Carbohydrate Loading Chickens Facing Long Cold Winter Night Using Shell Corn

centrarchid

Crossing the Road
14 Years
Sep 19, 2009
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Holts Summit, Missouri
Materials and Methods

Measure a known amount of standard feed you use into a bowl that birds are not likely to spill feed from and that you can pour feed out of after birds do to roost. Then have a second similar container that you can either place measured amount of same feed or shell corn. Allow birds free-choice access to first bowl of feed all day. At end of day introduce second bowl which has know amount of feed or shell corn. After birds go to roost, then pull both bowls and measure remaining contents of both separately.

I will be using black rubber bowls like purchased from TSC for about $5 each.

If I am correct, then birds fed the shelled corn at end of day will consume a similar amount of formulated feed as those fed only formulated feed plus consume shelled corn. If I am not correct, then the birds will not consume additional material relative to presenting the fresh formulated feed in second bowl.

My measures will be based on weight as I have a scale of appropriate size.

Therefore they will have consumed more calories. More calories is important during long and cold winter nights when crop depletion is likely to occur well before feed consumption resumes in the morning.

A little more detail needs to added concerning replication. I have only two pens that can be setup with two pullets each. Will have to repeat and switch treatment a pen gets on alternative nights. Ideally more pens would be used over more nights.
 
Above was come up with as method to test if we can get chickens to consume more calories during the course of a day. If works as planned, the birds interest in eating the corn will over ride the feeling of satiation imposed by eating a complete feed alone.
 
This will be interesting to watch. I have noticed that in really cold weather, sometimes my chickens eat considerably less.
Here they do at first as do as well, then once they acclimate to the cold, feed consumption gets much higher. With mine there is a predictable reduction in weight and change in behavior. Mine also come out of lay.

Test needs to be ran when conditions stable, not during the middle of a very stressful weather event. That is why great effort is made to control environment when doing feeding trials of smaller animals like chickens, or you run the trial for much longer periods of time.
 
Test needs to be ran when conditions stable, not during the middle of a very stressful weather event. That is why great effort is made to control environment when doing feeding trials of smaller animals like chickens, or you run the trial for much longer periods of time.
Going to be very hard to set up identical environments and birds to collect viable data....you might be able to do so, as you are familiar with conducting such trials, but others will not.

I believe the question that spurred this experiment was whether a crop full of corn keeps birds 'warmer' at night than a crop full of regular ration. I still posit that any digestion will keep them equally 'warm' and the better nutrition of the ration(often mostly corn anyway) is overall better for them than plain corn.

'Corn keeps them warm at night' is an old adage that will likely never die.
 
Going to be very hard to set up identical environments and birds to collect viable data....you might be able to do so, as you are familiar with conducting such trials, but others will not.

I believe the question that spurred this experiment was whether a crop full of corn keeps birds 'warmer' at night than a crop full of regular ration. I still posit that any digestion will keep them equally 'warm' and the better nutrition of the ration(often mostly corn anyway) is overall better for them than plain corn.

'Corn keeps them warm at night' is an old adage that will likely never die.

My assertion remains, birds can be induced to eat more of a highly palatable option (desert) follows the main course. That has been my assertion along and what likely stimulated what evolved into an incorrect concept. It needs to be clarified, not swept rug of IMO's.
 
I don’t know enough about how chickens metabolize feed to be certain.
In mammals, the order goes, sugars, carbohydrates, protein and last fats.
You can see the difference in fat consumption in the various regions of the world. Generally the colder the climate the higher the fat content of the diet.
If I wanted to ensure a supply of energy if time between feeds was particularly long I would be considering dense proteins and fat.
 
BOSS and live meal worms can be high fat options. This is simply exploiting a behavioral quirk where the birds will consume additional mass based on mixture of stimuli provided by the offering.
 

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