Feed foulup HELP PLEASE

Lilalienangel

Songster
Aug 28, 2019
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My chickens needed food and since I was low on funds my husband offered to buy me food on his Amazon account. Well I got it today and he accidentally bought scratch! They ran out completly last night so I need food and don't have time to return it. My chicks are 9 weeks old and 9% protein I know won't cut it. What can I add to round out out?? If it helps I do ferment my seed. I have access to alot of oat meal. This is what I ended up getting.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006VGI3WE/?tag=backy-20
 

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You can always give them tuna or canned cat food for the protein. I would feed them the scratch and the tuna or cat food, making sure they have access to grit. Get the correct food as soon as possible. Mistakes happen and this one is easy to fix!
 
Goodness, so you have scratch, oats, and seeds? Basically, all you have is chicken candy at this point. Sounds like you'd be better off going out to the store and buying some high-protein canned cat food for your chicks, until you can get some real chicken feed. This is a very temporary fix that would only be good for a day or so until you can some real feed.
 
You might try reaching out to your local community via Facebook or Craigslist - that's some fancy stuff your husband ordered, you might be able to trade it out for chick starter, grower/finisher, or all-flock feed. The question is, how long until you can get the right feed - days or weeks?
Meanwhile, give them cooked eggs, any meat you've got on hand, tuna, canned corn, yogurt, oatmeal, cauliflower, plus grit to help digestion.
 
Looking at the high quality of that seed, I'd personally plant it in a space that the chickens will get access to later on, after the "garden" is established. I wouldn't even try to sort through those seeds, just loosen the soil, scatter the seeds and give the earth a gentle toss over the seeds and see what comes up. That ought to make excellent foraging for them after it's established! The trick will be to get it firmly established before you chickens have access to it, as they will eat it roots and all if given the opportunity. If you don't have an area that you can fence off to plant these, you can build a 2x4 wooden frame with the 4" side being top to bottom, then attach hardware cloth to one side, like a picture frame, that you can lay over your planted seeds. This will give you 4 inches of growth to figure out what your next move to securing this area should be.

As for the predicament at hand; a small bag of dry cat foot smashed up with a rolling pin or moistened until soft, will cover their needs for a few days until you can get some real food for them. Cat food it typically 30% protein (a good thing for your birds), but the amino acids aren't balanced to be ideal for chickens. Moistening the food would enable you to easily 'fortify' it with canned fish (pick whatever one is cheap in your area) packed in oil (the extra calories won't hurt the chicks and the oil may have some key nutrients to offer as well).

Your dear husband spent dearly on your beloved flock... I can buy plain old scratch for cheap, dirt cheap... but then mine wouldn't be whole grain, organic luxury. Your husband is a keeper, even if he bought the wrong stuff, he was totally invested in getting your chicks 'the good stuff'.
 
And if you keep the fancy scratch, you might look into sprouting it and/or growing fodder - won't help today, but you can have sprouts in 3-4 days usually, fodder in a week or so. I believe it changes the protein content, and makes it easier to digest, and fodder provides greens.
Yes yes, but... if she plants it, she can have that all the time :p
 

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