Hog feed for eggs?

[TinyChickin]

I've heard that giving your hens hog feed is better for egg production. Is this true? Has anyone tried it?

 

[2ndTink]

I don't know hog nutrition but I'm going to say no, as long as your chicken feed is a good proper poultry feed. If your poultry feed is crud, then maybe.

It also depends on what nutrition recommendations you want to follow, are you going based on the absolute minimums that it takes to get a hen to pump out eggs for 18 month to 2 years like a commercial farm, or are you trying to target a long healthy life for your hens, or are you trying to produce the best possible hatching eggs that have everything a growing chick needs?

You will get a lot of opinions here, my opinion is that commercial feeds are too low in fat and many of the vitamins to provide optimal nutrition for hens.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I've heard that giving your hens hog feed is better for egg production.

If hog feed is better for egg production why don't commercial egg farmers use hog feed instead of special feeds blended for their chickens and egg laying? Think about that.

Hogs need different nutritional requirements based on growth stage: starter pigs, grower, and finisher so which phase are you talking about? The purpose of hogs is to provide meat efficiently. But you don't want to "finish" laying hens, you want to maintain them. Instead of meat growth you want egg production. Those are different things and require different nutritional mixes. An easy example is calcium. Hogs need some for growth, especially bones. Laying chickens need a lot more as a percentage of what they eat for eggshell production. Hogs need a lot of energy (carbohydrates). Laying chickens need some fat (yolks are about 1/3 fat) but they don't need the overall energy hogs need. It's just different nutritional requirements.

 

[FrostRanger]

As long as their food is providing what they need nutritionally, feed doesn't impact egg laying rate much (obvious caveat being the feed is nutritionally sound as subpar feed will negatively impact egg laying). The age and breed of the hen, the current season (with the changes in daylight that come with that) and stress have a far greater impact on egg laying than feed. A young healthy bird in spring of a high production breed with little environmental stress will be more productive than an older hen, especially of a breed not known to lay as much, and if it's fall or winter or there's something stressing the flock out, you won't get many if any eggs at all (with the caveat that many pullets lay through their first winter)

I'd just stick with a quality chicken feed, clean water and grit and oyster shell on the side and keep stress in the flock down and perhaps add a few pullets every 1-3 years, that should leave you with good production most of the time (winter will still not be great for production but adding light to the coop can help if you are inclined to do that. I don't 'cause I'd rather they have a break)

 

[NatJ]

I've heard that giving your hens hog feed is better for egg production. Is this true?

Where did you find this? Did it give any reasons?

For anything to be "better," that means it is being compared with something.

If someone is comparing hog feed with no feed, then of course it is better. This could have been the case at some points in the past when people often expected chickens to forage for their own feed: if there was a time of year with nothing available for the chickens to find, then adding hog feed or anything else would be better than leaving the chickens to starve.

If someone is comparing hog feed with a complete chicken feed (the kind that is meant to provide everything the chickens need), then I would generally expect the chicken feed to be better.

There could be times when one specific hog feed was better than one specific chicken feed, depending on what details were being considered (one might be low in protein and the other a bit better, one might be cheaper than another, etc.)

If something is wrong with the chicken feed, for example if it is all moldy, then a bag of non-moldy hog feed might be the better choice-- along with fixing the conditions that led to the mold in the first place!

If no chicken feed is available, then hog feed would probably be better than no feed. It would probably even be better than cow feed or rabbit feed, since pigs and chickens are both omnivores while cows and rabbits are not.

But if there is chicken feed available, and nothing obviously wrong with it, I would expect the chicken feed to better for chickens, rather than trying to use feeds meant for other kinds of animals.

Has anyone tried it?

I have not tried it. I have looked at the labels on the bags, and the prices, and the chicken feed looked like the most sensible choice for feeding chickens at that time.