Commercial Poison (err... "Feed")

[U_Stormcrow]

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.)

Yes, and when the cell signal gets bad, the remote server doesn't recognize I'm asking for punctuation.

 

[NatJ]

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

I noticed that @U_Stormcrow keeps mentioning that ingredients do not always have the same nutrient levels. For example:

Even if you grow it yourself, unless you have it assayed, you can't know what the nutritional values of any particular crop are. At best, you can rely on broadly reported averages, accepting that what comes off your soil may be consistently substantially better, or substantially worse, across a host of nutritional metrics than the average. I.e, if your soil is low in selenium, your crops will be low in selenium, and your feed will then be low in selenium. Consistently. Otoh, if you plant a high protein wheat crop, or a low tannin pea crop, chances are good your crops will better the averages for those metrics.

Mills, on the other hand, do have crops assayed (at least the good ones)

 

[Goosebaby]

Here’s another issue many who buy layer feed might not consider as well as those mixing their own feed.

Calcium can inhibit iron absorption and visa-versa. Normally this doesn’t pose much of an issue and it’s pretty negligible with a healthy diet. But if one were to be taking calcium supplements or administering it often to another it can lead to anemia.

Layer feed eliminates a bird from choosing free choice calcium intake, so if one were to feed a flock low protein layer feed with no supplementation for a period of time it’s possible for iron absorption to be hindered and the flock to gradually become anemic, which will cause a host of problems.

If that feed is also old it’s nutrient content is also degrading, so on top of possible anemia other vitamin deficiencies are also appearing.


If it’s hard to put into perspective what that would do to a hen’s egg production let’s look at what that would do to a human female. It’s a strange comparison but not entirely dissimilar.

Iron deficiency anemia causes infertility in women. Any nutritional deficiency will also cause infertility in women of it worsens enough.
In fact if a woman’s weight drops low enough “anorexia” her menstrual cycle will stop as her body is actively struggling to keep itself alive and will focus on diverting energy to life essential organs rather than the reproductive organs.

Now even if her weight is in the range of normal she can still be anemic from one deficiency or another, her body isn’t able to produce cells at a normal rate which is what causes her infertility. Vitamin and nutrient deficiencies can occur wether a person appears healthy or not.

Now a human egg is smaller than a pin head, a medium sized chicken egg is around an oz in weight, coming from a 4 to 10-ish pound bird, so the rigors of producing a chicken egg are rather extreme compared to the production of a human egg, and yet vitamin and iron deficiency can have such extreme implications in human fertility, so what about a hen? The same thing applies.

In other words if you’re feeding your flock an old bag of low protein cheap layer feed you’re essentially just feeding them a calcium supplement with filler, and hens don’t lay eggs by magic and intentions alone.

Besides that hens and humans can be affected reproductively in surprisingly similar ways from similar cases.
Severe enough sicknesses will halt the reproductive process until the body has recovered.
Genetics and age can also play a role obviously.
Bacterial infections can affect fertility. Inflammation of the ovarian tubes from corona viruses like IBV and Covid can substantial affects of fertility. Many Mycoplasmas do as well.
If you have a prized hen that has become an internal layer as a result of any of those the answer to saving you feather child’s life is an annual expensive implant that halts egg creation through hormonal alterations or dangerous surgical procedures to spay the hen. A magic pill, “basically the pill for birds” sadly doesn’t exist yet or anyone who’s had a valued and loved hen or parrot with these problems would already have them on it. There is no magic pill to make a hen stop laying, and if there were it probably would be too cost prohibitive to put it in bagged feed and like I said before, it isn’t in a companies interest or welfare to be intentially selling feed that causes hens to stop laying.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

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

I'm not ignoring them.

I've alluded to them above, and in many other posts.

I submit that the rational animal, knowing that agricultural products are inherently variable from place to place, season to season, year to year, as well as within broad divisions within the product (i.e. "hard" wheat vs "soft" wheat, or the various kinds of millets), determines an acceptable range and seeks to ensure that the averages for those products combine in ways that exceed one's minimum nutritional targets, so that when a ingredient inevitably fails to meet average nutritional levels, the product produced in part with that ingredient may yet do so. Such a rational actor is also aware of the range of variability with her or his ingredients, and seeks not to place all of one's proverbial eggs into a single basket for a given nutrient.

It is irrational to me, understanding that inherent agricultral variability, to throw ones's hands in the air at the impossbility of knowing any particular batch's exact nurtritional assay (absent test), and instead assume that everything's fine, why bother to even make the effort?

But again, that's a level of understanding, a balance of risk taking, of nuance completely missing from the beans and pasta chicken feed recipe circulating this month, or the little girl on her farm who cant do algebra popular last month (and last summer), or the February "wisdom" of feeding oats and corn to increase crude protein levels.

 

[Perris]

I noticed that @U_Stormcrow keeps mentioning that ingredients do not always have the same nutrient levels. For example:

yes, but it seems to me he emphasizes it only in the context of making one's own feed, and not in the context of a random bag of commercial feed.

 

[Perris]

to throw ones's hands in the air at the impossbility of knowing any particular batch's exact nurtritional assay (absent test), and instead assume that everything's fine, why bother to even make the effort?

But again, that's a level of understanding, a balance of risk taking, of nuance completely missing from the beans and pasta chicken feed recipe circulating this month, or the little girl on her farm who cant do algebra popular last month (and last summer), or the February "wisdom" of feeding oats and corn to increase crude protein levels.

Did this appear earlier in the thread?

 

[21hens-incharge]

To be fair there are about 30 active discussion threads on this matter. It would be difficult at best to remember exactly where each post is.

I for one am not going to dig up decades old issues that happened on other continents to do research on anything.

The feed debate comes up yearly as chickens take winter breaks. This year it was fueled and fanned by YouTube click bait and a heightened sense of public panic.

There are a multitude of reasons chickens stop laying.

 

[NatJ]

yes, but it seems to me he emphasizes it only in the context of making one's own feed, and not in the context of a random bag of commercial feed.

He does say (including in one of the bits I quoted) that some commercial mills test the ingredients.

For people who cannot test the ingredients, the obvious workaround is to just work with the worst numbers for each ingredient. Use the lowest number for things like protein, and the highest number for anything that is dangerous in excess. If both ends of the range matter (like for salt), do the math both ways and make sure it is within the safe range. Feed manufacturers could do that too, although it is probably cheaper for them to test the ingredients than to maybe use extra of the more expensive ones, given that they are making large batches of feed.

In the USA, animal feeds have a "guaranteed analysis" tag that lists the minimum of some things (example: protein) and the maximum of some other things (example: fiber.) Some things list both a maximum and a minimum (example: salt). I assume the manufacturer is free to exceed those numbers, but can have trouble if they are caught short--at a bare minimum, it would violate laws about false advertising, to "guarantee" something and then not actually provide it.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

Here is the deal - who really cares what the OP thinks? By feeling a need to squash something we don't believe is true, we are discrediting the the fact that people can make their own educated decisions.

The OP’s account and postings had all the earmarks of being a bot or troll. There is a high likelihood the original postings were not sincere at all.

I submit there was no evidence poster was interested in education, merely regurgitating a broadly discredited worldview which persists in spite of plausible motive, plausible method, plausible means. Even "Mike" whose self-aggrandizing media empire I won't link here, who helped spread the conspiracy theory has backed away from it, after his award winning (technically true) lab found nothing wrong, and he admitted he didn't understand enough to read the results.

I am reasonably convinced this entire conspiracy theory was engineered by Purina’s and TS’s competitors and masterfully spread to a willing audience.

Make no mistake people, shadow, negative, social media campaigns between competing businesses is a very real thing and its been around for as long as internet message boards have existed. I used to collect trail cameras as a hobby and was heavily involved in a community of trail camera reviewers. It was very common for representatives of various camera brands to pose as regular people and offer fake negative reviews of their competitor’s products. That was 20 years ago. Today I’m sure there are many firms that employ hundreds of people and thousands of bots to offer fake antedates to the benefit of the highest bidder.

 

[BastyPutt]

The OP’s account and postings had all the earmarks of being a bot or troll. There is a high likelihood the original postings were not sincere at all.



I am reasonably convinced this entire conspiracy theory was engineered by Purina’s and TS’s competitors and masterfully spread to a willing audience.

Make no mistake people, shadow, negative, social media campaigns between competing businesses is a very real thing and its been around for as long as internet message boards have existed. I used to collect trail cameras as a hobby and was heavily involved in a community of trail camera reviewers. It was very common for representatives of various camera brands to pose as regular people and offer fake negative reviews of their competitor’s products. That was 20 years ago. Today I’m sure there are many firms that employ hundreds of people and thousands of bots to offer fake antedates to the benefit of the highest bidder.

I don't doubt this at all and I know I have generally been the bad guy in the thread, or a bad guy, but honestly I doubt that there is anything to it.

Similar to what you said, every single company has a cabal, people behind the scenes making decisions that people don't want to make. Even nonprofits have donors whose interest they need to keep in mind - every single decision is influenced by something, and I think where the public has divided is whether or not you trust those decisions are being made in our best interest.

In terms of getting information on the internet, you can find two different opposing theorys for the same problem, both from credible sources. The internet just isn't credible.

Ultimately credibility is personal experience. If you've had a negative experience, and have the need to share - the presentation is everything. Opinions v statement of fact. If that makes sense. Getting on here and saying, "I had a bad lay on TSC pellet" is different than "TSC caused a bad lay". There could be 100's of reasons why it was bad.

Side note - I can believe something like TSC making a bad batch, but believing commerical feed was all simultaneously affected causing a nationwide shortage is so far reaching that even me, a "conspiracy theorist", thinks that is impossible. I thought we were just referring to backyard flocks.