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Do you make your own organic feed or where do you purchase it from? I would love to go all organic but as my hubby is a state employee the pay is not really enough to feed us well. I love having my own chickens even if there is a cost involved in feeding and caring for them. They are so much fun to have around.
 
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Mahonri, maybe you scared it into getting food somewhere else and it went over to pastrymama...

Yeah, come and get your hawk. This guy is big and I don't even have a sling shot(not that I could even hit anything). I think of the Christmas story and the red rider bb gun, you'll shoot your eye out...

I don't like those hawks. Living in the desert we seen many of them. One day I was walking out to take the trash to the curb and looked at the flying hawk above me and as I looked back away he dropped his prey just inches from me onto the ground. It splattered all over me and it had wised I had something to shoot his dumb butt with.
 
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Do you make your own organic feed or where do you purchase it from? I would love to go all organic but as my hubby is a state employee the pay is not really enough to feed us well. I love having my own chickens even if there is a cost involved in feeding and caring for them. They are so much fun to have around.

I buy my organic layer pellets from a local feed store here in Tucson (O.K. Feeds). Right now 50 lbs. of organic layer pellets is $26.14 and non-organic is $14.17. So, organic is almost twice as expensive. It helps to put it into perspective though; I'm only on my second bag of layer pellets since they started laying nearly a year ago (I only have 6 birds). I also feed organic sunflower seeds and those are $31.31/50 lbs and non-organic is $31.25/50 lbs. So, really no difference between the two types. I'm still on my first bag of those after more than a year. Overall, it cost me just about $25/year extra to keep my birds organic. I should note that my chickens free-range nearly every day and get a LOT of greens from the garden.
 
Gallo,
How is that possible??????? I have 14 birds, one being a roo, all are laying and I go through 50# of Manna Pro Crumbles every 2-3 weeks! They free range about 4-6 hours a day and get alfalfa in the run. I keep them on a worming schedule and I get 8-11 eggs a day. Oh, they get some scratch in the morning only. How do you use so little feed?
 
(Insert plug for award winning treadle feeder here)

I have 6 layers and use 50# of layer pellets every 3 months. I use scratch, lots of kitchen scraps etc.

I'd bet a bag of feed that chickens prefer what they find by free ranging to whatever we feed them. I'm sure that helps too.
 
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idunno.gif
O.K. let me think this through. I got my birds on Jan. 3, 2010. They started laying around the end of May/beginning of June, which is when I started them on layer pellets. Well, there's a few less months over which the 100 lbs of feed was distributed (now we're down to about 9 months-as opposed to a year --but I still have at least 20lbs left in the bag). Then, in the heat of last summer they didn't eat much of the layer pellets at all! I was worried (I always worry) about how little they were eating but I still got about 5 eggs per day throughout the heat. They started eating more later in the fall/winter as it got colder and they came out of their molt (that went on for nearly three months for all of them). Some of the increase in pellet consumption this winter might also be due, in part, to the reduced amount of forage available in the yard. My girls also free range nearly every day from early morning until they put themselves to bed. Since the garden is always producing, we also have a LOT of stuff to give them from that too. Not just greens, but lots of bugs. For a good part of the summer and into the fall I gave them a huge handful of tomato hornworms or those giant beetle grubs we have pretty much every day. Some days if I was turning the mulch or the soil in the garden I would find about a gallon of the beetle grubs and I'd keep them to feed the chooks over time. I also have 3-5 large compost bins going (hot) at all times and cycle through them every 4-8 weeks, depending on the season. Each time I change one out, I let the chickens sort through it for all the BSF larvae and whatever else they find before I use or cure the compost. Of course, they also get mealworms. My girls are REALLY spoiled.

It also just occurred to me that I think the treadle feeders have had a dramatic impact on feed conservation. As I was making the feeders to alleviate my sparrow problem, I also realized that I had a serious mouse problem. I didn't realize it until I started paying attention. I think that early on the mice were eating a lot of feed and the treadle feeders stopped that. The design of the feeders also prevents them from pulling feed out and wasting it.

Cluckin, I just saw your comment on the preview. You made me laugh!

eta an apostrophe
 
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