Making our own food, how much of each ingredient should we add for a balanced diet?

[ChickenTender1203]

We bought ingredients to make our own chicken feed. Looking at many sites, they all say something different so we're hoping to get advice from anyone else who makes their own feed. Btw they are also free-range and are given egg shells and table scraps. Here's what we got.
1. 25lb of black oil sunflower seeds
2. 50lbs of uncleaned wheat
3. 50lbs of oats
4. Diatomaceous earth
5. Frozen Peas
6. Lentils
7. 50lb cracked corn
8. Oyster Shells
We have roosters, pullets, and laying hens. Our pullets should be laying soon. What kind of mix should be for roosters? Hens? I'll probably feed a rooster mix to the pullets until they start laying. We can also get soybean meal or cottonseed meal at our feed store. Next time we are in the area we will likely get some soybean meal.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

My advice, which I've repeated many times here, is DON'T DO IT.

Having no idea what the nutritional assays are of your individual ingredients, the best you can do is guess at your final results. Even if you were to use published averages for the ingredients (as I do with my feed calculator), those ingredients won't allow you to hit modern recommended targets for at least some critical nutrients. Some of those ingredients should be treated in various fashion to reduce antinutritional factors, as well.

Whomever suggested you make your own feed offered you very bad advice.

 

[ChickenTender1203]

My advice, which I've repeated many times here, is DON'T DO IT.

Having no idea what the nutritional assays are of your individual ingredients, the best you can do is guess at your final results. Even if you were to use published averages for the ingredients (as I do with my feed calculator), those ingredients won't allow you to hit modern recommended targets for at least some critical nutrients. Some of those ingredients should be treated in various fashion to reduce antinutritional factors, as well.

Whomever suggested you make your own feed offered you very bad advice.

I wanted to keep what we had whixh was purina layer pellets and all flock but my mother was insistent that we make it cheaper by buying ingredients in bulk and creating our own mix. We have already purchased them so we're going to have to use it.

 

[Hanathehappyhen]

I wanted to keep what we had whixh was purina layer pellets and all flock but my mother was insistent that we make it cheaper by buying ingredients in bulk and creating our own mix. We have already purchased them so we're going to have to use it.

I know it isn’t cheap to buy chicken feed, but maybe you could convince your mom to keep using Purina, and use up the grain as treats. ( or since you have a lot you could try growing some of the seeds for your chickens to eat fresh. That could cut down on costs, and sprouts are great for chickens.)

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I wanted to keep what we had whixh was purina layer pellets and all flock but my mother was insistent that we make it cheaper by buying ingredients in bulk and creating our own mix. We have already purchased them so we're going to have to use it.

Your mother, with respect, is long on erroneous assumption and very short on both facts and the relevant knowledge base.

Simple math.

If the peas plus the lentils add up to 25#, they you are looking at 200# total weight of nutritionally deficient feed. At mthe mill I use, I can have a vastly superior mix for $16.45 x4 = $65.80 or the actual blend I use for $58.80 for 200# of feed. Locally, my TSC is selling the Purina Layer for $24.49/50#, so basically $100 for 200#. BOSS pricing varies wildly, but I'd guess you have between $20 and $40 invested in that bag. Corn should be under $10/bag right now, though I've seen it as much as $13, depending on where you buy. 50# of wheat? $30-60 dependning on source. Oats? $23-38. Grocery store frozen peas, bulk almost $1/lb, dried lentil about $1.5/lb.

My guess is that you have at least $85 in ingredients, and maybe closer to $120 in ingredients before accounting for the peas and lentils. Remembering that the known quality and nutrition Purina Layer is right at $100 for 200#. Your mom's 175# of BOSS, Wheat, Oats, Corn is (my guess) close to the same price, and (before reductions for moisture content), coming in at 11.7% protein (way too low), 7.8% fiber (high), 10.1% fat (way too high) and deficient in Methionine, Lysine, Threonine, and Tryptophan, as well as most vitamins and minerals based on published averages for those bulk ingredients.

If she wants to make a BYC account, any number of us can provide some of the relevant information - but the simple truth is, you can't touch the economies of scale the commercial mills enjoy. You can't even get close. Particularly when some of your ingredients are coming from the (human) feed store.

Can I make a top notch dining experience at home for my family buy buying bulk and raw ingredients, then preparing my own at lower cost than prepackaged? ABSOLUTELY. Can I do the same for my birds? Not even REMOTELY close.

 

[saysfaa]

How many chickens do you have?

I would figure the closest you can get to a good diet, price it out, then show her the math. That should be better than just telling her you (and we randos) don't think it will save money, even not counting health consequences of missing some nutrients or having too much of something.

At a minimum, you will also need a trace mineral mix (Nutribalancer by Fertrell is where I would look first; there may be others), it usually comes with vitamins which are probably theoretically easier to cover without the mix if you put a lot of work into selecting plants to feed as well as the ingredients you already have. Although, if you feed plants like that, you will be even further off with meeting the macronutrient needs - macro nutrients being protein, carbs, fat, fiber.

The biggest issue you will find is getting the protein right. It isn't just "protein" that you need, it is each of the individual amino acids that together are called protein. Start with Methionine. It is both the most important and the hardest to provide without far too much fat or too many antinutrients.

If I were in your shoes, unless you have a really lot of chickens or some other livestock, I would eat most of the peas, lentils, and oats myself. Then plant most of the wheat in the garden for a cover crop (the oats could be planted as a cover crop also - it took three of us two years to eat 50 pounds of oatmeal, eating it nearly every day for breakfast.) [Edit to add: if your oats are unhulled, it will be less to eat but you'd have to hull them some way; the chickens can eat them but the fiber get too high. Oh, and the peas would also make a good cover crop] And put most of the cracked corn and sunflower seeds in a bird feeder for the wild birds (although, my chickens are separate from wild birds - a bird flu is a major problem this year.)

Probably, you will read (or think of it yourself), that chickens lived for thousands of years without commercial chicken feeds. That is true but they laid a few dozen eggs a year instead of 250+, and survived long enough to raise a few chicks instead of the several to many years we can expect chickens to be healthy for, and tended to be able to find a wide variety of foods that the horses, cows, and pigs spilled or provided.

 

[ChickenTender1203]

I have 29 chickens; 2 adult roosters, 14 laying hens, 3 cockerels, and 10 hens that are about 24 weeks old but not laying yet as far as know. I was thinking that if we added half of a 50lb bag of layer feed to the mix, it would add more of the necessary nutrients? And I plan to only add corn in their diet from fall to spring.

 

[DickMidnight]

my mother was insistent that we make it cheaper by buying ingredients in bulk and creating our own mix.

it costs me ~$20 for a 50lb bag of feed, which lasts me a month in the summer with half the number of chickens you have.

so if you double that, and then tack on another 25% for the winter months, you’re at $50/month in chicken feed. that’s nothing.

so far, the most surprising facet of owning chickens has been how inexpensive they are.

what your mom is also failing to consider is the cost of your time, which seems like it will be sunk into a fruitless endeavor.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Layer feed is already the minimum bar. Mixing layer with something even more deficient only makes greater weight of deficient feed.

 

[saysfaa]

If you want to keep trying to use what you have already bought, this may be helpful. It is from a textbook published in 1952 - before all the necessary nutrients were discovered much less minimum amounts were figured out.