Homemade feed questions?

Its getting close to bringing the girls out to their new home and I am wanting to give them the best food that I can provide them. Since I am a very hands on person and enjoy making food from scratch, I want to make my own organic homemade chicken feed. I have read many recipes and they are all very similar, yet one thing that varies is a dry feed or fermented feed.

Is there a nutritional value between DF and FF? If I go with FF would I still be able to use custom made feeder or will it begin to mold and turn bad from being wet?

You might want to look at this.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/4477/everyone-post-your-best-homemade-chicken-feed-recipes

I put my FF in a plastic piece of gutter but only put out as much as they'll eat in a day. That's the drawback to FF. You can't bulk feed.
Fermenting prevents the food from going bad but if it sits out for days it will still go bad.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/645057/fermented-feeds-anyone-using-them

I understand wanting to produce a better feed but the economy of scale works against you. It will be MUCH more expensive to produce your own and still get the right balance of micro-nutrients, fats, amino acids, vitamins and minerals than buying a bag of organic feed.

ChickenCanoe said:

You might want to look at this.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/4477/everyone-post-your-best-homemade-chicken-feed-recipes

I put my FF in a plastic piece of gutter but only put out as much as they'll eat in a day. That's the drawback to FF. You can't bulk feed.
Fermenting prevents the food from going bad but if it sits out for days it will still go bad.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/645057/fermented-feeds-anyone-using-them

I understand wanting to produce a better feed but the economy of scale works against you. It will be MUCH more expensive to produce your own and still get the right balance of micro-nutrients, fats, amino acids, vitamins and minerals than buying a bag of organic feed.

Click to expand...

Not everyone is about cost first. I make my own feed for my chickens, and I make my dogs' food as well. It's a little more expensive to feed the chickens home made feed (WAY more expensive to make dog food!) but it is worth it to me. I don't like feeding any of my animals processed, cooked to death food. Not to mention that after working in the pet food industry, I don't trust feed companies one bit!

I disagree with the expense issue being WAY more going the homemade route. I make my own feed with bulk ingredients purchased from Azure Standard, they are all non-GMO and mostly organic. I whipped up an excel spreadsheet to figure out my cost/lb and I come in fairly close to what I can find online and about the same as a 10lb of feed from my local TSC (only local option for buying feed for me) which doesn't carry any Organic variety in their store. Due to storage capacity issues, I don't buy in the largest quantities available, and therefore I could cut my cost down even further if I bought the ingredients in larger bags.

Beyond that, I have not tried to do the math on the difference in consumption rates of the whole grain feed vs pellets/crumble. For my girls, there is an undeniable difference though. They go through the pellets/crumble MUCH faster than the same weight in whole grain feed. That coupled with the fact that I know *exactly* what goes into their feed, makes it worth my time and effort for me and my girls.

That's my point. A person with a few chickens is buying 50 pound bags of grain at best. The feed company is buying by the trainload and micro nutrients by the ton.

Furthermore, an appropriate balance of amino acids is essential. That requires animal protein or a good understanding of the proper mix of grains and legumes to get all the amino acids that are essential to chickens.

Grains and Legumes won't have micro-nutrients like selenium and copper or vitamins like K, D3, etc.. There may be the possibility of getting a general supplement with those things. Some vitamins are water soluble and some are fat soluble which is another mixing and preservation issue.

Fat and salt levels are important considerations as well.

If one is just mixing grains and seeds, it won't be long before there are nutritional deficiencies unless their chickens have year round access to pristine pasture with lots of bugs and other animal protein sources.

ETA
If one searches hard enough, they can find an organic complete feed at a cost less than they can mix themselves and without the hassle.
I use an organic 16% grower as my base feed for all birds. It's under $22 for a 50 lb. bag. It took me a long time to find it. For chicks and molting birds, I add fishmeal to up the protein. A 10:1 ratio gives me 20% protein.

ChickenCanoe said:

That's my point. A person with a few chickens is buying 50 pound bags of grain at best. The feed company is buying by the trainload and micro nutrients by the ton.

Furthermore, an appropriate balance of amino acids is essential. That requires animal protein or a good understanding of the proper mix of grains and legumes to get all the amino acids that are essential to chickens.

Grains and Legumes won't have micro-nutrients like selenium and copper or vitamins like K, D3, etc.. There may be the possibility of getting a general supplement with those things. Some vitamins are water soluble and some are fat soluble which is another mixing and preservation issue.

Fat and salt levels are important considerations as well.

If one is just mixing grains and seeds, it won't be long before there are nutritional deficiencies unless their chickens have year round access to pristine pasture with lots of bugs and other animal protein sources.

Click to expand...

I agree with this post.
I will also add that people overlook the fact that chicken eat to fill there energy needs. When the energy need is met they stop eating.

Nuffsaid had said that her birds eat less of her feed than a commercial type feed, this may be true and one of the reasons may be that there feed is a high energy feed when compared to a feed that has correct energy levels. The biggest down fall with a high energy feed is that the birds don't receive all the nutrients they need per feeding.

ChickenCanoe said:

That's my point. A person with a few chickens is buying 50 pound bags of grain at best. The feed company is buying by the trainload and micro nutrients by the ton.

Furthermore, an appropriate balance of amino acids is essential. That requires animal protein or a good understanding of the proper mix of grains and legumes to get all the amino acids that are essential to chickens.

Grains and Legumes won't have micro-nutrients like selenium and copper or vitamins like K, D3, etc.. There may be the possibility of getting a general supplement with those things. Some vitamins are water soluble and some are fat soluble which is another mixing and preservation issue.

Fat and salt levels are important considerations as well.

If one is just mixing grains and seeds, it won't be long before there are nutritional deficiencies unless their chickens have year round access to pristine pasture with lots of bugs and other animal protein sources.

Click to expand...

But with a little research, it's not that difficult to balance things. Adding animal protein isn't that hard. Adding things like kelp for micro nutrients isn't that hard. At worst someone could go the route of a vitamin/mineral supplement.

People say the same sort of things about making dog food. Yet somehow, 8 years later my dogs are healthy and their blood work pristine. Funny, huh?

Dogs are easy because they're primarily meat eaters. Chickens being omnivores/scavengers have a broader mix of nutritional needs.

http://feed-additives.evonik.com/pr...trition/feeding-strategies/pages/default.aspx

http://animalscience.ucdavis.edu/avian/feedingchickens.pdf

http://www.ag.auburn.edu/~chibale/an12poultryfeeding.pdf

My chickens free range in a tractor that regularly gets moved so they have fresh "pasture". I can't possibly send off what they eat to a lab to be tested. The feed I mix is more of a supplement to the rest of what they eat than the other way around.

This is exactly why I asked this question. Even though there are tons of homemade recipes around the internet for chicken feed, there are still others that say it is not worth it and actually not nutritious enough for the chickens.

For now I am going to be buying organic feed, but will make my own sometime in the future. Funny though, if you look at alot of the organic feeds out there you will see additives of minerals and vitamins and other things. Funny I thought organic meant everything was natural and not an additive such as those added vitamins.