My DH works at a not-so-fast restaurant chain, Baja Fresh, and they trim the meat before cooking. He is able to bring home the trim and cook it up for the chooks, and dogs...cats too! I am wondering if we should just give it raw, is raw better for them?
Maybe you could go to your local restaurants and ask if they would be willing to give you the trim, as they would just toss it anyway~!
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How awesome! Not sure if I can swing that, worth a look...
I DID have the same question, anyone - raw or cooked?
- Ant Farm
To be on the safe side, I always cook if for no other reason than to remove bacteria from handling. Where the food is cut up from the tables, to the knives, to everyone that touches it can transfer bacteria.
My old reproduction book on keeping poultry on scraps (war time Britain) suggests fish and fish meal, including detailed instructions for cooking up heads and bones (they were rationing so it was illegal to give "human edible" food to them). But I'm worried about a fishy taste to the eggs.
I got a pretty good kitten food, but it was quite pricey. I need to look at the cheaper ones. I get sort of paralyzed in the store, there are SOOOOOO many options... I really just need to get some meat.
- Ant Farm
I can get fish heads very cheap at the Asian market so I'd like the instructions because the chickens don't do much with the big heads.
Roaches would be a good insect source....can't kill 'em and they thrive anywhere. I doubt if folks would want to buy feed with ground roaches in it, though, just because of the negative PR roaches get.
He said using them for human food hasn't really caught on yet.
Ya think?
Although, there is a tree caterpillar in somewhere in Africa that is harvested, deep fried and sold packaged just like potato chips.
I'm not sure how often wild turkeys ingest earth worms.. do they dig a lot like chickens do> Seems they more walk along picking things off plants, surfaces...
if they get black head, they die and disappear from view via predators and scavengers, once the symptoms start they go down hill extremely fast.
That is also true of Marek's and fowl pox. It is common not every where yet a lot want vaccinated chicks. It also takes just one infected bird to enter the premises........ not necessarily an management issue.
They will dig. In winter they'll dig up tubers to eat. I doubt chickens would dig up turnips in frozen ground.
I was very proud of myself to have 300 lbs of feed left from my last shipment of feed when I picked up this delivery. Usually I wind up having to visit the local feed store for an extra bag or two before the next delivery is available. I once tried tracking feed consumption per bird using a spreadsheet I'd been supplied, but it was hopeless. I've got so many birds of different ages on different types of feed that it became too much work to track....says the woman who tracks eggs laid by each bird plus the egg weight, plus bird weights, plus regular photos.....
You probably have some pretty good forage this time of year.
My food bill goes up significantly once bugs die, vegetation stops growing, ground freezes and sometimes covered with snow.
If the hens consume a "fishy" tasting fish you will DEFINITELY taste it in the eggs, and it's not even remotely pleasant. When we started up our aquaponics we added feeder goldfish to help establish the habitat along with the fingerling Tilapia. The Tilapia would eat half a goldfish, leaving the head. We mad the mistake of feeding these heads to the chickens. YUCK! Never again!. As a rule, if the fish odor is strong then only the roosters or the chicks are allowed to have it. I don't know about changes to the meat flavor though. None of my butchered birds ever tasted like fish.
A poultry nutritionist told us you could go up to about 4 or 5% of the diet with fish and not impart it to the eggs.
High flax content will also give eggs a fishy taste.
Like you, usually only breeders or chicks get much fish. I start with a 16% organic grower and mix in fishmeal for chicks at a ratio of 10:1 to raise the protein to 20%.
The fishmeal is 60%.
Lots of great discussion the past few days.
Always give meat to my birds, be it leftovers, raw trimmings, even cans of bargain tuna with oil. Birds raid the cat's food bowl on the back porch frequently.
Feral hogs here in all 77 counties and are legal to shoot year round because of the damage to land, crops and livestock. They make great barbecue according to our friends and family that are over run with them...butcher, hang in freezer then thaw and barbecue whole in smoker...or butcher and immediately fire pit roast.
Feed costs here are moderate compared to prices mentioned. The past few months the rats, starlings and sparrows are blowing out my feed cost data....working on irradicating those with rat shot...making progress.
I always feed all the meat and fish scraps to the chickens but with so many chickens, they each don't get much.
I wanted to add something to the cat food discussion.
I was just at the grocery store and checked prices. Your numbers may vary. Most canned cat food started around 20 cents per ounce. Some were as low as 11% protein.
Dry cat food varied between 12 and 28 cents per ounce. The protein varied between 11 and 33% protein.
So if you just go buy cat food based on someone's suggestion,
if you don't read the label for ingredients and protein %, you're just winging it.
If you buy without reading the label, you could be lowering amino acids rather than increasing them.
Mackerel, on the other hand, is 10 cents per ounce and you're getting plain fish with no additives which are added to supplement the meat or fish in cat food making the food specific to the needs of feline carnivores.
So, in my mind, why pay more to enhance the amino acid balance of chicken feed buy buying cat food when you can get mackerel that is about 23% protein and high in omega-3.
The whole idea of upping protein during molt or for breeding is to improve the amino acid balance for omnivores from what is in plant based diets. Crude protein is misleading in many ways. Some grains may be as high as 14% protein (though most are much lower) but they have huge deficiencies in certain amino acids. More of the amino acids are essential to chickens than humans.
