Commercial Poison (err... "Feed")

[21hens-incharge]

My knowledge of BSE and CJD is limited so I will refrain from commenting on those.

If we used my flock as the sample group for Purina feeds the results would be stellar as my birds including high production breeds average a 7 year life span and continue to lay up until their last year.
My results show Purina has no issues.

With my own flock and my 30 years of chicken keeping I would say I have experience.

My experience tells me to keep doing what I am doing.

 

[Perris]

I am delighted to hear it. But things can and do go wrong for some people in some places. For example, "A number of food and animal-feed contamination incidents occurred between 1997 and 2010 in Europe, and these highlighted the need to monitor dioxins and PCBs in food and feed (Zennegg, 2018). An outbreak involving dioxin and PCBs in animal feeds occurred in Belgium in 1999 (van Larebeke et al., 2001)."

 

[Perris]

Or "in Germany in 2010 when illegal use of industrial oils led to fats used for animal feed becoming contaminated with dioxin (Kupferschmidt, 2011). Other examples include the use of furazolidone in animal feed and the melamine crisis in China in 2008 (Chen, 2009; Pei et al., 2011)."

 

[Goosebaby]

Hi Max

Don't be deterred. Sometimes folks on here get really upset when status quo is in question, kind of like anywhere else.

We have been feeding our hens and broilers alike feed that we mix here on the farm for 8 years. I've learned not to share it openly here. Happy to send it to you privately if you'd like, just let me know. It is more expensive if you want to go this route, but pretty negligible in the long run.

And I encourage your desire to question your chickens feed, as well as your own "feed". Talking about conspiracies and questioning companies is what helps keeps a free state free - spreading things that you know to be untrue is where the line should be drawn - which I certainly don't think is the case here.

It seems to be that you’re most upset about people voicing different opinions to the point that you like stamping people with labels to get others to ignore them.

Freedom of speech goes both ways, it shouldn’t be silenced when it doesn’t fit with your agenda. People sharing facts aren’t threatening your freedoms. Behaving as you have in this forum does.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

No one is saying that you can't get a bad bag, or a bad batch of commercial feed. No one is saying that the feed you bought may not have gone bad because it was stored too long or stored improperly. No one is saying that some supplier of your feed ingredients may not have tried to cut a corner and adulterated the feed with something you don't want, something potentially dangerous to your birds. No one is saying that commercial producers of feed don't occasionally make mistakes.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

But all of those things are equally possible with everyone of the feed ingredients making feed at home. And unlike the commercial mills, you cannot separately assay your ingredients comma or test them for acceptable levels of mold mildew toxins etc.

What many have said, myself included, is that one should not abandon use of commercial feed because one saw a video on YouTube or Mike Adams page, or tick-tock or Facebook claiming some vast conspiracy to adulterate chicken feed with some magical chemical that makes them stop laying by the biggest producers of commercial feed on the planet period a chemical which is somehow almost 100% effective, can't be detected in any common tests comma has no other obvious health effect, and is so cheap that it is cost-effective to do so period

some of us, myself included, have strongly hinted that if the extent of one's knowledge of poultry nutrition comes from a Mike Adams video, a teenage YouTuber who can't do algebra, or a tick tock video shared on Facebook, that one lacks the necessary knowledge base to make feed effectively for the health of your chickens. The vast majority of recipes being tossed around can't even accurately report their crude protein levels. If they can't get that one claim correct, why should any educated person assume they accidentally got fat fiber useful energy calcium phosphorus iron selenium a host of water soluble and fat soluble vitamins and a number of trace minerals correct, to say nothing of an efficient amino acid profile, and a a minimal level of anti-nutrative factors to compensate for?

 

[Perris]

there are a lot of intermediate positions that seem to get lost in this polemic. Straw men don't help resolve any argument.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

And a final thought. You don't have to feed exclusively commercial feed. I don't myself. But if you don't know what you're doing, you probably should.

 

[Perris]

One could be forgiven for thinking that one can calculate everything, ignoring the inherent variability that exists in the nutritional levels of all these ingredients. See e.g.
https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templ...uments/upload/Poster_potato_nutrient_comp.pdf

 

[NatJ]

But all of those things are equally possible with everyone of the feed ingredients making feed at home. And unlike the commercial mills, you cannot separately assay your ingredients comma or test them for acceptable levels of mold mildew toxins etc.

What many have said, myself included, is that one should not abandon use of commercial feed because one saw a video on YouTube or Mike Adams page, or tick-tock or Facebook claiming some vast conspiracy to adulterate chicken feed with some magical chemical that makes them stop laying by the biggest producers of commercial feed on the planet period a chemical which is somehow almost 100% effective, can't be detected in any common tests comma has no other obvious health effect, and is so cheap that it is cost-effective to do so period

some of us, myself included, have strongly hinted that if the extent of one's knowledge of poultry nutrition comes from a Mike Adams video, a teenage YouTuber who can't do algebra, or a tick tock video shared on Facebook, that one lacks the necessary knowledge base to make feed effectively for the health of your chickens. The vast majority of recipes being tossed around can't even accurately report their crude protein levels. If they can't get that one claim correct, why should any educated person assume they accidentally got fat fiber useful energy calcium phosphorus iron selenium a host of water soluble and fat soluble vitamins and a number of trace minerals correct, to say nothing of an efficient amino acid profile, and a a minimal level of anti-nutrative factors to compensate for?

Are you using a talk-to-text feature? I see the words "comma" and "period" several times in places that I would expect to see the actual punctuation marks. (This question has nothing to do with the overall topic, just curiosity.)