Emergency for me, Caught Disease, Need a Cure!

[mudderhen]

I may give that a try as well. It sounds interesting. There is no grass in the chicken lot, but there is in the back yard where the dogs are. I run the dogs out periodically and let the chickens run and eat grass, but then they want out there even when the dogs are out there, and the dogs would kill them. This may be an alternative.
If the alfalfa pellets are that big, why not put a handful or two into the blender nad chop them a little finer for the chickens? I may try that just to see if that works.

 

[Smoky73]

The first time I got alfalfa pellets they were like the large ones, 2 inches long, etc. This time they are the size of rabbit pellets. I just take whatever size they are and put them into warm water, ALOT of it, I must say and rehydrate. I then mix them with some other stuff, and they LOVE IT!

 

[Mahonri]

With alfalfa, the hens will usually only eat the leave flakes and they leave the stalks.

I think I'm going to buy some of those alfalfa pellets next time I'm at the feed store.

 

[mudderhen]

That's cool. As soon as I can get DH by the feed store, I will have him pick some up. The feather babies should like that. Thanks all!

 

[MandyH]

The place that we buy our feed from gets all his feed from a mill about 40 minutes south of us. So they make all the feed we get and the alfalfa pellets are about the same size as the layer pellets. If chickens can eat a whole piece of corn they can eat alflafa pellets. But I will warn you , if you put them in the blender you will have allergy problems again. They make a horrible dust. You can let them get a tiny bit damp and they do puff up and fall apart. I give all our animals alfalfa pellets in the winter when the grass is dead, everybody loves them. I think that's one of the reasons I get eggs with such deep orange yolks.

 

[ewesfullchicks]

I'm very interested to hear how chickens do with alfalfa pellets. I'm "scared" of them, because they've caused frothy bloat (once fatal despite vet. intervention) with my sheep, and I was warned not to feed them to my llama too. However, they ARE an ingredient of my layer pellets.

HOWEVER swapping notes with other sheep people - no one had a problem feeding bales of alfalfa hay - so I did last year. OMG it was like animal crack!

Everyone went nuts for it - the sheep, the goats, and the chickens! I had to keep protecting the bales from the chickens - they'd blissfully scratch around in it all day - like it was cat nip! They would ignore the layer ration in favor of "helping" the livestock with the alfalfa.

Now I have a fat horse, so I won't be feeding it this year.