Feeding Chicken food scraps are not only good for the environment, but it is very beneficial for the chicken’s nutrition as well. Certain foods are proven to help speed up egg fertilization! Watermelon and other fruits carry Vitamins and antioxidants! Corn can help boost a chicken metabolism as well as regulate their body temperature! Any greens are a great treat for our feathered friends, they are full of vitamins and minerals that will help keep happy and healthy chickens!
Food Waste
Did you know that 14.7 million tons of food waste happen in the United States? The Land Fills are overflowing, but we can all take a step forward and prevent this! So how can you help? By composting or in this case by putting those scraps to good use! We can all come together and spread this awareness on how food waste affects our environment, also affects climate change. Landfills over time will decompose and release methane emissions. A greenhouse gas that is even more potent than carbon dioxide (Deer, 2022).
Community Giving Back
Community awareness of food waste is an important step for the future. By informing the community of where their scraps actually end up after they throw them in the garbage, we can create a ripple effect for the better. By feeding natural food waste to the chickens, we are eliminating the amount of waste that ends up in landfills as a community as well as giving back to the chickens that support us.
Why you should help?
By donating your scraps, you are helping to keep your food waste out of landfills and repurposing them for a greater good. We are feeding the food waste to chickens, but you can still help in other smaller ways at home by being conscious about what you are throwing away and even giving food scraps to other animals if it is safe for them to eat.
The Helpful Hand
We decided on the name “Helpful Hand” because the hand provides a natural symbol of generosity and vulnerability that brings out the themes that we wanted to express through our art piece. The idea of the Helpful Hand was to express gratitude and celebration for the chickens and their role in the environment as well as protecting their habitat. By making the hand out of food that the chickens could eat, we are not leaving a trace on the environment because we are building the sculpture to be completely eaten and essentially giving back to the chickens without leaving a footprint.
What makes up the Helping Hand?
The foundation of the Helping Hand is chicken wire, which the chickens are already familiar with being around so it will not disturb their natural habitat. The filling within the palm is lettuce scraps with larger lettuce leaves covering the chicken wire for aesthetic purposes and the fingers were constructed from corn on the cob fixed onto the base with wooden dowels. We decided on having the hand hold a apple. A natural bowl made out of half of a honeydew melon filled with food waste collected from the community as apart of the main structure for the chickens to eat. Some of the scraps that chickens are able to eat consist of other leafy greens, fruit peels (except for citrus) and other vegetable scraps.
