- 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's 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 dissemble 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 from an urban system.
You've got to see what 12 cubic meters
of high quality fertilizer,
high quality organic compost, does to an urban garden.
1,000 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.
(rooster crowing) (birds chirping)
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.
Now every time the lawn's mowed
and we 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
'cause this is our bulk material
to make our compost wood to start off.
By the time our compost 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
'cause we've got six to eight weeks
of this material being continuously manured onto.
And if 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's 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'll be flying.
But you've also got between 8 and 10 eggs
every single day of the year.
Can't get a better deal than that.
(gentle music) (birds chirping)
So here we are.
This is the system and this is a 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 and 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
'cause 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 a 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 window.
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 footpath 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 100 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 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 seed,
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 meter
every single week of the year, 52 cubic meters.
If you have 50 birds and a slightly larger system,
you can produce two cubic meters every week of the year,
106 cubic meters of compost
going on the growing beds of one acre is guaranteed to work.
It's guaranteed to give you permanent productivity
how you're always yielding
and you're always maintaining
full soil ecosystem population.
(bright music)
(birds chirping)