Grasshoppers in Texas, I need help

A cashier at Home Depot told me her home and garden are pest free because she crushes moth balls (the old naphthalene type that smell really strong) and throws the crushed moth balls all over her yard. She also believes it repels fire ants and snakes. She said she buys them for one dollar per box at Walmart and many of the dollar stores.

We bought some chickens recently from a producer who had mothballs scattered everywhere on his property for the same reasons. He claimed the mothballs repelled snakes and the chickens wouldn't touch the mothballs when they free ranged.

Just a thought!

Ted

[Redbaron]

Originally Posted by SIP Gro-Tubs

What size chicken tractor were you going to make?

How many days would you leave it in place, before moving it?

How many chickens would you need for the size of chicken tractor you were going to make?

It sounds like a interesting concept.

Terry Layman

Well for my small scale "Red Baron Project" test trial I was going to use a 4X10 chicken tractor. Something like this.
Chicken tractor Moving it once a day between the rows. My rows are 30 feet long so in 3 days you move on to the next row. I was planning on only 10-20 hens and only for eggs. (small scale like that tends to make the family get attached and it would be a big fight to actually butcher a chicken. They don't even like it when I kill gophers! so eggs was supposed to be the compromise )

But for up-scaling it to commercial scale, I was planning on at least 10X12 and each row being 350 feet long. It takes 35 days on pasture to produce a broiler. 10X35 = 350. 75 birds per tractor. So one tractor per row. Something similar to this.
Pastured Poultry, broilers
BUT instead of side by side, the tractors would be spaced farther apart and crops raised between. As you may notice from the vid, one person can move 45,000 birds in one hour.


Then the mobile hen houses for eggs would hold 1,000 to 2,000 hens each and use electric fencing instead of chicken tractors. Something similar to this. PolyFace egglayers
and they follow the cattle.

I don't know how big chastom is. But some version large or small or even something in between should work to put a real hurting on the grasshopper infestation. Chickens gobble up bugs (and grass and weeds) like crazy. The more grasshoppers the less you have to use grain supplements! The chicken manure is great fertilizer. And you get multiple streams of income off the same land.

The whole trick to using chickens in an organic permaculture system is to creatively control when where and how long they stay on any particular part of the garden or farm.

Need to "plow"? Leave the chickens there long enough and their scratching will "plow" the soil bare. Need to reduce fly infestation for the cattle? Move the chickens onto a cattle paddock 3 days after the cows leave. The fly larvae in the cow manure will make a tasty treat for the chickens and in scratching the cow patties up you get a free manure spreader. So the cow patties don't kill the grass under them yet still fertilize the paddock. They will eat the grasshoppers too, making the pasture produce more grass for the cattle instead of the bugs. Need grasshopper control in your crop area? Move them quickly through, in a chicken tractor, between the rows. Need crop residue cleaned up after harvest? Move in the chickens similar to how they are moved in a paddock. There is even a permaculture method that uses chickens to start a successional species progression, ultimately ending up with a food forest after 10 years. The possibilities are endless, and all can be profitable and/or productive, done right.

[tlintx]

Chickens are a lot more work that you'd expect. And they can be ridiculously destructive, to the soil, to plants, to your fingers.

It's also wasteful to not eat them. Sentimentality only has a place on the farm if you can drive over to the grocery store when nature doesn't cooperate or someone doesn't feel like eating Mr. Chicken. I don't think I could bear to spend $4 a pound on something I have at home already!

[Redbaron]

Originally Posted by tlintx

Chickens are a lot more work that you'd expect. And they can be ridiculously destructive, to the soil, to plants, to your fingers.

It's also wasteful to not eat them. Sentimentality only has a place on the farm if you can drive over to the grocery store when nature doesn't cooperate or someone doesn't feel like eating Mr. Chicken. I don't think I could bear to spend $4 a pound on something I have at home already!

I have raised chickens before. You are absolutely correct. But you have to teach the boss gently or she makes life unbearable. Then all you are left with is finding a new boss that understands where their food comes from. I find it is better to at least try to train the boss you already have, and only find a new boss as a last resort.

PS Chickens are great for the soil if you know what to do with them. Again, it boils down to finding creative ways to work with them.

One large grasshopper made the fatal mistake of entering the chicken run today. I thought the chickens were rioting when they were only scrambling to beat each other to the tasty morsel. I'm not sure if our hens have ever seen a grasshopper before, but they sure knew what to do with it. There is no longer any question that chickens will eat large grasshoppers.

Our Wyandotte chickens are notorious for starting egg production slowly. Once they start, they keep on trucking. Our Wyandottes are now about twenty six weeks old and only one of six has started laying. I was giving them a pep talk today reminding them that I prefer fried chicken over fried eggs. My wife said that will not happen. It is a lot less expensive to buy eating chicken at the grocery store than feed them for a few months and then eat them. She is correct, but she is also kinda protective of her girls. Now if she would stop complaining about how slow the Wyandottes are to start producing eggs, we could both be happy. Fortunately our Red Star hens started producing at about twenty weeks of age.

Ted

[lycomania]

Originally Posted by tedln

I admire him because his "organic" ethics prevent him from taking any actions which violate his beliefs.
Ted

Perhaps you are using extremely polite language, but I have to say I feel sorry for anybody that is about to lose an entire crop based on beliefs learned in a school versus on the ground.

To each his own path through life. I guess it's also safe to say that somebody that loses an entire crop is going to learn an important lesson for the next season.

[Redbaron]

Originally Posted by lycomania

Perhaps you are using extremely polite language, but I have to say I feel sorry for anybody that is about to lose an entire crop based on beliefs learned in a school versus on the ground.

To each his own path through life. I guess it's also safe to say that somebody that loses an entire crop is going to learn an important lesson for the next season.

And that lesson is always have an emergency back up system you can live with.

I have a way to irrigate, yet I never use it in a normal year. Even in a drought year very seldom. I lost almost my entire crop of peppers to frost, but knew I could buy pepper plants from the nursery to get me by and I replanted some from seed. I have been growing organic for over 30 years, but I have some insecticide in the shed, just in case. I almost even used it last year on the squash bugs. ALMOST. I decided in last years case it wasn't worth it. I was promised stakes for staking my tomatoes, both wooden and t stakes, both people backed out last minute, I used bamboo instead, my 3rd back-up. I wanted to use chickens this year, but ended up using my "back up"...a mower and a neighbors manure.

Always have a back-up. 9 times out of 10 you won't even need it, if you have it. But that Murphy was a pretty smart fellow. The moment you don't have a back-up, that's when you'll need it. I learned that working on the ocean as a merchant marine engineer. On the ocean there is no "oops call someone". You better have some solution, even a temporary ugly bad solution, in your back pocket. And try gardening while working a 3 man rotation of 2 weeks at sea and 1 week home! It ain't easy. Unless you have already planned well in advance and built in your garden many "back-ups". Once you are on your back-up, you better be thinking of 2 more back-ups to back up your back-ups in case they fail! I am on my forth back-up on some of my crops this year! It was a nasty spring!

[chastom]

I think you need careful with chickens, chicken manure needs to be composted ,it has a high bacteria count ,and could cause problems if the manure comes in contact with small low growing leaf crops like spinach and greens and such.

[Redbaron]

Originally Posted by chastom

I think you need careful with chickens, chicken manure needs to be composted ,it has a high bacteria count ,and could cause problems if the manure comes in contact with small low growing leaf crops like spinach and greens and such.

Agreed. Careful is never a bad thing.

But keep in mind that a CAFO chicken and it's manure is a completely different thing. CAFO chicken manure is orders of magnitude more dangerous.

It is a completely different situation if a chicken runs through an area one day and is gone the next. I still wouldn't want to let the chickens directly in contact with greens. For one they'll eat them! And for two the manure could be harmful if in direct contact.

There is a principle called "ecosystem services". It is important that you use any animal in a way that doesn't exceed the capability of the land's ecosystem services. A CAFO does exceed that capability. So a beneficial part of the nutrient cycle becomes a toxic waste in a CAFO system. Most definitely you need to make sure if you integrate chickens into a cropping system, that you do not exceed that capability of your land, or your beneficial chicken manure will become like toxic waste too.

So no, you don't have to always compost chicken manure. The land can do it. BUT you do need to make sure it doesn't get too concentrated.

[SIP Gro-Tubs]

Originally Posted by Redbaron

Well for my small scale "Red Baron Project" test trial I was going to use a 4X10 chicken tractor. Something like this.
Chicken tractor Moving it once a day between the rows. My rows are 30 feet long so in 3 days you move on to the next row. I was planning on only 10-20 hens and only for eggs. (small scale like that tends to make the family get attached and it would be a big fight to actually butcher a chicken. They don't even like it when I kill gophers! so eggs was supposed to be the compromise ).

RedBaron

On an earlier date you stated you had 6 rows of test trial area, with 4' of grassed area between your different widths of rows covered with hay. But you also stated all of the hay covered rows wern't the same width.

So exaxtly how big is the test trial area?

To get to both sides of those 6 rows you would need 7 rows for your chickens, and 2 rows across the end, for complete controll of grasshoppers??

How many chicken tractors were you going to use in the test trial area at one time?

If the chickens in the tractor are confined to the inside of the tractor, how do they feed on the grasshoppers on the rest of the test trial area, and on the ones that are eating the plants, or even next to the chicken tractor?

When moving the tractor, just by walking backwards will scatter most all of the grasshoppers away from were the tractor will come to rest for that day. Even walking thru a pasture with what "Chastom is referring to", they will scatter out of your way.

I, understand what Chastom is facing, there are literaly millions of this type of grasshopper per acre.

I, went thru the same situation in 1994, 95. But in the spring of 95, with ground monitoring for when they first start emerging from underground. We, had 100 lbs of Nolo bait dropped by a bi-plane crop duster company, over a 100 acres just so we could have a big enough buffer zone for a 10 acre growing site.

We do this every 5 years just to keep them in checkmate.

Terry Layman

[jillybeantx]

The grasshoppers pushed me over the edge two weeks ago and I brought home a dozen 6 week old chicks from the feed store. I know that the chickens love tomatoes and will taste about everything else, so I put up chicken wire fencing all around my garden to keep the chicks out. The grasshoppers were so thick in the garden area that last night I changed the fencing to keep the chicks IN the garden. I'd rather have my chickens eat what I'm growing than the blasted grasshoppers. Hopefully next year will be better since the chickens will be in place and free ranging when the grasshoppers first appear. I'm going to try some of these other ideas around the house where the chickens aren't.

[dawn of health]

Thank you for this information. I will pass it on to a friend that is being over ran by grass hoppers this year in biblical proportions . I am blessed to say they haven't been to my place yet and don't know what I did to prevent them. I did have a problem a few years back and I put weed prevention cloth over the crops to save them and this seem to work well though it made it difficult to pick the tomatoes and other veggies when they were ripe.
Dawn of Health

[Redbaron]

Well now very interesting points and questions. My trial area has 17 rows 30 feet long each with 4 feet of grass between the mulched parts, and an 8 foot wide staging/landing area. But I don't have chickens! I designed it for chickens, but I ran into budget problems. The total area mulched is ~1,140 sq feet with ~2,040 sq feet still in grass between the rows. That's a total of ~ 3,180 sq feet of "garden trial" + 848 sq feet of "grassed staging area". That grassed area (2888 sq feet) was planned for forage. (with my yard as back up if I guessed too high with the chickens, and the mower as back up if I guessed too low) But you know about best laid plans of mice and men!

The idea is that the chicken tractors can be used between rows and the staging areas can be used for more of a free range with portable electric feathernet fencing. Electric NettingIf you use a multi purpose chicken tractor with a door, you can use which ever is more appropriate under the circumstances.

And as jillybeantx mentioned. The time to do all that is BEFORE the grasshoppers get to crisis plague proportions. Yes the grasshoppers will move around. You'll never get em all. But the chickens will still catch a lot. If they have been there all along, the grasshoppers should be kept to normal manageable levels that won't destroy a garden.

@jillybeantx Best bet is to move those chicks around best you can. Don't keep them inside too long. They will go for the bugs first! I don't know if you set up your garden for integration with chickens this year. But next year plan ahead and maybe you can have the best of both.

[tlintx]

I wish we could have chickens here. Nothing but "traditional pets" allowed.

Do be careful, by the way, if kept in the same area (and it can be a big area, ~15 chickens can ravage a 30x30 run in no time) for too long, the ground will get barren. MIght be useful to set up a small area as a dust bath for them beforehand, although I've never tried that. And wear gloves, chicken poop is nasty.

Are you going for eggs?

I wonder if ducks or geese would eat grasshoppers. Hmmm... those are traditional pets, right?

[SIP Gro-Tubs]

Originally Posted by tlintx

I wish we could have chickens here. Nothing but "traditional pets" allowed.

Do be careful, by the way, if kept in the same area (and it can be a big area, ~15 chickens can ravage a 30x30 run in no time) for too long, the ground will get barren. MIght be useful to set up a small area as a dust bath for them beforehand, although I've never tried that. And wear gloves, chicken poop is nasty.

Are you going for eggs?

I wonder if ducks or geese would eat grasshoppers. Hmmm... those are traditional pets, right?

There is a geese species that is called "Weeder Geese" all they will eat is weeds, not your vege's.
Metzer Farms Using Weeder Geese to Improve Your Land

www.metzerfarms.com/usingweedergeese.cfm‎



Weeder geese have been used for years to control unwanted vegetation in commercial crops, waterways and lawns. They have been most extensively utilized in ...An acre of strawberries in the Northwest, that is cultivated between rows, will require a minimum of 6 geese.

The next stop for them "Peking Duck" mmmmmmmmm,

Terry