Bulk seed

[JacinLarkwell]

Add DE as well maybe a cup?

No reason to add DE.

 

[sdm111]

Those are good questions- this guy didn’t add anything else. Those ingredients I assume naturally have vitamins and minerals etc. We already ferment and we are beginning to try sprouts, which both will also beef up their nutrition. They can only free-range for a few hours a day, at least till we figure out how to keep them out of the neighbors yard and off our porches. Letting them out a few hours before sunset, they tend to get in less trouble.
As far as going bad, I am assuming if stored well, they should last a few months, right? I may also split the homemade bulk mix with my son’s flock so it will go faster. That would be a dozen bird’s altogether.

First don't assume anything just cause someone says something doesn't make it true or false. I mixed my own feed for a long time but at that time I had alot of heads to feed. I stopped cause they would Pick what they wanted and the rest was left to mold.

 

[sdm111]

A chicken can have a lot of internal fat without looking anywhere close to it.

They'll look for a fat chicken to tell, lol that's a good one.

 

[Alagirl]

Thanks. I saw the horse kind at TS and wondered if that would work.

Ok, but I do have a question for you
(If you ask my husband, I am the perennial party pooper and kill-joy, plus I notoriously overthink things):

You are looking at 85 pounds of seeds of various sizes you aim to mix into a homogenous feed. not to mention that that is a ton of feed to stockpile for a small flock (I take it you have about 6 hens?)

I buy a 25 pound bag of feed at the store because the 50 pound is too heavy. The bag lasts my 5 girls for a long time. They get a few things extra, but the feed is their staple.
I am not sure you can buy the seeds in just those amounts.
if you have a container with stuff (no matter what, Legos, nuts, cereal...) and move it around, the content will invariably shift to basically separate.
given whole, the birds will with no fail pick through the feed and eat their favorites. After all, they are equipped with natural tweezers.

Out of personal curiosity, how do you propose to mix that amount of feed to get everything evenly distributed? Are you going to buy a cement mixer? Which seems to me to be the most practical solution to amounts like that? (yes, I have dealt with grains in larger amounts. they are dense and heavy, and I was much younger then.)

then again, I am a cynic. I do not believe anything any youtube channel/influencer says. Unless it can be verified by independent sources.
If I were you, I'd look at U_Stormcrow's articles and contributions. He has taken great pains to read up on the recent feed studies. I am not going to tag him here, it's not his job to teach us about nutrition. Although I think he would have not much good to say the recipe you shared)

I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Those are good questions- this guy didn’t add anything else. Those ingredients I assume naturally have vitamins and minerals etc. We already ferment and we are beginning to try sprouts, which both will also beef up their nutrition. They can only free-range for a few hours a day, at least till we figure out how to keep them out of the neighbors yard and off our porches. Letting them out a few hours before sunset, they tend to get in less trouble.
As far as going bad, I am assuming if stored well, they should last a few months, right? I may also split the homemade bulk mix with my son’s flock so it will go faster. That would be a dozen bird’s altogether.

Don't assume. There is PLENTY of Ignorance on the web. It seems to replicate rapidly there.

A) That's a terrible recipe, though certainly not the worst I've seen.

It's sub 14% protein (too low), greater than 10% fiber (too high), roughly 16% fat (4x target) and misses nutritional targets for Methionine, Threonine, and somehow even Tryptophan (props for that, its hard to miss a 0.2% inclusion rate for Tryp in a grain based diet). It also has no non-phytate source of Phosphorus (chickens almost can't use phosphorus bound up in plant sources), which guarantees their Calcium : Phosphorus ratio will be off, which is key to bone development, certain neurotransimtters, and a host of other biological processes.). Your vitamin/mineral content is "anyone's guess", and there is enough oats in there with their high beta glucan quantities that you have to be concerned with it blocking nutrient absorption and contributing to "sticky poops", a potential disease vector.


B) Its more expensive. A nutritionally complete mid range feed should be selling right now at about $0.50/lb +/- (more in places like AK, HI, PR, CA, NYC etc) from the farm store. On that basis, your recipe (makes 85#) needs to come in under $44.50. The flax seed alone is about $1.50/lb, the Winter Peas about $1/lb. Black oil sunflower seed? $0.80- $1.20/lb. WHole Oats you can get $0.50-0.55/lb - that's $52.50 before buying the corn (likely runs $0.35-0.40/lb right now, another $7-8). That is, 50% more expensive than buying a bag of nutritionally better feed off the shelf.


Thank you for coming here and asking first.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I don’t have a problem with fat content unless we notice a chubby chicken. Then we can reevaluate. The fella online looked like his flock was healthy and happy.

Chickens don't deposit fat like we do - and you can't judge by eye. **I** can't judge by eye, have been doing this a few years, and routinely take my birds apart and poke around inside while they are on their way to freezer camp. I can barely - I've been developing the skill - body condition gauge them by picking them up and feeling along the breast bone. The feathers are deceptive.

Chickens who die of fatty liver hemorrhagic usually fall over dead of internal bleeding with no prior symptoms. Chickens raised as a flock with others on nutritionally deficient feed tend to look fine, when compared to one another. The same way a North Korean male looks fine when compared to other North Korean men. The moment they walk across the border to South Korea, with similar climate, similar genetic pool, and a first world diet (for just the last 80 years or so) the differences are obvious. His South Korean counterpart is heavier, inches taller, and has better disease resistance on average, among other traits.

I can provide other examples.

This is not intended to insult. We appreciate that you came here and started asking questions. We'd like to help. In the world of chicken keeping, "assuming" won't get you far - it tends to lead to a host of errors we'd rather hope you not need to learn from. We've made them, no need to repeat them. Your chickens will thank you for it.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Ok, but I do have a question for you
(If you ask my husband, I am the perennial party pooper and kill-joy, plus I notoriously overthink things):

You are looking at 85 pounds of seeds of various sizes you aim to mix into a homogenous feed. not to mention that that is a ton of feed to stockpile for a small flock (I take it you have about 6 hens?)

I buy a 25 pound bag of feed at the store because the 50 pound is too heavy. The bag lasts my 5 girls for a long time. They get a few things extra, but the feed is their staple.
I am not sure you can buy the seeds in just those amounts.
if you have a container with stuff (no matter what, Legos, nuts, cereal...) and move it around, the content will invariably shift to basically separate.
given whole, the birds will with no fail pick through the feed and eat their favorites. After all, they are equipped with natural tweezers.

Out of personal curiosity, how do you propose to mix that amount of feed to get everything evenly distributed? Are you going to buy a cement mixer? Which seems to me to be the most practical solution to amounts like that? (yes, I have dealt with grains in larger amounts. they are dense and heavy, and I was much younger then.)

then again, I am a cynic. I do not believe anything any youtube channel/influencer says. Unless it can be verified by independent sources.
If I were you, I'd look at U_Stormcrow's articles and contributions. He has taken great pains to read up on the recent feed studies. I am not going to tag him here, it's not his job to teach us about nutrition. Although I think he would have not much good to say the recipe you shared)

I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor.

I shared. No need to tag. But this would have been an appropriate time.

 

[NatJ]

We were actually talking about doing this while they were even chicks. If we mix our own, we will know what’s in it, but more import, it will be cheaper.

About cost: check all the numbers (including shipping) before deciding which is cheaper.

As regards mixing your own, yes you will know what is in it, but just knowing the ingredients does not guarantee that it is a healthy food. If I bake cookies, I know what is in them, but it would not be healthy for me to only eat cookies. Likewise, to make a healthy chicken food, you need to use the right ingredients in the right proportions. (No, I don't have a recipe to recommend. I'm just making a basic observation.)

 

[U_Stormcrow]

and to demonstrate that we really are here to help (though I am still a complete @$$ - a well meanining @$$, but still an @$$), I'm going to recommend a thread by @saysfaa who has gone to great effort to collect old feed recipes (which are, frankly, much better on average than most of what I see posted on Facebook) and also Justin Rhodes's more modern recipe as good starting points. Be aware that old feed recipes were designed before the tinkering we have done with modern birds - which results in much greater production at the cost of much higher needs for nutritionally dense feeds - so your "production" in terms of rapid weight gain and frequent egg production will suffer - but they are still, on average, better than most of the FB, YouTube and "Garden Betty" style recipes I see on the web.

And how did I calculate that feed recipe's output as quickly as I did? I built a feed calculator. Almost entirely with information populated from Feedipedia.Org. (which has its limitations, that I would be happy to discuss, ad nauseum)

 

[Sammster]

and to demonstrate that we really are here to help (though I am still a complete @$$ - a well meanining @$$, but still an @$$), I'm going to recommend a thread by @saysfaa who has gone to great effort to collect old feed recipes (which are, frankly, much better on average than most of what I see posted on Facebook) and also Justin Rhodes's more modern recipe as good starting points. Be aware that old feed recipes were designed before the tinkering we have done with modern birds - which results in much greater production at the cost of much higher needs for nutritionally dense feeds - so your "production" in terms of rapid weight gain and frequent egg production will suffer - but they are still, on average, better than most of the FB, YouTube and "Garden Betty" style recipes I see on the web.

And how did I calculate that feed recipe's output as quickly as I did? I built a feed calculator. Almost entirely with information populated from Feedipedia.Org. (which has its limitations, that I would be happy to discuss, ad nauseum)

Thank you for these links! I feed commercial feed. But I really do think it's a good idea to know how to provide the "next best" feed, just in case.