First time hatching

[dc3085]

Your best bet for generating a lower cost food is to mix your own by the ton. There are many formulas in the archives of BYC for creating healthy gamebird food.

Like someone else suggested feeding them chicken feed is substandard and honestly not humane for your birds. Chicken feed has nearly 10% less protein on the top of the fact it has too much calcium for quail roosters to consume regularly. Chicken feed has more than 3x the amount of infused calcium that gamebird feed does and can cause organ failure in your roosters.

 

[tballx4]

Thanks for the suggestions not quit ready for the tonnage yet but would like to start testing recipes. If anything they will b getting more than what they need other than less. I will keep looking in the archives and see what I can find. It's not as easy as hay and corn for my angus I put on the table to cut the grocery store out.

 

[dc3085]

There used to be a member here called JJMR. He lists a couple different feed formulas. you can just do the math to shrink the quantities since he only gives them for a whole ton of feed.

 

[TwoCrows]

Making a feed with everything needed in the diet of poultry is a very difficult thing to do. It is not as easy as throwing grains together, some protein food and being done with it.

As much as I would rather not rely on some of these manufacturers to make my feed, these feeds are properly formulated with the right proportions of the vitamins and minerals needed for quail to live a healthy life. If even one of these nutrients are off, you can cause them not to be able to process calcium, or clot their blood or see properly. Poultry are extremely delicate and sensitive to eating a proper diet and lots and lots of health issues can arise if you don't feed them right.

And I will tell you, it IS cheaper to buy manufactured feed. Making your own will always be more expensive. To purchase every ingredient needed to make a good feed will run your wallet dry.