Finally found something my girls would eat

[janz70]

I am all for trying different feeds but I find if you feed them the layers pellets and only them, eventually they will get hungry and eat it - its a battle of wills

 

[nminusyplusm]

Here's a photo of the card that came with the bag. It looks like it definitely has protein, and the bag says 19% protein on it. They've been eating it for about 2 weeks and seem to really enjoy it, and my family has been loving the eggs. Is the hemp seed not enough protein?

The website says all 3 varieties only have 16% protein.

ETA: Also it should be noted that for its high price it's not even organic. It has some organic ingredients but they're not in the top three.

 

[JaeG]

What food to feed is a personal choice. There is no 'right' answer to what is best for your birds.
Hopefully @Tammy Lewis this article will put your mind at rest:
http://patchtotable.com/best-type-of-chicken-feed/

*edited by Staff*

 

[rjohns39]

Hi and welcome to BYC We're so happy you've decided to join us
Feed is a very personal choice and you have to take the path that works best for you. I can't read the analysis on the picture of the bag, so I can't offer an opinion one way or the other—but the best sign that you're doing it right is happy, healthy and productive birds.

 

[ChickenCanoe]

This was the OP's first post as a member of this site. What a welcome!

What food to feed is a personal choice. There is no 'right' answer to what is best for your birds.
Hopefully @Tammy Lewis this article will put your mind at rest:
http://patchtotable.com/best-type-of-chicken-feed/

Good points. Here's a big to the OP.

The OP brings up something that might be worthwhile experimenting with. Get some scratch and mix some pumpkin, hemp, or flax seed in with it to see if the chickens like it. Not sure where to get hemp seed, but pumpkin and flax seed can be got at health food stores.

Sometimes I buy scratch but usually I just offer some oats in summer and in winter some barley, wheat and sunflower. Right now they're getting pumpkins, seeds and all, from the holiday season decorations. Lowes had a sale on all their fancy pumpkins for 50 cents a piece. I bought the lot for 25 cents ea.. The local produce market is selling their sweet pie pumkins for 50 cents. I see pumpkin pies aplenty in my future.

You can probably get hemp seed in Colorado, California, Washington, Nevada, Maine, Connecticut, DC, Nevada

I'm going to say some good and bad things, nothing negative just truthful. Hemp is an awesome protein source, but you need maybe three times the amount I'm seeing in that handful. You could make that grain mix yourself for less than half what they're charging and still have more hemp content. Your girls love it because no doubt it's delicious, but that can't be an incisive feed maybe a mix in to fluff up a staple crumble diet but as is it's a treat a vitamin fortified treat. I think that site counts on you being new to chickens and not knowing the nutritional needs of them or the extent they're overvalueing their products .

X2

Welcome to BYC.

Most people here are very skeptical about "scratch-based" feeds, partially because most of them aren't very wholesome, and partially because chickens can and will pick out what they like, thereby unbalancing their diets. And that feed has a 15% Min of crude fat, Which, as I understand feed (and I'm no nutritional expert, though I believe @centrarchid is?) is about three times as high as it should be. And that fiber is a 24% min? To me, it sounds like candy for chickens.
EDT: Just saw the price tag. Very expensive candy for chickens.

Agreed. Those are very high numbers. Regardless of whether it be chick or adult feed, fat should be about 2.5% or more and fiber 6% or less.

Hey thanks for all this info. We tried a crumble feed we bought off Amazon but they wouldn't touch it. Maybe we'll try mixing this in with something else. What do you recommend that delivers?

Welcome to the site. I hope you enjoy it.
I can't help you with the delivery thing for a small number of chickens. I get delivery of pallet loads but that is for my 50-100 birds and several other people in our co-op.
Chickens are voracious eaters but I sense that in an effort to please your birds, they may have become habituated to the fact that something more appealing may be offered if they hold out.
Chicken feed from traditional manufacturers is nutritionally balanced for the age of birds it is intended to feed. That balance is based on over 100 years of exhaustive research. Each batch of feed is assayed to guarantee the nutrient balance. Is there a better way to feed? Of course there is but to come up with the same level of nutrition in a more natural way would be prohibitively expensive. For one, I don't know anyone with the ability to analyze the nutrient balance at home.
Buying feed online, you can't be guaranteed of the manufacture date and as others have said, the feed needs to be as fresh as possible. Buying at the feed store, you can look at the mill date that is on every bag to determine freshness. Sometimes it is on the paper closure seal at the bottom of the bag. Sometimes it is on the guaranteed analysis tag. Sometimes they use the Julian date but it is on there if you look hard enough.
I had a brief stint working in the feed mill industry installing equipment and programming the whole manufacturing process.
An interesting thing is that chickens on commercial egg and broiler farms get feed the day of, or the day after it is milled so, in my mind, they get feed that is more optimal than what we can buy. Not only because it is fresher, but also because each commercial operation has a proprietary formula for their birds that matches the specific age and species of their stock, which they can tweak as needed.
The other reason it is impossible to match what is in a bag of feed at home for anywhere near the same price is that we buy grains/legumes by the 50# bag while a mill buys by the trainload. We buy vitamins/minerals by the ounce and they buy by the ton. The economy of scale dictates the price.
I recommend pelleted feed over crumbles and especially mash. There is less waste with pellets and the nutritional punch is greater for your dollar than the other two forms of feed. Eliminate everything offered except the pellets and they will eat them eventually. They certainly won't starve themselves to death. It just isn't in the nature of a chicken to do so.
I worked with scarlet and great green macaws in Central America. Feeding 400 large parrots is expensive and as a non-profit, we had to feed what we could afford. We would go to the local market and buy all the produce that was about to go bad by the truckload at a greatly reduced price. Some were things that were their natural food but not all, like many root crops. It was labor intensive to cut up all the fruits and vegetables to a size appropriate for the birds. First thing in the morning all the birds got a dish of gallo pinto (rice and beans) with a vitamin/mineral pack mixed in. Then two more meals of the fruit and veggie mélange mid day and before dusk. The biologists on staff and all the volunteers would have much preferred a pelleted parrot food but it wasn't in the budget.
With a pellet, virtually every bite has all the nutrients the animal is known to need, in the correct ratios.
I also wanted to add a point about protein. All the feed labels list the % of crude protein. But more importantly, what is the amino acid makeup of that protein? There is a concept called 'limiting amino acid'. As most people know, some amino acids are essential because they can't be made by the body. The rest, even though the body needs them, can be synthesized from the raw material in the essential ones.
Every species has different requirements. Humans have 9 essentials, chickens have 12. Besides the recognized essential AAs, several more are considered conditionally essential. That's because, under certain circumstances, too much of the essentials are being used to synthesize them that both the level of essentials and some non-essentials is compromised. (if that makes sense)
What the limiting amino acid concept dictates is that a feedstuff can contain all the protein you want but if it is missing some essentials, a lot of that protein is wasted.
While hemp, flax, etc. are good sources of protein, omnivores usually require some animal protein in their diet to meet the needs because vegetative sources of protein are deficient in some essential amino acids.
Feed manufacturers avoid animal protein by adding lysine and methionine in synthetic form.

My girls get a layers mash that is a grain mix. I ferment it and they always clean it up. Go with what your chickens will eat - no point wasting food and money on stuff they don't like.

Except for periods of extreme cold or heat, I ferment too. It is a great way to cut feed cost.

Chickens are kind of like kids. They like the junk food and don’t like the healthy stuff very much. But if all they have is healthy they will eventually eat it. They will not starve themselves. But they will hold out quite a long time for the good stuff but just like kids it is your duty to make sure they get healthy stuff.
It seems like delivery is very important to you, I can relate because I cannot drive so delivery is nice when you can get it. Do you live in an area that you can get Azure standard delivery? They have several different types of food that’s good for chickens. I get scratch and pack, big sky, and sometimes the Modesto from them. And just my opinion, but any of the food that is not a crumble or a pellet should be fed to them wet or fermented. Otherwise all the good powdery vitamins etc. usually go to waste.
This food that your chickens love so much could actually be used as treats. It’s always handy to have something you know they love in case you need to get them in or come to you quickly for some reason etc.

I am all for trying different feeds but I find if you feed them the layers pellets and only them, eventually they will get hungry and eat it - its a battle of wills

X2
As creatures of habit, they will eventually like pellets.