Making your own feed...

[Taliasun]

I want to raise broilers and formulate my own feed to do so. I'd like to do it without soy or corn (haha, right?). I am looking at Black Soldier Fly Larvae and alternative grains like amaranth and sorghum. I'm going to be doing in in Hawaii so other possible feedstuffs would be coconut, papaya, taro etc might be in the mix if needed to replace what I am missing without soy.

Is anyone doing something similar on any scale? I'm looking for better resources for nutritional content for each ingredient and am getting some info but there are gaps. What nutritional factor are crucial beyond the basics? I'm talking Amino Acids, Minerals etc not crude protein etc. I don't need actual numbers on here per say but a reference would be awesome.
(I have Storey's guide, Mattocks' Pastured Poultry to start)

 

[DobieLover]

Hey there, I'm digging up old posts I see!
I'm curious about making my own feed as well. Do you find this to be more cost effective this way or about the same as layer ration from the feed store? Organic feed is outrageously priced but I'd love to get away from gmo corn and soy in my feed.

thx

I don't mix my own feed any longer. But when I did, it was labor intensive and cost only marginally less than what I could purchase it for. And this was pre-pandemic.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Hey there, I'm digging up old posts I see!
I'm curious about making my own feed as well. Do you find this to be more cost effective this way or about the same as layer ration from the feed store? Organic feed is outrageously priced but I'd love to get away from gmo corn and soy in my feed.

thx

So, good news. @DobieLover remains active on BYC and may drop in to answer.

As a general matter, because the question of making one's own feed comes up here several times daily, for the very vast majority of posters, making their own feed is not good for the pocketbook, and not good for their birds. We simply don't enjoy the economies of scale of the commercial facilities, we can't assay our inputs, only make assumptions based on averages and hope the final product is acceptable, and (with rare exception) the people seeking to make their own feed at home - or offering homebrew recipes on the internet/youtube/etc to others - are completely unqualified to do so.

Here's an example from yesterday showing some of the terrible info out there, which none the less has plenty of followers and likes.

Here's another example, Internet Personality Garden Betty is the culprit this time.

Another

etc etc etc etc etc....

A few of us hop into these questions pretty quick and tend to rain all over the parade.

Feeding chickens is easy, if you don't care about anything but survival. Feeding chickens so they thrive is actually pretty difficult. Unless one is in a foreign country with limited options, or has some extreme food allergy, its not a path I would recommend you embark on.

 

[NatJ]

I have a nagging curiosity about something though.
Before mass production, with humans keeping chickens for many hundreds of years and continually increasing their egg production, how did people feed them a balanced diet economically?

The continually increasing egg production is caused by a combination of factors:
--selective breeding
--better feeding
--artificial light
--changes in management

If you were to take the chickens from a few hundred years ago, feed them modern chicken food, provide artificial light so they think it is always spring, and break each hen that goes broody so she does not spend time setting, you would get quite a few more eggs from those hens even without the selective breeding.

And people who had no incubators, and could not buy chicks from a hatchery, would probably need to have hens that went broody, even if that meant fewer eggs laid each year. So they would not have been selecting for the highest possible egg production, because they needed to select for other traits too.

 

[DobieLover]

I was going to ask if you had considered reformulating to remove some of the fat (and cost) from the mix - or if you had any old birds you had recently butchered to look at the long term effects of diets at those fat levels.

My oldest birds are 4 years old. They are all still doing very well. I haven't fed that diet for over 2 years. Life gets in the way.

 

[DobieLover]

Truer words...

Thanks. Hope you have a wonderful day.

Oh, I am. On vacation to prepare myself for another big stressful change.

I hope you have a great day too.

 

[DobieLover]

Hello.

I make my own feed which I then ferment. I use triticale, oats, field peas, BOSS, flax seed, Fertrell Poultry Nutribalancer (for all the vitamins and mineral the chickens need) and add feed grade fishmeal to get the protein up to 18%. My chickens are thriving on it. I just started offering oyster shell free choice on the side but none of my pullets are laying yet. They are 16 weeks old.

Edited to add following link from which I (very) loosely based my formula:
https://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/l...-acids-in-eggs-from-small-chicken-flocks.html

 

[SourRoses]

So, good news. @DobieLover remains active on BYC and may drop in to answer.

As a general matter, because the question of making one's own feed comes up here several times daily, for the very vast majority of posters, making their own feed is not good for the pocketbook, and not good for their birds. We simply don't enjoy the economies of scale of the commercial facilities, we can't assay our inputs, only make assumptions based on averages and hope the final product is acceptable, and (with rare exception) the people seeking to make their own feed at home - or offering homebrew recipes on the internet/youtube/etc to others - are completely unqualified to do so.

Here's an example from yesterday showing some of the terrible info out there, which none the less has plenty of followers and likes.

Here's another example, Internet Personality Garden Betty is the culprit this time.

Another

etc etc etc etc etc....

A few of us hop into these questions pretty quick and tend to rain all over the parade.

Feeding chickens is easy, if you don't care about anything but survival. Feeding chickens so they thrive is actually pretty difficult. Unless one is in a foreign country with limited options, or has some extreme food allergy, its not a path I would recommend you embark on.

Great points!

I have a nagging curiosity about something though.
Before mass production, with humans keeping chickens for many hundreds of years and continually increasing their egg production, how did people feed them a balanced diet economically?
I've read only a few aspects mentioned in the life of farmers - throwing scratch, letting them out into a yard, and of course the good 'ol kitchen scraps. Were the veggie scraps enough nutritionally to make up the difference?

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Great points!

I have a nagging curiosity about something though.
Before mass production, with humans keeping chickens for many hundreds of years and continually increasing their egg production, how did people feed them a balanced diet economically?
I've read only a few aspects mentioned in the life of farmers - throwing scratch, letting them out into a yard, and of course the good 'ol kitchen scraps. Were the veggie scraps enough nutritionally to make up the difference?

Easy answer - and we have the books to prove it.
100+ years ago, the birds were expected to forage missed grains, bugs in the field, feed missed by the dog, the cow, the pig, scraps from what we didn't eat... So its not that they weren't being fed, they were getting the waste and spillage of a number of much larger animals, plus foraging fields larger than most of us currently enjoy.

The birds were generally smaller, grew much slower, and a prized egg layer was expected to produce just 100 medium eggs in an entire year! Even then, chicken meat was a special treat "a chicken in every pot" was a political campaign slogan, more than once.

The feed recipes at that time were mostly corn, together with a substantial portion of "meat scraps" (no longer allowed to be used), plus typicially either oats or a local mix f grains (sorghum, barley, rye, etc).

@saysfaa did a nice job of assembling some of the old resources, then another poster picked it up and continued the effort. I'll try and find the thread.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Here we are, hat tip @Lauravonsmurf who put a lot of effort into that one.

I hope you find both threads instructive.