicken pen with mulch.
You bring in more large animal manure
and food scraps and weeds.
Every week you make a new pile.
Five weeks later, just five turns,
five turns in 35 days,
you have one cubic meter of material coming out
at the other end of the commercial systems,
or two cubic meters if you have 50 chickens.
In the urban system, you just turn it over once a week,
from a cage to an open pile, from an open pile to a cage.
And then you have a system within six to eight weeks,
you have a cubic meter coming out.
And a week later, you have a second cubic meter.
12 cubic meters a year for an urban system.
You gotta see what 12 cubic meters
of high-quality fertilizer,
high-quality organic compost does to an urban garden.
A thousand square meters could easily be fertilized,
or much less would be even more fertile.
And then, if you go into a commercial system,
where you have one cubic meter every week
going on 2,000 square meters, half an acre,
or two cubic meters going on an acre,
the fertility is continuous.
The production is continuous.
It can be diverse,
and it's obviously very high in nutrition.
You're getting the highest production rates possible.
You can go up to 12 tons to the acre in production,
equivalent in a per square meter production ratio.
This system is guaranteed to feed humanity
on an urban and commercial level.
This is the back end of our urban chicken composting system.
And this door here lifts up
so that we can keep stacking material in.
It takes a few weeks to process our compost in the front end.
Now, if we keep stacking here,
we'll keep this full
because the chickens manure into this every night,
and it starts to break down a little bit.
And we want volume
that every time the lawn's mowed,
and we've got clippings in the catcher,
we can put extra in here.
It'll receive extra manure,
and it'll be better fertilizer
as an initial compost component.
Because this is our bulk material
to make our compost with to start off.
By the time our compost's finished,
we've already made a good mixture here.
Weeds out of the garden, they can all go in here.
And they'll start the process
because we've got six to eight weeks
of this material being continuously manured onto.
And then it starts to drop in volume
because it's already decomposing.
We can put a little bit more in.
Diversity makes it even better.
Then we open up the other side
when we're ready to make our new compost,
and we pull it out,
and we start to build our cage compost from the other side.
So here we have the compost that's being turned
all week by the chickens, literally dissembled.
And then we have the cage compost sitting here
processing for a week.
And we take the cage off
the one that's processing on its own,
and we position it in the empty space,
and we fill it up with the one
that the chickens have been scratching and dissembling.
We assemble it in the cage.
A week later, this one is dissembled,
and that's the spare space.
So we move the cage from here to here,
and we fill it up with the one
the chickens have been scratching.
And every week it changes.
Over six to seven, eight weeks sometimes,
then we get a completely processed two cubic meters.
So over a year, you get 12 cubic meters of compost
produced in just 16 square meters of chicken system.
And that's enough
to completely revolutionize urban gardening
so that every urban garden
that can allow 16 square meters of this process
gets completely fertilized every year
with 12 cubic meters of compost.
You can then grow just about anything.
If your garden's 1,000 square meters
or right down to 500, 400, 300, 200 square meters,
you'd be flying.
But you've also got between eight and 10 eggs
every single day of the year.
Can't get a better deal than that.
So here we are.
This is the system, and this is the system in trial.
Now, if you set a system up properly,
you can put frames right over the chickens
and chicken wire all over the top
and make sure they're 100% retained inside the system
because you don't want chickens
getting into that fertile garden.
They're not good in amongst that garden.
They're going to eat your seeds
and scratch through your vegetable beds.
So they want to be well retained.
And also at the top here,
you can put in a big door
enough that this door or gate, a tractor can go through.
A tractor can then push the material
from inside through to the first pile
and deliver new material in.
So you can push through from the top pile,
can get pushed to the second pile,
and new material can come in
and supply everything needed
to make a new pile at the top
and top up the chicken system with mulch.
At the bottom, you can have a large gate door
that a tractor can come in and take the pile number five,
the pile that's ready, out to the garden,
and you can pull down the fourth pile
into the fifth position.
That means only pile two and three
need to be turned by hand.
And that's where you need to keep your eye on it as well,
to make sure you've got a system
where the compost is processing really well
in the mid stages.
Everything else is about fertility
delivered straight to the garden
and nutrient density harvested every day of the year.
Okay, let's have a look at the main workers here
because the main workers are our chickens.
And they're really in action
because we've got a brand new pile.
Pile's just been made here.
It's been constructed with the roost material
that's been under the roost.
It's been there a week.
It's been manured and scratched already.
Then large animal manure
and then food scraps and weeds on top.
Now here in the foreground, we have grapes.
We have grapes going along the fence.
All the way through the system,
you can have grape vines over the footpaths.
Two meter wide footpaths
on either side of the main chicken system
and two meter wide footpaths in between each garden bed.
And they can have frames over as well
because in a cold climate,
you can have glass houses or polytunnels.
And you can lift the side of the windows up
or you can lift the polytunnel up in summer
to let more ventilation in.
In a really hot climate like a desert,
you can have a shade house over the top
and lift the sides up in winter.
You can have trellises over
and you can have a deciduous vine crop over.
You can have a perennial vine crop
for partial shade in the tropics.
You can choose the type of shade you have over the gardens
and you can trellis between over the footpaths
dividing the gardens with a vine crop.
So you can have perennial or annual vines
on all of the trellises that adds to production.
There's a few hundred individual vines
that can be planted inside the system.
So we've increased production again.
We've gone up into the vertical space
and the horizontal shade space.
And we've got our chickens
and we've got the diverse vegetables.
These systems will feed humanity
in the perimeter urban, urban systems
and even out on commercial farms.
This is an integrated system of production
that never ever loses fertility
if you keep the engine running.
And the engine itself is a productive
self-replicating engine.
You can breed your own chickens.
You can save your own seeds.
You can divide your own root propagules.
Let's have a look at how fertile these systems are.
This material has been processed in five weeks
and it's pretty good compost.
Now, 30 chickens produce one cubic metre
every single week of the year.
52 cubic metres.
If you have 50 birds and a slightly larger system,
you can produce two cubic metres every week of the year.
106 cubic metres of compost
going on the growing beds of one acre
is guaranteed to work.
It's guaranteed to give you permanent productivity
that you're always yielding
and you're always maintaining
full soil ecosystem population.
