Making chicken scratch

When you are just making scratch (not their main source of food) you can mix just about any grains together and they will like it.  I have found ours particularly like some sunflower seeds, raisins, rice and peanuts.  

   Basic scratch feed is corn, wheat and oats.  Other grains added as available or desired.  Back in the days of family farms, every farm grew those three grains.  They fueled the farm both the animals and people.  My grandfather mixed those to make his scratch feed, he also used mash from the local mill.  But stretching out the cost of the eggs by growing his own was important in making it go.  I remember when I was 5 or 6 helping him mix it up.  Dumping the grain on the floor and using the grain shovel to mix it, then shoveling it in the barrels.  I'm sure he enjoyed me trying to lift the shovelful into a barrel nearly as tall as I was.  Anyhow back to the present.

   I mix my basic, with those three grains.  Equal parts in the summer and two parts corn in winter.  Since I grow wheat and rye as a cover crop in my garden I throw in a half part rye as well.  The thing I did that I don't like is I bought cracked corn without thinking last year. I do not like the dust that disappears into the ground when I throw it out for them.  Adult chickens can handle whole grains, including corn in their gizzard.  I'm not using cracked or chopped grain unless someone gives it to me.  When the chickens eat the whole grain, they are using all of the grain I paid for.  Plus whole grains keep better.

Mine love their scratch cracked. We put corn, oats, and millet in it...I sometimes add some black oil sunflower seeds or whatever I have available from what we grow or I find a great deal on. I will also add the balck seed sunflower seeds have better nutritional feed value than other varieties of sunflower seeds...atleast that is what I have found out from internet and various other sources.

I was looking into making my own feed for the pullets. From my literary research, I was seeing a lot of similarity between these home formulas and bird seed.  True there are vitamins and minerals that are not present in bird seed, but the whole grains used in bird seed are also milled and used in commercial poultry feeds and many of the home formulations.

For a substitute scracth feed, I feed bird seed to my pullets as a treat and they come running when I go into the yard. The bird seed is a whole grain which means that none of the nutrional value will degrade over time, as it would with cracked corn, rolled oats and other prepared grains...as long as the bird seed is stored properly.

The bird seed also contains grit.