Organic feed reviews

[Faeshka]

I started out thinking it'd be easy to find a good quality organic feed for my chicks that's free of things I'm allergic to (soy, shellfish). It's turning out a lot more difficult than I thought it'd be.

New Country Organics starter
I liked the convenience of their free shipping bundles, in this case a bag of their starter and a bag of grit. The grit is nice. The texture of the starter is nice. There are some larger particles but they didn't cause any problems. The problem here is that my chicks wasted most of it and it didn't agree with them. No pasty butt but some of them make mustard color & texture poops when they were getting it.

Scratch & Peck starter with grub protein
This one has worked out the best. Normal poops. They eat it and waste very little of it. The downside is that it isn't easy to get here, though the shipping is relatively fast.

Scratch & Peck starter (the regular starter)
According to the label information online, this should've been a safe option for me to handle. The online ingredients say there is no soy or shellfish. When I opened the bag, my hands & face started swelling up. I said "well crap, wtf" and looked at the label. Sure enough there's crab meal in it. Thankfully I caught on to the allergen fast and the reaction I had was mild for me. I'm just annoyed that the online label is wrong. It sure makes buying stuff online more difficult. I thought this'd work and be totally fine, but since I can't even touch it I have no idea what I'm going to do. I can't get allergen free feed where I live. I also can't get an order here before I run out.

If you are allergic to shellfish, the Scratch & Peck starter has crab meal. There is no crab meal in their starter+grubs.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I started out thinking it'd be easy to find a good quality organic feed for my chicks that's free of things I'm allergic to (soy, shellfish). It's turning out a lot more difficult than I thought it'd be.

First, thank you for providing your experiences, I'm sure they will be useful to those who value Organics.

As to WHY you are finding it difficult? Modern chickens have quite high nutritional needs to perform at their best. One of the things they need a (relative) lot of is an amino acid called Methionine. Methionine is NOT abundant in the plant world - levels are so low in most plants, yet the needs of chicken are so high, that a small amount of synthetic methionine (appears as DL-Methionine on the ingredients label) is allowed to be added while still retaining the "Organic" label.

The best (common) sources of Methionine in chicken feed are (loosely) animal sources (fish meal, crab meal, porcine blood meal, insect proteins) and next best, soy meal.

Insect proteins suffer in the fact that they aren't really produced commercially at the scale of some of the others, or necessarily under guaranteed "Organic" methods - which adds to price, and also that they tend to be very high fat - which makes fomulating the rest of the feed more difficult, as chickens don't do well on a high fat diet.
Soybeans, otoh, functionally have their protein concentrated at the same time their fat is being removed by the processes which produce soybean oil. Then the byproduct (cheaper - and yet better than soybeans themselves, due to now reduced fat levels and the neutralization of some antinutritional factors) is sold for animal feed as soy meal. Similar to other oil crops, such as cottonseed, or peanut meal which also (if rarely) appear on poultry feed labels, but pound per pound, soybean meal tends to have the highest methionine levels. Alfalfa meal and other "forage" legume meals made by fermenting rather than some form of extraction method don't have the concentrated protein levels and reduced fats of the oil crops above.