Hi! At our house we're going to grow some more rock crosses over winter and this time around I want to do about 25 male birds and I've figured they each need about 20 Lbs. of feed for 10 weeks of growing. The last batch I grew we put on chick starter (20%) for the whole 10 weeks and got great freezer campers! Avg. about 8 lbs. cleaned and wrapped. This time I was hoping to cut some feed cost and use some cracked corn to supplement them but I want to know if this will adversaly affect their weight gain and leaness of their meat. My last batch were pretty lean not very much fat at all. Also I'm looking at getting the "Meat Bird Feed" at Rural King so if anyone has tried that I'd like to know how it worked for you. We used trupoint/ landmark chick starter last time but its about $3 to $4 more per 50# bag than the rural king feed and at 10 to 12 bags its a big diffrence in price. Thanks!
I soak my feed, try that to reduce costs. It doubles the feed weight (one scoop dry = 2 scoops soaked). I soak it like this in a seven gallon bucket: Four scoops of starter, two scoop of scratch. Each scoop is 4 pounds of dry. I soak it for 12-24 hours before feeding. I feed my flock of roughly 150 chickens this in one day. Long story short, you can feed scratch (or cracked corn). I always do. I add BOSS to my soaked feed for something extra. I feed starter (unmedicated) as the feed portion of the mixture.