Feed Prices

[doublejfarm]

I found some old threads on here talking about feed prices but they were from like 2009. What's it going for per 100 now? I am talking the good 24% + stuff ??? I am thinking I will get a way better price at the local country feed store where they mill their own. TSC seems really high. Also do I feed the same thing the entire time? Or do I use "STARTER" first anthem switch somewhere along the line?.

 

[Bluff Country Chicken]

In my neck of the woods, it's $23.90/100 from co-op elevator and $26 from Farm Fleet for 21%.

 

[Fred's Hens]

Feed has been heading north for the last few years. Used to pay $9.50 a 50# just a year or so ago and now my elevator is up to $10.95 for their own grind and $13.99 for a "name brand". With grains, led by corn, reaching new heights, there's not much good news to report. Don't forget to factor in higher and higher oil prices as all this stuff requires oil to be produced on the farms and trucked.

 

[itsy]

I'm buying Southern States "Sporting Bird Flight Developer" also known as by my feed store to be "Poultry Game Starter Unmedicated" Crumbles. 50lb bag. 22% protein. $16.99.

 

[crj]

Prices have gotten out of control. Mostly because the government wants corn, soy, and just about every other grain to go to ethenal for gas. The other is the fact that the government sold a butt load of grain outside the US. With the drought in the south and mid west that will cut produce even more. Prices are going to just keep going up. I don't know......... maybe we will have to go back in time and not feed grain to our birds at all. As far as I know the birds lived off the land like the settlers did. Something to think about.

 

[Fred's Hens]

While we all give this some thought, the reality is that we depend on our birds, many of us do, to fulfill the egg and/or meat needs of our customers and ourselves. Without top quality feed, egg production could/would taper off to 1/3 of it current level. Putting muscle on meat birds would be a stretch, since we endure 4 months of heavy snow cover. We don't keep cows or horses as our forbearers did, there's precious little for our hens to pick through or our meat birds to thrive on. While many of us garden in the summer, we don't grow our own grains in sufficient quantity as our pioneer great-grandparents did. I honestly don't know how we un-ring the bell or roll back the clock on our grain/feed dependency and the prices we all now face.

 

[juliaaa]

At TSC we paid around 15 or 16 for 50lbs but then we found a local place that grinds their own and it is 15 for 100lbs. So we switched to crumble and they seem to like it more and waste less too!

 

[Mac in Wisco]

Fred's Hens :

While many of us garden in the summer, we don't grow our own grains in sufficient quantity as our pioneer great-grandparents did. I honestly don't know how we un-ring the bell or roll back the clock on our grain/feed dependency and the prices we all now face.

Even back then not everybody was a farmer, although many kept animals. I came across something in a blog about sustainability and self-sufficiency the other day. This is commonly quoted:

"If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light," Ma considered. "We didn't lack for light when I was a girl, before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of." "That's so," said Pa. "These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves - they're good things to have, but trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em."

- Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter (Which describes the harsh winter of 1880-1881 in the Dakotas.)

Another blog noted that Ingalls never lived too far from the general store which provided the the various sundries they needed for everyday life and that they even bought cornmeal and other basic food stocks from the general store.

The only way to become less dependent is to grow it yourself. Even if you grow it yourself there are costs incurred and when corn is selling at $7 a bushel, you are still feeding your birds corn (albeit homegrown) that is worth $7 a bushel... You have traded land use, seed, equipment, fuel, financing and tax costs, as well as your labor to produce "cheaper" grain.

We buy all of the feed for our 2500 hen organic layer operation. I have other egg producers scoff at me because I don't grow my own feed, that I'm not a "real" farmer... In my eyes growing the grain is a completely separate enterprise. I try to explain to them that I do what I do almost debt free and still make money even when feed costs are high. When feed costs are low I make a lot of money for the extent of what I do with 2500 hens, because I'm not mortgaged to the hilt with land and equipment costs. They just don't understand the idea that regardless of whether they grow it themselves or not, they still feeding $12 organic corn to their hens.​