I've been trying to ferment grains for my chickens. I'm fairly new to all of this but I had a question. I came across an article that said feeding them whole oats is not good because oats interfere with nutritional absorption. Since I'm investing all of this money and organic feed that's healthy and I'm fermenting to help increase the nutritional content I don't want to do anything that's going to undermine that. Has anyone heard that you shouldn't feed whole oats to your chickens?
Welcome to BYC.
The Dosage is the Poison. Oats, as part of a nutritionally balanced feed, can be a healthy component. Oats, on their own, or to excess are not.
Water is heathy - but too much will kill you - and not just by drowning. Too little, the same.
Salt is healthy - but too much will kill you. Too little? the same.
The art and science of making a nutritionally complete, balanced, chicken feed is the stuff of books and studies, there are few simple answers. I'll offer you one, however - backed by science and math.
If you have to ask this question, you lack the education and understanding to be manufacturing your own feed at home, and should not attempts same unless:
A) SHTF,
B) you live in a third world country (where the ingredient you need to make a nutritionally balanced feed to modern standards aren't likely available),
C) or you live in an area of a first world country so remote you have no alternative (in which case, the cost of having a commercial feed shipped to you is still likely cheaper than the cost of having ingredients shipped to you individually).
In each of those cases, you are probably better off eating the chickens, and making some other long term feed plan.
For the very vast majority of individuals here on BYC, in the vast majority of circumstances, making feed at home isn't remotely cost effective, either. Most often, it serves to make the ignorant "feel good" as they offer expensive, sub-par nutrition to their birds - and lacking any standard against which to compare, they know not the harm that they do.
So now I've purchased organic grains (barley, hard wheat, whole oats, field peas, with some flaxseed and black sunflower seeds) that I mixed together to increase the protein content to 20%
No you didn't. Before accounting for moisture content, Feedipedia.org (there are other sources, and a bit of variation between them, but Feedipedia has one of the larger databases, and is easier to search than, say, USDA...) gives average protein values as follows:
11.8% Barley Grains
16.5% Hard Wheat
11.0% Whole Oats
23.9% Field Peas
23.7% Flax Seed
16.0% BOSS
To get to 20% protein mix with those ingredients, you would need to combine about seven parts (some mix of field peas and flax seed) with one part each of barley, wheat, oats and BOSS. Not only would that be horrifically expensive (organic field peas run about $1/lb in bulk, organic flax about $6/lb), but you would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 15.8% fat, more than 4 times the recommendation for a chicken, and ready recipe for fatty liver hemorrhagic disease and a host of other maladies. You would also need to deal with the very high tannins (an anti-nutritive property), trypsin inhibitors (another antinutritive property), and lectins (which, among other things, inhibit protein absorbtion) in the field peas - part of why field peas are generally not recommended for inclusion in feed recipes at rates above 15%. The flax seed, of course, is responsible for those ultimately deadly levels of fat. The BOSS doesn't help that issue, either.
...and that's just back of napkin math, I've not looked at vitamins and minerals at all.
sorry
