Feeding fish to your flock

[CrazyTalk]

we backyard keepers often keep varieties that predate commercial feed.

No, we don't.

The birds you keep have been selectively bred to excel on commercial feeds for more than 100 years, even if you're keeping heritage birds. Unless you're buying jungle fowl from southeast asia, you're getting birds designed for commercial feeds.

 

[Jesusfreak101]

Personally its been my experiance so far with my hens they prefer to find their own food. Yes i offer all flock raiser but for twenty hens to barely finish and sometimes not finish 3 quarts of feed a day shows that. I offer meat scraps and veggies and fruit. Once again they hardly finish the scraps. I have scratch mixed in with their feed and they dont over eat it at all. They often leave it and go and forage most of the day they are foraging they eat grasses and bugs and seeds and berriea what ever they find. I think you under estimate these animals. Cats, dogs, horses, cows all arent what they use to be but they still have their instincts yes some more then others. And on the topic of humans thats because some people refuse to control their intake of food much less care what they are eating. Plan and simple they have become lazy.

 

[Pork Pie]

I feel that posts here are failing to take into consideration the location of the OP and why and how chickens are raised in the developing world. Having lived in Africa for 20 years I can assure you that the majority of chicken keepers in the world do not have access to commercial feeds. The chickens that one sees in any rural setting are not commercial in today's sense as natural selection has ensured that only those able to exist on a limited diet survive and hence breed.

In many parts of Africa, for example dried fish is a common supplement in chicken diets and I am sure that the same applies all over the developing world and that's possibly where the thread starter was coming from.

Ct

 

[birds4kids]

Lot of feed saleman around or academics who can't see reality past a good sales line, next they will be telling us we need to keep our chickens on concrete so they can't have access to natural foods and spoil the fine balance struck by commercial food.

To get maximum productivity from birds sure commercial feed will be easiest but that is not to say a more natural diet is harmful.

Even dogs can revert to living wild quite readily, and hogs, feral cats are a problem just about everywhere, heck I know a deer hunter who was asked to shoot a cow next time he saw it because the farmer had trouble capturing it and it wasn't starving in the wild. Where I grewup in NJ there was a wild goat for YEARS that was occasionally seen

Animals are a lot more resilient than people think, and in survival situations even people have enough instinct to start craving odd foods, organs they would not touch endup being the only part of a fish or something that they crave, seen the interviews with people it happened to.

Mother nature is fa better at managing the world than we and she still has ultimate control over what we manipulate.

 

[birderPK]

My decision to feed a natural diet instead of a commercial one wasn't due to some necessity, it was a choice I made. Commercial feed is more easily available than grains. I get wheat from one store, millet from another, same is with most of the other stuff. However commercial feed is way easier to get.

 

[HeritageGoose13]

Some people here do not understand what a heritage breed is. If it is commercial or came from a hatchery it is not heritage. Hatcheries do not sell breeds, they sell mutts. Everyone who has done an ounce of research knows this. Many of us on BYC keep heritage breeds. Some people are skeptical of this for some reason, but that does not change the fact.

For the record, there are people on this very website who have successfully free-ranged Cornish Cross.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/...-your-cornish-x-meaties-tractors-do-not-count

People get heated over this topic, so I think I will leave this thread now.