DIY Duck Feed vs DIY Chicken Feed

[NatJ]

Is it easier to grow your own duck feed or grow your own chicken feed? I don't have a ton of land to work with but not super small. I am trying to decide whether I want ducks or chickens, I don't have either. I live in a subtropical climate. Thanks!

I don't think ducks vs. chickens would make it much harder or easier.
I know more about chickens than about ducks, so I will mostly use them as examples for the rest of my post.

At a minimum, you would need to provide:
--enough energy (calories) per day. For an adult hen, this takes about 1/4 pound of commercial chicken food per day, or about 100 pounds per hen per year. Commercial chicken food is dry, made mostly of grain, and low in fiber. If you are feeding foods that contain water, or that contain more fiber, your birds will have need more pounds to get the same number of energy (calories).

--enough protein, including the correct mix of amino acids. Things like meat and fish usually have amino acids in a workable balance, but most plant sources are deficient in certain ones. This can get complicated, and I don't personally know enough details to say much more. Birds that are growing, molting, or laying eggs will need more protein than birds that are not. For example, a laying hen needs enough protein to make one egg in addition to the protein her body needs to stay healthy each day.

--the right amounts of vitamins and minerals. I know they need plenty of calcium but not too much, so providing it free-choice is a good way to let them choose the right amount. For the other vitamins and minerals, different ones are found in different foods, and I don't know enough to help with specific details.


Just checking whether you can produce enough calories might be a good starting point.
A google search tells me that many commercial chicken foods have about 1500 calories per pound. So if a hen were eating 100 pounds of them per year, she would be eating 150,000 calories per year. If your property cannot produce that many calories per year per hen, you will need to buy in food of some kind or another. If you can produce that many calories but they do not have the right balance of nutrients, you will still need to buy some things as supplements.

I was truly hoping but honestly I wondered if it would take too much room. Perhaps the best I can do is supplement.

One thing that works well for many people:
provide a feeder of a complete commercial feed free choice, and also provide free range and the things you grow. That way the chickens can fall back on the commercial feed if needed, and you don't have to do as much planning and ration-balancing.

Things like grass do not have many calories (mostly water and fiber), so your chickens might eat a surprisingly large amount of green plants without much change in how much commercial feed they need.

 

[happybird100]

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.

Your comment makes sense, however I have heard reports of more experienced chicken keepers having this problem and also people who have mixed age chickens. It does seem that more people don't have the problem vs do have it. It would be so easy for the corporations to change things (if not now, then in the future) and the food you rely on would be lessened or non-existent. I know this stuff is supposed to be checked but who knows whether they've been bought off or not. I am not necessarily saying this is so, I am just not sure that it isn't, or wouldn't happen in the future. Besides, what if they price the feed out of everyone's budget? Anyways, thanks for your comment

 

[happybird100]

I don't think ducks vs. chickens would make it much harder or easier.
I know more about chickens than about ducks, so I will mostly use them as examples for the rest of my post.

At a minimum, you would need to provide:
--enough energy (calories) per day. For an adult hen, this takes about 1/4 pound of commercial chicken food per day, or about 100 pounds per hen per year. Commercial chicken food is dry, made mostly of grain, and low in fiber. If you are feeding foods that contain water, or that contain more fiber, your birds will have need more pounds to get the same number of energy (calories).

--enough protein, including the correct mix of amino acids. Things like meat and fish usually have amino acids in a workable balance, but most plant sources are deficient in certain ones. This can get complicated, and I don't personally know enough details to say much more. Birds that are growing, molting, or laying eggs will need more protein than birds that are not. For example, a laying hen needs enough protein to make one egg in addition to the protein her body needs to stay healthy each day.

--the right amounts of vitamins and minerals. I know they need plenty of calcium but not too much, so providing it free-choice is a good way to let them choose the right amount. For the other vitamins and minerals, different ones are found in different foods, and I don't know enough to help with specific details.


Just checking whether you can produce enough calories might be a good starting point.
A google search tells me that many commercial chicken foods have about 1500 calories per pound. So if a hen were eating 100 pounds of them per year, she would be eating 150,000 calories per year. If your property cannot produce that many calories per year per hen, you will need to buy in food of some kind or another. If you can produce that many calories but they do not have the right balance of nutrients, you will still need to buy some things as supplements.



One thing that works well for many people:
provide a feeder of a complete commercial feed free choice, and also provide free range and the things you grow. That way the chickens can fall back on the commercial feed if needed, and you don't have to do as much planning and ration-balancing.

Things like grass do not have many calories (mostly water and fiber), so your chickens might eat a surprisingly large amount of green plants without much change in how much commercial feed they need.

I love your reply! Thank you for some ideas that I can use for calculations.
Will chickens go searching for food if they have feed already available? And also, how do I take into account free ranging?

 

[Meri Maura]

I was truly hoping but honestly I wondered if it would take too much room. Perhaps the best I can do is supplement.

No. The best you can do is feed your poultry commercial feed like you're supposed to.

 

[NatJ]

I love your reply! Thank you for some ideas that I can use for calculations.

As you probably noticed-- that was a bare-bones set of ideas, without all the details you would need to actually make it work.

Will chickens go searching for food if they have feed already available?

Yes. If you put a feeder of commercial feed in the coop or run, and open the door each morning to allow free ranging, the chickens will go out and forage for most of the day. If they find enough, they may not bother to come back and eat the commercial food at all. Most likely, they will come back and munch the commercial food a few times during the day, when they feel that they are not finding enough other food, and they will often use it to fill their crops right before bed.

Similar things happen if you keep them in the run, but the run has lots of compost for them to scratch through. They will spend large amounts of time scratching and foraging in the compost, and take a quick snack break with commercial food when they are hungry but not finding enough stuff in the compost.

And also, how do I take into account free ranging?

I have read of several possibilities. Here are the ones I can easily remember:

The easiest thing is to provide commercial food at all times, and let them go range as much as they like.


Another way I have read about, some people provide several feeds and let the chickens do some balancing for themselves. The usual options are grain (easy calories), a protein source, oyster shell, and probably something with a mix of vitamins & minerals. If the chickens are finding a lot of bugs, they eat less of the protein source. If they are finding a lot of easy calories, they eat less of the grain. (The protein source may be something like chopped meat, or cooked soybeans, or a purchased Game Bird starter, or any of quite a few other options.)

Depending on how you do this, you might end up with chickens who have some kind of deficiencies because there was a vitamin or mineral that you forgot to consider, that is lacking in what you provide (or even one of the amino acids.) They probably will get enough calories with such a system, so they will not entirely starve, but you will want to keep an eye on their health.


Some chicken feed recipes from about a century ago use a two-part feed. One part is whole grains (plenty of calories, but low protein, and deficient in a number of other things.) The other part is a ground mixture of protein source, vitamins and minerals, and a bit more grain. It is specifically balanced to work with the mixture of whole grains. The farmers would typically leave the protein mix available free choice, and feed a measured amount of grain each day so the hens ate the right proportion of each feed. Leaving both kinds of feed available free choice might work well in a free-range situation, although you would have to monitor whether the chickens liked one too much better than the other (eating the wrong proportions, in a way that does not match what you think they are getting in their ranging.)


There is a particular user on here who lets his birds free range, and gives them a measured amount of commercial feed each evening. He adjusts the amount of feed based on butchering chickens frequently, and looking at how much fat they have. (Chickens store most of their fat inside the body cavity where you cannot easily check it on the living bird.) You can search for threads started by @U_Stormcrow if you want more details. I know he has several threads that mention it (mixed in with other details of his projects.)

 

[U_Stormcrow]

@happybird100 Welcome to BYC.

The sad truth is that modern birds need a lot if they are going to produce to modern standards. Unless you have rather unique circumstances (good ground, good climate, lots of both, heavy equipment, and good storage) you can't produce what you need on your own property to fully support your birds at optimum nutrition. If you have all those things, there are FAR more economically productive uses of your land, and you will never approach commercial economies of scale.

You can - with good climate or good land or lots of land - "bend the cost curve" somewhat by free ranging on a property that is either devoted to producing a monocuture of an expensive key ingredient you can then support with cheaper ingredients (like if you could plant and store an acre or three of hard winter wheat each year), or you can plant a polyculture with a mix of greens to take a more generalized approach, and count on seasonal reductions in total food consumption - then provide a realy high quality (nutritionally) commercial feed - because there is no way to be certain about what they are getting nutritionally from their ranging. You can make educated guesses, but that's as good as it gets.

I've not made a great study of duck feed (though I have a few). It mostly, apart from the extra niacin needs and some high level protein concerns, parallels chicken feed needs. Extreme protein levels aren't gong to come from a food plot, so the big difference is the extra niacin. I'm sure I could quickly look up good sources, so not difficult, but one more concern than feeding chickens, so on that basis, chickens are easier.

and yes, I'm happy to share what I think I'm doing right, why I think that, and what I know I'm doing wrong, so others need not repeat my mistakes. Hope that helps some.

I do feed once daily (in the evening, to encourage them to come back home to roost) a high nutrition commercial feed to my whole flock, then they free range acres of polyculture all day - and I do cull routinely to better judge how much to feed them. Their behavior tells you some, but the insides don't lie.

This will give you an idea of some of the things in my pasture, pros and cons.
and this is my culling project

ands I'm VERY active on the feed forums. One of the stronger voices against "make at home" efforts on basis of cost and nutrition both. Search my name, lots of answers to the common questions, often links to sources.

 

[happybird100]

@happybird100 Welcome to BYC.

The sad truth is that modern birds need a lot if they are going to produce to modern standards. Unless you have rather unique circumstances (good ground, good climate, lots of both, heavy equipment, and good storage) you can't produce what you need on your own property to fully support your birds at optimum nutrition. If you have all those things, there are FAR more economically productive uses of your land, and you will never approach commercial economies of scale.

You can - with good climate or good land or lots of land - "bend the cost curve" somewhat by free ranging on a property that is either devoted to producing a monocuture of an expensive key ingredient you can then support with cheaper ingredients (like if you could plant and store an acre or three of hard winter wheat each year), or you can plant a polyculture with a mix of greens to take a more generalized approach, and count on seasonal reductions in total food consumption - then provide a realy high quality (nutritionally) commercial feed - because there is no way to be certain about what they are getting nutritionally from their ranging. You can make educated guesses, but that's as good as it gets.

I've not made a great study of duck feed (though I have a few). It mostly, apart from the extra niacin needs and some high level protein concerns, parallels chicken feed needs. Extreme protein levels aren't gong to come from a food plot, so the big difference is the extra niacin. I'm sure I could quickly look up good sources, so not difficult, but one more concern than feeding chickens, so on that basis, chickens are easier.

and yes, I'm happy to share what I think I'm doing right, why I think that, and what I know I'm doing wrong, so others need not repeat my mistakes. Hope that helps some.

I do feed once daily (in the evening, to encourage them to come back home to roost) a high nutrition commercial feed to my whole flock, then they free range acres of polyculture all day - and I do cull routinely to better judge how much to feed them. Their behavior tells you some, but the insides don't lie.

This will give you an idea of some of the things in my pasture, pros and cons.
and this is my culling project

ands I'm VERY active on the feed forums. One of the stronger voices against "make at home" efforts on basis of cost and nutrition both. Search my name, lots of answers to the common questions, often links to sources.

Thank you for taking the time to comment. I understand that the chances of being able to completely feed chickens without store bought feed are very low. I do have a year round growing season but the soil is sand. I would ask your opinion on how much free ranging could be done for 6 or 7 chickens on 1/8 of an acre? I already have a few problems simply because some of that land is open front yard near a street. No opportunity to plant trees either. But this is not including garden space, and I would probably throw the compost pile in the chicken run. I am assuming at the very least I will have to offer conventional food once a day. Since you mention modern birds, should I try to get some kind of heritage breed of chicken?

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Thank you for taking the time to comment. I understand that the chances of being able to completely feed chickens without store bought feed are very low. I do have a year round growing season but the soil is sand. I would ask your opinion on how much free ranging could be done for 6 or 7 chickens on 1/8 of an acre? I already have a few problems simply because some of that land is open front yard near a street. No opportunity to plant trees either. But this is not including garden space, and I would probably throw the compost pile in the chicken run. I am assuming at the very least I will have to offer conventional food once a day. Since you mention modern birds, should I try to get some kind of heritage breed of chicken?

I'll come back to this after work. I also have sand soils (and clay - "GA Red"), acres. zone 8A - its pretty forgiving. The answer is "not much". I can bend my cost curve 15-30%, seasonally dependent.

Also, in the main "heritage chickens" are more like modern birds, because most of the heritage birds you are likely to get nowadays comes by way of a commercial hatchery - which has focused on egg production, because they sell day old chicks - for decades. They may be heritage breeds, but they are not (mostly) our great grandparent's chickens.

Unless you want to look at jungle hens - long lanky, flighty, infrequent layers, limited meat, generally smaller eggs than many of the Mediterannean breeds - there you might get something with significantly lesser needs, and lesser production expectations.

 

[NatJ]

Also, in the main "heritage chickens" are more like modern birds, because most of the heritage birds you are likely to get nowadays comes by way of a commercial hatchery - which has focused on egg production, because they sell day old chicks - for decades. They may be heritage breeds, but they are not (mostly) our great grandparent's chickens.

Unless you want to look at jungle hens - long lanky, flighty, infrequent layers, limited meat, generally smaller eggs than many of the Mediterannean breeds - there you might get something with significantly lesser needs, and lesser production expectations.

Some of the bantams from hatcheries might be a possibility, too.
They generally lay much less well than the standard breeds.
I would avoid feathered feet, crested heads, and other odd features.
But something like Old English Game Bantams might do fairly well. (Despite the name, they are not "game" in the sense of roosters fighting each other. They should be able to live like any other normal chicken.)

 

[happybird100]

I'll come back to this after work. I also have sand soils (and clay - "GA Red"), acres. zone 8A - its pretty forgiving. The answer is "not much". I can bend my cost curve 15-30%, seasonally dependent.

Also, in the main "heritage chickens" are more like modern birds, because most of the heritage birds you are likely to get nowadays comes by way of a commercial hatchery - which has focused on egg production, because they sell day old chicks - for decades. They may be heritage breeds, but they are not (mostly) our great grandparent's chickens.

Unless you want to look at jungle hens - long lanky, flighty, infrequent layers, limited meat, generally smaller eggs than many of the Mediterannean breeds - there you might get something with significantly lesser needs, and lesser production expectation

I would've expected better feed savings, but that is helpful to know what to expect. Plus your setup would most likely be more optimal than mine. Are you able to save appreciable amounts on feed using other methods in addition to free ranging?

Some of the bantams from hatcheries might be a possibility, too.
They generally lay much less well than the standard breeds.
I would avoid feathered feet, crested heads, and other odd features.
But something like Old English Game Bantams might do fairly well. (Despite the name, they are not "game" in the sense of roosters fighting each other. They should be able to live like any other normal chicken.)

I have thought about Egyptian Fayoumi, Rhode Island Reds, or Leghorns, though I haven't done much research on them yet. I figure priority is working out feed and coop issues. I was considering the Fayoumi since they can take heat, but the other two are a lot more common. Also the assorted mix from the Sand Hill Preservation Center is rather attractive, so with that one I'd get a variety and see what works best.
I looked up bantams and read they need a pound of feed a month? Sounds shockingly low... But I am not sure they lay enough eggs, I'd have to get at least double the number of chickens I was thinking of.