Feeding medicated feed to meat birds

[Marc33]

Hello there everyone! We have our entire flock of heavy breed birds on chick starter medicated chick feed. It's about time to start processing the meat birds - is there a problem with them having eaten this feed? Should we take them off of it for a time before processing and eating the meat?

Thanks for you help!

 

[Arklady]

I believe it is two weeks... but you need to read the package. It may be more or less.

Arklady

 

[Marc33]

Thanks Arklady -

I just looked on the bag and it says "feed 1 day old to finish" - it's medicated for coccidiosis, so I guess the company feels it's not a concern in meat birds?

 

[greyfields]

If there isn't a withdrawal period listed on the tag, get the name of the "active ingredient" and google it. All the commerical feeds seem to use a different drug, but I want to say it's around 5 days for most the withdrawal times.

I never use medicated feeds on broilers, since it's a huge marketing advantage to say "no medicated feeds were used". However, I have certainly lost cluckers to coccidiosis (we had a wet, cold spring). I just have to work out an expected mortality in my cost analysis.