Has anyone tried this?

[Crazy chicken lady 77]

My mom found this and wants me to try it, but my gut tells me chicken food is created for a reason. What are your thoughts?
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Thank you all for your wonderful insights
!

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Thank you all for your wonderful insights
!

That's what BYC is for!

 

[Bsmac]

That's what BYC is for!

Absolutely!

 

[Ridgerunner]

For our 33% increase in feed costs, plus the hassle of mixing it, and the hope that the chickens don't pick out favorites and leave other stuff behind

my gut tells me chicken food is created for a reason.

Great analysis Stormcrow. You are much more patient than I am.

@Crazy chicken lady 77 one reason chicken feed comes in the forms it does is that unless the ingredients are ground up and bound together in pellets or crumble the ingredients sort themselves out by specific gravity. If the chickens can pick and choose what they eat they are not getting the balanced diet you are trying to provide. That's why the commercial operations that feed mash dampen it and mix it so the ingredients do not separate out. I understand some feeds are sold "whole grain", not ground up and bound. I avoid those like the plague no matter how popular they are with some people on this forum.

Something else I consider. Feeds are intended to be the sole ration. If your chickens are fed treats other than the feed, the mix of nutrients they eat each day will vary from the nutrient mix of your feed. If yours forage for some of their food you have lost the ability to micromanage their diet.

Mine forage for a decent portion if their food. Mine get kitchen wastes as well as garden and orchard excesses or waste. Oyster shell is available on the side. I don't have a clue how much protein, calcium, potassium, or anything else they get each day. Mine are healthy, lay well, and hatch and raise a lot of chicks. I just do not feel the need to micromanage every bite they eat.

 

[Perris]

the commercial operations that feed mash dampen it and mix it so the ingredients do not separate out

they bind the ingredients together because they are supplying most of the vitamins and minerals in the form of powders, which will sink to the bottom. The vitamins and minerals in real food (whole grains) are already bound into the food, naturally. All wild birds manage to select a healthy diet from real foods. Chickens have been shown to be able to select a healthy diet when provided with the constituents separately.

 

[saysfaa]

I add in leftover Box Turtle food (Omnivore Mix) from my one little turtle, Phoenix. She's so small, she can't ever eat it all before expiration. It's just (dead) grub worms, roaches, crickets + dehydrated strawberries, carrots, peas, etc. Chickens love to eat & they are Omnivores. They don't see anything wrong with it & neither do I.

Wise use of the turtle food that the turtle can't eat... assuming your chickens get a good diet otherwise. And, if you feed commercial chicken feed, you get turtle food that is small quantities relative to how much your chickens eat. Or your chickens get a wide variety of feeds/forage that allows them to select all the nutrients needed in the amounts they need.

Edit to add: assuming there isn't anything weird in the "etc" - I don't know the specifics about what turtles need.

 

[Fluffy_Butt_Hutt]

I haven't read birdseed labels recently. What percent calcium does it usually have?



That's another bad point about this recipe: we don't really know if the scratch is 1/6 or 1/4 or what of the feed, because there are no "parts" listed for the cat food and the rabbit food. They could be almost nothing, or they could be in even larger amounts than the scratch or birdseed or layer pellets, and it just does not say.

Given that the list says "every other day" for the cat food, I'll bet the scratch is more than 1/6 of the diet.


Rabbit food is mostly hay, ground up and squished together into pellets. A little bit is not going to hurt chickens, but it will not be any better for them than providing a bale of hay for them to peck through: a little bit of variety in the diet, but not a big proportion of what they need in the day.

They often don't explicitly state it, but if you do the math based on seeds and percentage in the food there is around 60-70g calcium per cup which varies based on seeds they use.

 

[FrostRanger]

The only time you have to switch up their diet is if you feed layer and you have nonlaying birds. I feed kalmbach flock maker pellet with crushed oyster shell on the side all year round and my birds do great on it. Cat food is OK in small amounts but only as an occasional treat, not as a regular part of their diet (I have cats and feed feral cats so I always have it on hand and I use it rather than scratch on the rare occasions when they do get treats since I don't go through scratch fast enough to justify buying even a small bag. They just don't get treats very often), same deal with bird feed. General rule of thumb is if you see it on social media, question it heavily

 

[Appalachickens]

For the life of me, I can’t evaluate the ingredient lists on feeds to make a reasonable decision. At the moment, I’m feeding them the Dumor chick starter grower crumbles from TSC in their treadle feeder and a bowl of wet mash made from Kalmbach chick house reserve, soaked for a day. I don’t want to use pellets because I have one with a crossbeak and I don’t think she could manage. They free range most days, but when they don’t, I pull various weeds they like (stilt grass, jewel weed) or give them a wedge of cabbage. They also get a fruit treat every afternoon. And calcium (crushed egg shells and oyster shell) on the side, since some aren’t laying yet. I’m hoping all that covers it for them. They seem healthy and happy, but what do I know?

 

[NatJ]

They often don't explicitly state it, but if you do the math based on seeds and percentage in the food there is around 60-70g calcium per cup which varies based on seeds they use.

The birdseed @U_Stormcrow found did list calcium: minimum 0.25%, maximum 1.5% That is quite a wide range, but even the high end should be safe enough for non-laying chickens. At the low end, any chicken would need more calcium. A laying hen needs about 3 times as much calcium as a chicken that is not laying, so any laying hen would need much more calcium than that particular birdseed provides.

Unless other birdseed mixes have a much higher level of calcium, I would not worry about them raising the calcium of the entire diet to a dangerous level for any hens, laying or not.

Birdseed may have many other problems, but I'm not seeing "high calcium" as a serious concern when it is fed to chickens, unless there are some with MUCH higher calcium levels than the particular one where I could see the label when I went to the website.

I tried to look up how much calcium is in some birdseed ingredients, and I now have trouble believing that any birdseed can have 60-70 grams of calcium per cup.

Here is info on sunflower seeds from the USDA (human food source).
https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170562/nutrients
1 cup is 140 grams
calcium is 109 mg (milligrams). Converted to grams, that is about 1/10 of a gram.

Here is nutrition info for millet (raw, presumably dry):
https://www.nutritionix.com/i/usda/millet-raw-1-cup/513fceb775b8dbbc21002dbb
1 cup is 200 grams
calcium is not listed
https://www.uhhospitals.org/health-...ry/article/nutritionfacts-v1/millet-raw-1-cup
This gives calcium of 16 mg in 1 cup of raw millet (that is between 1/100 and 2/100 of one gram.)

If a cup of sunflower seeds or millet weighs 140-200 grams, and I assume that other ingredients have similar weights, I don't see any possible way for it to have 60 or 70 grams of calcium. That would be 1/3 to 1/2 of the total weight being calcium! Oyster shell and chicken eggshells are about 1/3 calcium by weight. I think you must have been finding numbers for how many milligrams (mg) of calcium are in the birdseed ingredients, not how many grams (g).

A laying hen needs about 4-5 grams of calcium each day. In milligrams, that is four thousand to five thousand (4000 to 5000). A non-laying chicken needs a calcium rate about 1/3 to 1/4 what a layer does, so a non-layer might need a bit over 1 gram (1000 milligrams) of calcium each day, still much higher than is found in sunflower seeds or millet (or probably in other birdseed ingredients, although I am not going to look up every possible ingredient to try to check that.)