does anyone recommend a quality organic feed that's a good deal cheaper?
I am not interested in organic only feed at $40 per 50# bag, I buy my layer feed from the local mill at about $12 per 50# bag and/or I'll buy commercial brands at the local farm supply stores if they go on sale. Anyway, to save even more money, I put my chickens out on a grassy run during the day and their commercial feed consumption was cut in half. After they ate all the grass in the run, I started dumping my grass clippings in the run and they would eat that. Because of predator concerns, I don't let my girls free range. Also, I am now giving them kitchen scraps and they seem to enjoy that too. Now that the leaves are falling, I am dumping the leaves in the chicken run and they spend most of the day scratching through the leaves and eating whatever chickens eat. Although I have commercial feed available to them 24/7, they always prefer to eat the natural grass, leaves, or kitchen scraps first and that has saved me lots of money on feed.
If you have not considered growing fodder for your birds as an addition to your feed, I would suggest you take a look at it. You can turn 1# of barely, for example, into about 5# of greens and sprouted root mat. Not only do you get 5X the value in weight by feeding fodder, but I am told that whole grain is only about 30% digested by the birds whereas fodder is about 80% digested. Also, sprouting grains into fodder increases the nutritional value of the feed compared to the whole grain itself. I posted an article called
My $10 Inexpensive DIY Fodder Tower with Dollar Tree Dish Bins and listed my personal results on growing fodder. Point is, if you still want to buy organic grain, you could probably increase it's nutritional value and increase weight by 5X. That would certainly reduce your organic cost.
