I should've mentioned there is some room to free range, though I have no idea how long that would last. I would think free ranging and some legumes would work?
How come? Not enough room? On a side note, does this apply to chickens also?
That's not enough. Unless you have roving flocks of feral chickens, there isn't enough nutrition in the environment to support them.
Hmmm... I was hoping to grow something. I wouldn't care so much except I heard tractor supply's chicken feed not having the right nutrients. How much can you really trust these companies anyway. Even if I did cook the beans, would they be able to eat them on an everyday basis?
If you want to make your own feed, you need multiple acres for each bird, an extremely biodiverse plant load and plenty of insects and small animals the birds can eat. Not to mention all the vitamins and minerals that they need. You also need the birds from a hundred years ago, that are more forgiving when it comes to nutrition
I was truly hoping but honestly I wondered if it would take too much room. Perhaps the best I can do is supplement.
The tractor suppy/purina food conversation is pretty heavy on here but I think it's overdone. A company is allowed to change ingredients to make a product as long as the analysis is the same and they put it on the label, which they have. The other conversation is about lower methionine and lysine level in recent foods. It's still at a level that is recommended on most nutrition pages, but yes it has been lowered in a few foods. Another problem is in the organic foods those two amino acids have to be added to the food and the rules for what can be used and still be called organic is getting trickier. As the fules get tighter is will really be an issue. It's all based on birds not laying like they think they should. When you mix in tons of new bird keepers, genetic lines of birds that may not be breed for strong health and strong egg laying, crappy weather, stressful conditions and you get groups of people looking at the food as the cause to the problem. I have just added Saxony to my collection and I pulled from three different sources to get lots of genetic stock to work with. None of them have decent egg laying or egg size that the breed is expected to have. When a flock is not selectively bred correctly it can lose things like that. I'll get off my soap box now.
