Making your own feed...

[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]

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.

 

[saysfaa]

I have a nagging curiosity about something though...

Quite likely, many of them didn't. Either or both balanced or economically by today's standards. Who expects to see goiters anymore, even in the goiter belts? Who expects a good living to be enough margin that their children can wear shoes in the summer too? Concept here, not necessarily details, but not that far off if going back centuries)

Balanced enough for some of the chickens to survive healthy enough long enough to reproduce is a much broader target than balanced enough to support today's expectations of health or that can support production that can compete with today's alternatives ("economical" in its most basic form, no?)

 

[U_Stormcrow]

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.

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.

 

[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.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Life gets in the way.

Truer words...

Thanks. Hope you have a wonderful day.

 

[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.