Everyone, post your best homemade chicken feed recipes!

[ChickensAreSweet]

Boo-Boo's Mama :

Bought a small bag of split peas today to feed the girls. Can they handle as is without cooking or grinding? Are they high in protein? Thought I might mix with their BOSS.

Yes, split peas are part of my mix. They eat them, but they don't really like them. I have to be careful not to put too much food in their feeders or the stuff they don't like ends up on the ground. I try to put out *just a little bit* more than I know they will eat.

They are 24.5% protein. Google it to be sure though. Lord knows I've been wrong by looking at the wrong website before on protein percentages of foods. Some websites offer dramatically different percentages.​

 

[digitS']

Quote:
Right you are!

At least, according to the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference.

. . . probably, a fairly trustworthy source.

Steve

 

[dsc6]

I howled with laughter when I read the * One chicken needs 2 eggs and one oatmeal raisen cookie per day* post. Really funny. Just a little poke of fun at the serious responders to the thread.

But, my God, you never know if someone is going to take it seriously.....

 

[dsc6]

I just put my mix together. I only have 7 chickens, so I didn't feel I had to worry about the % each ingredients. Those of you who do this carefully must be horrified, but what I didn't include in science, I made up for in quality, I think. To this mix, I add yogurt, seed sprouts, fresh fruit like cranberries, and fresh vegs, like squash. Instead of yogurt, sometimes I use chopped sardines, cottage cheese, raw milk. They free-range part of each day.


whole oats
whole hulled barley
whole hard red winter wheat
whole spelt
a mixture of whole amaranth, teff, and millet (all tiny)
whole quinoa
high-quality non-GMO TVP (texturized vegetable protein) this is soy--I didn't put much of this in.
chopped dried kelp
nutritional yeast
whole flax seeds
hulled sunflower seeds
hulled pumpkin seeds
alfalfa meal
food-grade DE

I don't worry about protein, even if I don't add the yogurt/meat/fish/milk.


What do you all think?

 

[dsc6]

Would sprouting the grains, or some of the grains, significantly improve this mix? The key word here is 'significantly'. as sprouting the majority of my mix would greatly add to the time/work involved. Maybe I could just sprout some grains with my other sprouting, and throw that in. I won't be sprouting all of the grains.....

I especially would like the reponse of Organic North.

thanks.

P.S. I think one of the strengths of this mix is the organic quinoa. Also the nutritional yeast is a real winner in terms of nutrition. I'm lucky to have a source of organic hulled sunflower seeds.

 

[ChickensAreSweet]

Quote:
Very high quality ingredients, looks like! You can save yourself money and use BOSS, though, instead of the hulled sunflower seeds. I used to buy those too. Also just regular pumpkin seeds - the kind for squirrels- works fine. Even my bantams eat them.

I have dropped alfalfa meal from my recipe because they WOULD NOT eat it- unless I made a mash with it and mixed it with oats. They chose to STARVE the last half of a day rather than finish their alfalfa meal. Now I have fed them wheat bran and powdery stuff before- so it wasn't that it was powdery. They acted like it wasn't food. It didn't smell very good either- not moldy- just not appealing.

I have switched to rolled oats and rolled barley (from the feed store) and I think my chickens like it better than whole (field) oats.

Is your quinoa cleaned for human use? There is a bitter outer component.

I don't expect you to answer my questions. I am just offering you food for thought.

Very nice!!!

I have my recipe on my BYC page if you want to see my latest version.

 

[dsc6]

Yeah, the saponins are washed off at the source, because they are intended for human use. My Co-op only carries the washed version. You actually have to go out of your way to order unwashed quinoa.

I think this is true. I'm going to try to sprout my quinoa. If it sprouts, that means it wasn't washed. If it doesn't sprout, it was washed.

My chickens LOVE,LOVE,LOVE steel-cut oats. About their favorite, besides meat. I use it as treat-scratch.

I avoid picking and choosing by usually mixing it up with yogurt or cottage cheese or something else wet.

 

[dsc6]

I'll have to see about the alfalfa meal. I never used it before, but continually saw it in recipes. I happen to have some I bought to be an organic fertilizer in my garden. I hope I haven't ruined my just-mixed mix by adding the alfalfa meal. I had never mixed all the ingredients before; I have been just grabbing a handful of this and a handful of that. Just today I mixed it all up.

I include unhulled BOSS in the scratch. My scratch is hulled BOSS, unhulled BOSS, steel-cut oats, and whole kernel corn. They eat it in this order: find all the steel-cut oats they can, then pick out the hulled BOSS, then eat the unhulled BOSS, then maybe they eat the corn.

I am sadly finding that they don't like hulled or unhulled pumpkin seeds...what's THAT about??

I might try using my grain grinder to grind my mix up--just enough for a couple of days so the grain oils don't start to go rancid. I can't imagine them not eating any part of it that is mixed with yogurt, milk, etc.

 

[dsc6]

ChickensAreSweet,

I like your recipe. Thanks for posting it.

 

[Mrs. Fluffy Puffy]

Here is what I'm feeding my Flock(s) :
4 Scoops of Wheat Seed
1 Scoop of Layer Pellets
1 Scoop of Grower Crumbles
My older flock free ranges just about everyday. They get kitchen scraps and they also eat a ton of wheat sprouts. We have a wheat field right behind my chicken pen(s) and the chickens spend most of their day eating the wheat.