Inspired by Karl Hammer’s Compost-Chicken Hybrid system in Vermont, we began creating a compost pile inside our portable bird pen using food scraps collected from local restaurants and grocery stores. The chickens not only get to eat the fresh veggie scraps we dump on top of the compost pile every other day, but once those are eaten, they dig into the pile to harvest all the insect decomposers and other goodies that the compost pile generates. For 70+ birds (chickens, ducks etc) we only had to supplement them with about a pound of feed daily, and could probably go grain free if we had to, using this system.