You know, what I'd really like to do is find a real, old fashioned feed mill that would actually mill it for us. The problem I have is finding the pre-mix and weird ingredients that I would love to include, like fishmeal and field peas. A source of bulk sea kelp, instead of the two pounds online, two. But, if we found an old-fashioned mill, they could source all of that. All we'd need to do is give them the recipe we'd like to use, which I have a bunch of.
I can store quite a bit in my containers, probably at least 500-1,000 pounds, although I'd probably like to move the grain over to my horse barn in those amounts because right now I have the bins in the coop and I'm not confident about the floor strength, plus the coop isn't water tight.
A mixer would be nice. I haven't been grinding and even the small chicks have been enjoying the whole wheat, whole Milo and cracked corn. I have a grinder but it grinds into a flour.
I've been sticking the soy bean meal with molasses to get it to blend with the rest, seems to work, although it might be better to use some type of oil and molasses, I'd just worry about rancid oil. I'm working on finding feed grade molasses right now. I'd love to find roasted soy beans or even field peas and fish meal instead.
I need to find a bulk source of Brewer's yeast or nutritional yeast or a place to find a vitamin pre-mix. But, really, it's not that hard and so far the Cornish seem healthier than the ones I grew last summer on flock raiser. I'm growing the batch behind them on straight flock raiser so we can compare.
Right now I'm throwing things together and I'm sure I'm not doing the best of jobs but I'm hoping I'm doing better, since at least they're getting wholesome whole grains instead of by-products like wheat-middlings as a second ingredient and nearly %19 percent ash.
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You can try Tempe Feed. I know they have organic; it's Nutrena (used to be Arizona Feeds). Can't tell you whether it is buggy or not, though. There's also an Ace Hardware in Queen Creek or SanTan that carries Purina and supposedly stores it in air conditioning/refrigerator, and it's supposedly not buggy as a result.
I was hoping for a local store but if I have to travel a bit to get good stuff for the peepers, so be it. Being a Noob I'm not familiar with trends. Is the difficulty we are experiencing finding feed common?
or
Is this a fluke and it's always been pretty easy.
I'm almost on the
Tracydr bandwagon and am willing to mix up a bulk batch with you folk!
How bout it Tracy? What will it acutally take to make our own feed?
I've got a huge truck & trailer & can help in any way. Do we need a mechanical mixer or a grinder or storage silos? Drums for transport & storage? Maybe those 275 gallon storage tanks?
Control Tower in authoraitve police voice, "Step away from the project!"
