Can rooster eat layer food?

[Susan49]

Very helpful Den, thank you. I will keep him in the portable pen until I'm done with my current store of layer pellet, or until he's done his quarantine period, whichever comes first. At that point I'll switch to grower for all, make sure to keep the oyster shell feeder full, and let him meet the girls. That sounds like the best solution at this time. I suppose if the egg shell quality does suffer I can go back to layer and just let him have that, as he'll be older then anyway.

 

[easter peeps]

I am new at chickens- but I DID have a problem w/ my 3 roosters when their feed was switched over fm chick medicated feed to my adult hens feed. My Roos all of a sudden stopped crowing and just huddled in a corner w/ their backs turned toward everyone, you could see in their wincing eyes they were in pain & we're not eating as much or walking around. This lasted quite awhile, weeks to a month or more? When I switched bk to the chick crumble & then to flock raiser, they got better. After looking it up-I read that layered feed can cause kidney problems in roosters.. Which is probly what I was seeing.. Poor guys.
On flock raiser they are bk to normal- but now that my new chicks/hens are just now laying their first eggs I don't know what to feed them since the Roos proved they can't have the layeerd feed. I do have oyster shells out separately for the hens & they do free range parts of the day when I think it's safe- some days not- we live on acreage w/ barn & horses & lots coyotes & hawks. Haven't lost any yet since bringing them Hm in Feb. Roos were not yet free ranging when they they had their issue since I was introducing them to adult hens & keeping them fenced apart. Now their all together & doing great! But, what now? Keep them forever on flock raiser/ finisher??

 

[limited25]

Don't know what to say to last post (sorry). I mix layer and grower feed together (half and half) and that is what my hens and rooster have been eating for over a year. Haven't experienced any problems with it .... rooster seems fine and hens are all laying eggs daily. Offer grit and oyster shells separately.

 

[RobertPlamondon]

Commercial breeding flocks have roosters and hens mixed together (of course), and they eat the same feed.

In WWII, the Ohio Experiment Station anticipated random wartime feed shortages and did some studies to see what happens when you feed the wrong feed, because it's all you can get. Giving high-calcium layer feed to pullets who aren't laying yet was no problem.

I seem to remember also reading that the oft-stated fear of calcium poisoning is overblown for chickens more than six weeks old. They can excrete excess calcium without ever absorbing it into the blood stream, so worries about kidneys and such are unfounded. (Give baby chicks something else, though.)

Robert

 

[lazy gardener]

Commercial breeding flocks have roosters and hens mixed together (of course), and they eat the same feed.

In WWII, the Ohio Experiment Station anticipated random wartime feed shortages and did some studies to see what happens when you feed the wrong feed, because it's all you can get. Giving high-calcium layer feed to pullets who aren't laying yet was no problem.

I seem to remember also reading that the oft-stated fear of calcium poisoning is overblown for chickens more than six weeks old. They can excrete excess calcium without ever absorbing it into the blood stream, so worries about kidneys and such are unfounded. (Give baby chicks something else, though.)

Robert

I don't have any education in nutrition, but IMO, all of the hype about too much calcium for non laying birds is blown way out of proportion. If extra calcium found in layer ration were such an issue, we'd see lots of roosters keeling over dead, or requiring dialysis because of the "kidney damage" done by calcium over load. Not to mention... all of the leafy greens which are rich in calcium which are CRAVED by chickens.

 

[RobertPlamondon]

Quote:
I don't have any education in nutrition, but IMO, all of the hype about too much calcium for non laying birds is blown way out of proportion. If extra calcium found in layer ration were such an issue, we'd see lots of roosters keeling over dead, or requiring dialysis because of the "kidney damage" done by calcium over load. Not to mention... all of the leafy greens which are rich in calcium which are CRAVED by chickens.

Exactly. Theory is a wonderful thing -- but so are counter-examples.

In one book ... perhaps Leeson & Summers' Commercial Chicken Nutrition ... I encountered a table that summarized the effect of spreading henhouse litter on pasture year after year, plus a nutrient analysis of the litter. The calcium level of the soil kept going up. This, too, implies that much of the calcium fed to the hens passes right through them.

Robert

 

[lazy gardener]

Exactly. Theory is a wonderful thing -- but so are counter-examples.

In one book ... perhaps Leeson & Summers' Commercial Chicken Nutrition ... I encountered a table that summarized the effect of spreading henhouse litter on pasture year after year, plus a nutrient analysis of the litter. The calcium level of the soil kept going up. This, too, implies that much of the calcium fed to the hens passes right through them.

Robert

Were there any concerns expressed in this book about over fertilization of the soil from continued application of coop litter? Harvey Ussery does caution about continued overstocking of the poultry yard, and the resulting issues with manure run off and heavy nutrient loads. In the back yard flock, this is not likely to be an issue. But for the back yard poultry keeper who has a small yard, and keeps larger numbers of birds, this could become an issue, and is seldom talked about.

 

[RobertPlamondon]

Quote:
Concerns? I wouldn't say concerns, exactly. To a farmer, manure is money. If you over-manure a field, you:

1. Don't get the profit you'd get if you fertilized the field properly, so it's like burning hundred-dollar bills.
2. Might (depending on how soluble the excess nutrient are) have the nutrients run off into nearby streams, which is like choking fish with hundred-dollar bills.
3. Might (depending on the nutrient) eventually end up with soil with so much excess fertilization that nothing will grow, which is like using hundred-dollar bills as barrier cloth to keep your crops from germinating.

Which is not to say that lots of farmers don't do it wrong. If you have a few commercial broiler sheds, it takes a lot of acreage to turn all that litter into hundred-dollar bills. As the size of commodity poultry operations keeps going up, yesterday's well-balanced operation is now long on manure, and since commercial poultry farms tend to be clustered in the same area (near the processing facilities), you can even run out of other people's farms to spread the manure on. America's intensive poultry-growing regions used to be in areas of marginal or sub-marginal farmland, but these can't keep up with the manure, and the Midwest seems to be taking a bigger share now.

With backyard flocks, over-manuring can be a serious problem. Not only does the chicken run become barren due to an overload of manuring (plus the hens scratching the turf to death), but parasites do pretty well in this environment. Geoffrey Sykes promoted the "Henyard System" in the Fifties, with the idea of using a LOT of straw or wood chips in the yard, adding a LOT more if you ever saw mud, and removing all of it once a year, hopefully removing most of the nutrients and parasites, too. A small chicken run can absorb a surprising amount of litter this way, but not enough to overload a whole suburban lot, I wouldn't think.

Robert

 

[Patriot27025]

Quote:

There's also a feed you can buy called Flock Raiser. Purina makes it, but I'm sure there are other brands as well. Then you just have to offer the hens oyster shell, which I do even with layer feed.
Really, layer feed for everybody just seems the easiest way to go, IMO.

I do the same