Feeds affecting laying?

[Cindy in PA]

Well said. I thought this was an awareness issue and we are all in this together thing and the people on here seem to be pretty quick to shut it all down. I think some of the arguments on here have been twisted a little. I believe it’s a TSC issue because IF the feed is bad it goes back to the board of TSC behind it I believe is the claim. I have had chickens as an adult for 8 years been a member here for 5/6 years. Grew up with livestock and currently own my own mini farm as a felt I owed it to my 3 kids to give them same life I had. I’m also a physiologist and own my own gym. Never in all that time have I seen so many people reject the notion that something could be off and blame weather or light because that is a credible argument to follow. Ohio has never had reliable weather that’s ever anything but crazy. This is my first time experience with this massive egg fall out. If you check the record I haven’t posted on here in years but turned here for help because I was at a loss for what was going on. I have enjoyed being back on this forum even though it was crazy to see how dug in sides were. Hopefully everyone can figure out this situation for themselves. With a few more minutes a day of light and some feed swap I went from zero eggs to collected 15 yesterday. That I will call a win. Hope everyone else that has had issues is also getting back to a normal lay rate soon. The feed is too expensive to not be getting anything for your efforts.

I am one guilty of "laughing" & so I apologize. I spend every day down the old rabbit hole & EVERY little thing that comes up becomes a conspiracy theory. It all follows the same pattern, one person "discovers" something & everyone jumps on the band wagon even when you can see there is no proof. There may be a problem with the feed, however I still maintain that people always want to spread stuff first before there is any proof. No fan of "the man", but sad to see that many of the crunchy type from 30 years ago, have gone off the deep end. I hope we all see a resolution on this.

 

[countrybumpkin5]

Well said. I thought this was an awareness issue and we are all in this together thing and the people on here seem to be pretty quick to shut it all down. I think some of the arguments on here have been twisted a little. I believe it’s a TSC issue because IF the feed is bad it goes back to the board of TSC behind it I believe is the claim. I have had chickens as an adult for 8 years been a member here for 5/6 years. Grew up with livestock and currently own my own mini farm as a felt I owed it to my 3 kids to give them same life I had. I’m also a physiologist and own my own gym. Never in all that time have I seen so many people reject the notion that something could be off and blame weather or light because that is a credible argument to follow. Ohio has never had reliable weather that’s ever anything but crazy. This is my first time experience with this massive egg fall out. If you check the record I haven’t posted on here in years but turned here for help because I was at a loss for what was going on. I have enjoyed being back on this forum even though it was crazy to see how dug in sides were. Hopefully everyone can figure out this situation for themselves. With a few more minutes a day of light and some feed swap I went from zero eggs to collected 15 yesterday. That I will call a win. Hope everyone else that has had issues is also getting back to a normal lay rate soon. The feed is too expensive to not be getting anything for your efforts.

Ditto on the weather. It's as crazy here as it is every year, and it's this way most of the spring, too, with cold then hot then cold and wet, lots of cloudy days, etc, and this is the first time I've ever had first year pullets have an issue. It's not just the egg count dropping drastically but the way the hens looked as well. I mentioned it to my son way back beginning of October, and it might even been late September. I was scratching my head. I never looked online anywhere to see if others were having a problem because, as I've mentioned, I have no accounts on any social media platforms, only occasionally check in with a NE Missouri off grid channel. Also, as I've mentioned, I have massive wind turbines very close and they have been proven to cause serious issues with all livestock, and humans, for many decades. Come to think of it....the baby coon and possum that have both recently had seizures and health issues were eating the chicken feed and that was their main diet. Hmmm....Still, that does not mean it was/is the feed, or the feed alone, but as I've also stated previously, the grain was very poor quality the last two years with this last years being way over the top, and grain with vomitoxin or aflatoxins is not destroyed, it's just thinned out with "good" grain, if you can find good grain.

 

[Aunt Angus]

Yeah, I'm not discounting the fact that something is going on, but I am having difficulty with people assuming it's a government plot without any proof that it is. Could it be a govt plot? Sure. But there's nothing to back that up yet other than people's anger and wanting to blame The Man. There's no logic.

And - she repeats it a little louder for the people in the back - I feed my birds TSC feed. My birds are laying like crazy. Out of 11 layers, I got 9 eggs yesterday. I am also one of maybe 3 people on all of BYC apparently who is actually doing something about it. Rather than just provide conjecture or hypotheses or deny everything, I'm actually getting feed tested. And I'm NOT the one having problems.

If my birds were having problems, I'd have done it already. It isn't hard. It's pretty inexpensive. I have no clue why anyone wouldn't take these steps instead of just repeating as fact what someone else said. It's driving me crazy.

 

[Bhubbard]

I am one guilty of "laughing" & so I apologize. I spend every day down the old rabbit hole & EVERY little thing that comes up becomes a conspiracy theory. It all follows the same pattern, one person "discovers" something & everyone jumps on the band wagon even when you can see there is no proof. There may be a problem with the feed, however I still maintain that people always want to spread stuff first before there is any proof. No fan of "the man", but sad to see that many of the crunchy type from 30 years ago, have gone off the deep end. I hope we all see a resolution on this.

I don’t blame you at all it’s kind of a crazy world out there! No apologies needed at least to me I was never offended on here at all and seeing dialog and responses from all views made me think more on the topic and learn more about types of feed. I believe it was/is a hot topic and this thread should be encouraged and met with lots of questions that make people respond and tell their stories. I believe that’s how the community learns and grows which is the point of this site.

 

[countrybumpkin5]

I am one guilty of "laughing" & so I apologize. I spend every day down the old rabbit hole & EVERY little thing that comes up becomes a conspiracy theory. It all follows the same pattern, one person "discovers" something & everyone jumps on the band wagon even when you can see there is no proof. There may be a problem with the feed, however I still maintain that people always want to spread stuff first before there is any proof. No fan of "the man", but sad to see that many of the crunchy type from 30 years ago, have gone off the deep end. I hope we all see a resolution on this.

Do remember that what might appear to be the "deep end" to you now, could become your new reality in the future. What I thought to be true even 15 years ago, much less 60 years ago, has turned out to be false. Totally. You do have to know where to look when you're going down those rabbit holes because, as you note, lots of bandwagons there that are either intentionally or unintentionally misleading. When you look at the ancient history that can be found and proven you see a very different tale of the world than what we've been told. Does it matter in the long run? Well, that depends on what's important to the individual.

 

[saysfaa]

... 3) why do people on BYC assume that members who have many years of experience with chickens can't identify an unusual egg laying issue? 4) why do some people on BYC laugh at others concerns and assume them to be idiots? I keep reading about the suggestion that this is only people not used to 2 year old chickens in winter ... and they flat out pretend they never read the posts of seasoned chicken owners. It strikes me as very rude. 4) why can there NOT be the possibility that there's something wrong with some brand's feed AND the issue be something other than a global cartel trying to rid the US of back yard chickens? It sure strikes me as highly possible - especially in these economic conditions that a company would try to 1 cheat to save money or 2 make some ingredient switch to save money and inadvertently cause a negative issue with their product.

It's really sad how we treat each for what we perceive as protecting our team.

5) why do people ignore those who have many years of experience with chickens who identified this kind of unusual egg laying issue but didn't feed the suspect brands?
6) why do people ignore those who have many years of experience with chickens who identified this kind of unusual egg laying issue once after many years but it was several years ago?

I agree it could be something wrong with the feed without being a global cartel. That has happened before: Melamine in pet food (for an intentional example) and PBB in dairy feed (for an unintentional example).

I also think our food system is vulnerable to manipulation by powerful people. Why - gets pretty far into politics. I don't think it is in this case unless the powers are playing 4D chess. (what I mean by 4D chess: people - especially politicians - looking, or claiming, to do one thing while actually doing the opposite either through sophisticated multilayered strategies or incompetence. - in this case, manipulating people into feeding chickens dangerously high levels of copper and significantly low levels of protein (ie goat feed) by either messing with chicken feed or starting a rumor that chicken feed has issues. Or just testing disruption via social media from real changes to feed or just rumor - politically or commercial competitors. Yes, I do find myself hard to live with sometimes.

Both sides have done a lot of appearing to ignore what the other is saying. This post quoted above, for example, picks out the suggestion "only people not used to 2 year old chickens in winter" - vs the several other possible explanation many of the people who said that also suggested.

I use "appearing to ignore" and not "ignoring" because if one is to write all the examples or all the conditionals - a very unwieldy topic becomes even more unwieldy.

I was active in this discussion for a while. I probably looked like I was discounting the feed as the problem. I was really just irritated that the people giving this the most push in the beginning didn't check it out first (test the feed - or find people who had).

And, even more, that they didn't check that their solutions to what they said was the problem would help that problem. Better to not give a solution that to do that.

Enough people don't have a problem with these brands that even if some of the feed had problems, the risk is low enough that I bought some Producer's Pride yesterday. I thought, if nothing else, I would have some to test. I'm planning to wait until late enough in the spring that they are all laying normally, then feed this and see if there is a difference. I can afford to not get eggs for weeks.

Edit to add, and the date is recent enough that it won't be old even then, especially with being it is winter so it will keep longer.

 

[countrybumpkin5]

Getting all of these threads confused now as to which one talked about what, but I may have a way to test some feed for at least aflatoxin and vomitoxin. Won't be testing for nutrient levels, and it's not going to be a TSC feed. However, because the grain supply does not stay in the local area it is grown in, it may still be a clue. We know for a fact the grain was high in toxins this last year especially and one of the grain elevators that we use will probably be willing to test for us. We not meaning me specifically but the large corporate farm one of my sons is the Grain Facility Manager for. He controls all of the grain coming in and being stored and shipped out, grown on a bit over 10,000 acres. He's going to contact the elevator today.

 

[countrybumpkin5]

Heres a quick summary from NIM on symptoms of aflatoxin. Keep in mind that the weaker the exposure and/or the length of time of exposure, the less severe or obvious the symptoms. But looking back I can certainly see these severe symptoms in the coon and possum that were using the layer pellets I fed as their sole diet. Not solid proof, but sure is worth considering. If we can get the toxin test done it might at least answer that part.
"Dietary exposure to aflatoxins may result in severe toxic and carcinogenic outcomes in humans and animals. Aflatoxin toxicity may result in nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, convulsions, and other signs of acute liver injury. Long-term exposure also leads to various complications like growth retardation, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma.

 

[Sally PB]

Has anyone tried Kalmbach?

I've been feeding Kalmbach 20% Flock Maker for several months. I like it for several reasons: price, buying from a small business, my chickens like it, and they seen healthy.

I've switched to Purina Flock Maker as an experiment, since last Friday. I'll be switching back this Thursday or Friday, whenever the Purina feed runs out.

More of my hens are starting lay after their molting hiatus, but I can't credit that to the feed change. I think it's due to the amount of sunshine we've had in the last few days: More than the entire month of January.

 

[Aunt Angus]

Heres a quick summary from NIM on symptoms of aflatoxin. Keep in mind that the weaker the exposure and/or the length of time of exposure, the less severe or obvious the symptoms. But looking back I can certainly see these severe symptoms in the coon and possum that were using the layer pellets I fed as their sole diet. Not solid proof, but sure is worth considering. If we can get the toxin test done it might at least answer that part.
"Dietary exposure to aflatoxins may result in severe toxic and carcinogenic outcomes in humans and animals. Aflatoxin toxicity may result in nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, convulsions, and other signs of acute liver injury. Long-term exposure also leads to various complications like growth retardation, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma.

So get the test done. I am. Not hard.