Bulk seed

[U_Stormcrow]

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

Of course, here to help. The more I study feeding chickens, the less inclined I am to try it on my own - and I live in the middle of nowhere, my birds freee ranging acres.

If it goes to {explicative}, I have to assume amazon prime delivery goes with it - and we don't grow locally what I would need for a complete feed, even old school. The chickens and ducks would be gone, the rabbits and goats would stay. and I'd find tilapia for the duck pond. I'm zone 8a, btw, in one of the most forgiving areas of the country from a climate/growing standpoint.

 

[Alagirl]

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

thanks for weighing in, and I still don't just want to tag you when your expertise is all over the forum.

 

[BirdsBeesTrees]

I'm not looking for a fight.
The government had pushed for years how infants to one year old need baby formula or they would be nutritionally deficient.
Until there were shortages, then the government said it was fine to give 6 month old infants and older cows milk.
Funny how those recommendations can change when needed or forced....

 

[Cindy in PA]

So if all these fancy vitamins are needed, what did homesteaders and farmers feed their chickens a hundred years ago?

Chickens didn't lay 250-300 eggs 100 years ago & their laying was seasonal. You can't make feed without a premix like Fertrell's Nutri Balancer.

 

[NatJ]

The usual way to homogenize and blend ingredients and keep birds from picking out their favorites is to grind everything to a meal/flour before mixing. Then the mixture is cooked and extruded to make it clump together.

It would be easier to make your home-made feed out of ground meal/flour instead of whole seeds and kernals. The big four grains (wheat, corn, soy, rice) are all available as milled meal or flour. You can also find things like fish meal, blood meal and bone meal.

A century ago is was not uncommon to feed a uncooked powdered formula,. You can moisten it to make it easier for the birds to eat. Cooking/steaming it has the advantage of making some ingredients more nutritious and making it cake together as starches are glutenized.

You can also find the powdered vitamin/mineral premix. There are some spceial considerations when heating vitamins. Sometimes they add extra vitamin-C to make up for what is denatured in the cooking process.

There is another way to partly handle the picking-out problem. I found it in a book that's about a century old.

Set aside most of the whole grains, and feed a measured amount of them each day as "scratch" (sprinkled in the bedding for the hens to scratch for.) Then grind all the other ingredients to a powder, and leave that available free choice. Watch how much of the dry powder they eat, and give them the right amount of whole grains to make the correct total proportions in the diet.

This takes advantage of the fact that chickens like whole grains better than powder, so limiting the grains will leave them hungry enough to eat some powder anyway. If they won't eat enough of the powder, you can serve some of it as a wet mash (just add water) to make it more palatable.

This method gives all the behavioral benefits of scratch, saves the bother of grinding so much grain, and the hens still get the right total balance.

If you have the ability to make pellets, you could also make the powdered part into pellets. The hens would probably still prefer the whole grain parts, so the system could still work right. But the recipes I read were for people who did not have that option.

 

[sdm111]

This is getting ridiculous. Guess what yall are making with all this labor Intensive collection of 30 types of bagged stuff grinding it into a meal blag blah?
They sell it as chicken feed called lay pellets or crumbles.

 

[Alagirl]

This is getting ridiculous. Guess what yall are making with all this labor Intensive collection of 30 types of bagged stuff grinding it into a meal blag blah?
They sell it as chicken feed called lay pellets or crumbles.

which is basically the point being made.
there is a reason those things are on the market.

 

[allenw]

Go for it if that is what you want to do. Trying new things is how we learn and get experience. I would recommend that if this is your first time raising chickens to raise them on premade feed to give you a baseline to work from when you start experimenting with making your own feed.

 

[centrarchid]

I play around with my own concoctions for chickens all the time. Generally, saving money on feedstuffs is not a concern when doing it. Additionally, my chickens, like a very large percentage of those kept by people on this site, do not represent highly productive breeds in terms of rapid growth or high egg production. They are middling at best on these measures. Additionally, more often than not, my birds are fed for purpose of maintenance and long-term health. The feeds developed for commercial production which represent most of what I can buy are too hot/nutrient dense for sustained free-choice consumption by my birds.

The minimal nutritional requirements touted for chickens are based on breeds that are high performers for relatively short period of time under environmental conditions that do not include heat or cold stress. Most people in temperature zones keeping chickens outdoors are not doing the mild conditions. Especially, when it comes to cold and energy needs of the chickens are higher, the relative amounts of protein and energy in the feed needed are likely to differ.

Additionally, the diets sold are designed to be least-cost so cheap for use when birds are under ideal conditions. That makes me uncomfortable drilling into everyone head what the backyard chickens require when information is based on production chickens under controlled conditions.

My dog has a horrible case of gas making it difficult to keep a line of thought going. She consumed a bunch of chicken feed.

 

[8shotsmorethots]

You can't ask "why" or threads get shut down.

Is that really going on here? I just came back to this forum because of the whole feed situation. Are threads getting nuked for it? That's alarming.