Beans and pasta, oh my!

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LeslieS said:
Beans and any other grain together make a complete protein. Pasta is made from wheat, a grain. All the better if you use whole grain pasta, or cooked whole grain or cracked wheat kernels, corn, any grain. Be sure to provide calcium in the form of crushed shell, even egg shells cleaned and crushed. Give them kitchen scraps too for variety. Best to you!
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I'm by no means a chicken food expert, but I'm an ex-vegan, and there's just not enough protein in any grain for it to provide a significant amount of amino acids, especially since he's using cheap pasta. This was a frustration I had when I was vegan, this meme of a "complete protein." Just the presence of an amino acid isn't enough, it has to be in sufficient amounts. The amount of grain I'd have to eat to balance out the other "incomplete" protein would give me way too many calories.

It really seems like the pasta only provides filler to fill the gals up. He mentioned something about fish earlier, so maybe he's adding that as well. I guess that's a little better. But just a bunch of pinto beans and the cheapest pasta he can find isn't, imo, um, healthy.

Realme66 said:
Can you please all explain why it’s rampant ignorance? Beans are high in protein, and have plenty of nutrients for the birds and there is nothing wrong with pasta, If you had no Proprietary feed, which peopke never used to buy for their chickens, waht would you feed them on?
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Beans aren't perfect. I know more about human nutrition than I do about chickens, so I can only speak on that. But even a person cannot live on beans and grains alone. There is something wrong with pasta: it's nearly completely devoid of nutritional value. Replacing pasta with anything, for chicken or human, would be better.

I'm not trying to discourage anyone from making their own feed. And I'd personally like to do so as well with corn, sprouted beans, and amaranth from the garden. But this doesn't seem like the greatest way to approach it. If it were this easy, they would have done it like this back in the day. But they didn't.
 
I recount stories from my father living through WWII in England. No special feed, some grain that he could collect from the fields and some of whatever the pig was getting. Eggs regularly, I'm sure they would have loved beans and pasta.
 
Owlinsyd said:
https://poultry.extension.org/artic...redients-for-poultry/legumes-in-poultry-feed/

Appreciate level headed reply’s.
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As a high level summary, the article is good, as far as it goes. Cliff notes don't tell the full story though. When you start looking at the actual nutritional values of those ingredients, and their AA profiles, it makes it very obvious why soybean MEAL (which should not be confused for raw soybeans) is so commonly used. As any healthy long term vegan will tell you, all proteins are not the same. And that's even before considering the anti-nutritive properties of various options. Details matter.

Understand please, I'm playing with averages, there are variations in any agricultural product, and the variation in crops can be tremendous.

A decent soybean meal is around 50% protein, and its Met/Lys/Thre/Tryp levels are around 69, 305, 193, 69.

Your targets for the final feed are at least 30, 70, 60, 20 respectively for the aminos, meaning you can mix a lot of less nutritionally valuable ingredients w/ soy and still hit targets.

Winter Peas? Around 24% protein, 24, 172, 91, 21 - yup, defient in Met, and barely meets targets for Tryp.

Lentils? 27% protein, 24, 175, 94, 21 - looks a lot like winter peas actually.

Faba? 29% protein, 23, 180, 101, 23. Again, looks a lot like peas and lentils

Cowpeas? 25% Protein, 35, 176, 97, 28. That's much better Met and Tryp, still high levels of Lys and Thre. Unfortunately, they can have some of the highest levels of antinutritive factors among the listed legumes.

and he's mixing it with soft wheat pasta. 12% protein, 20, 36, 36, 15....

The only way to get to the minimum nutrional targets for the aminos, even if you get crude protein right (which is the least important part of this particular equation) is to increase the volume the chickens eat. That doesn't save you any money, and it increases their total daily calorie intake - fatty chickens which are likely still deficient on key amino acids, while simultaneously dropping high nitrogen fecals full of wasted amino acids of lesser importance. Or, the chickens eat till they meet daily energy needs, and are significantly deficient in their key amino targets.
 
BeefQuesoritto said:
Beans aren't perfect. I know more about human nutrition than I do about chickens, so I can only speak on that. But even a person cannot live on beans and grains alone. There is something wrong with pasta: it's nearly completely devoid of nutritional value. Replacing pasta with anything, for chicken or human, would be better.
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Feeding chickens is better studied than feeding any other creature on the planet, even us human-types. But a lot of what you know about feeding humans is true of feeding chickens. yes, there are some exceptions - chickens basically can't use phytate phospherous, which is the primary way its bound in plants, for instance. Interestingly enough, chickens are used as human analogs for some nutritional studies, where we, and they, use nearly identical (if not identical) chemical processes with regard the consumption and use of various nutrients, and suffer very similar pathologies when we don't get those nutrients in sufficient quantity.

So yes, given how well its studied, and how easy it is to research, seeing videos like the one that started this thread getting support (or even consideration as potentially true) is as head scratching as a watching a crowd nodding their head in agreement as someone proclaims the earth to be flat.

Nor do people have to trust american "big ag" for the research. Some of the best research right now on reducing crude protein by way of specific amino acid supplimentation is coming out of Europe right now. While some of the best research on variant feed ingredients is coming out of places like China, Brazil, and India - countries desperate to find cheap ways to effectively feed their populations. American big ag has largely stopped publishing. The Mediterannean basin is looking at variant calcium sources, oyster shell not being readily available to them in quantity. And yet, they all seem to independently be arriving at similar conclusion...
 
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Alternative argument. Ignore everything I just said about nutrition. No greater reason to trust my opinion than the youtuber, if you don't know me.

I'll make an economics argument instead.

Bulk Pinto Beans. That's $0.75/lb.
Bulk Pasta. That's $0.775/lb

No matter how you mix it, you are paying at least $37.50 for 50# of that feed, with all its nutritional 0s.

Know what you can buy for less than $37.50 for a 50# bag?

This $18.00
This $22.50
This $26.50
This $28.00
This $26.00
This $33.00


Need more examples???

So yeah, rampant ignorance. Lousy Nutrition, Lousy Economics, Lousy use of your Time.
 

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