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.

 

[TinyChickin]

I don't exactly remember where I heard it. I think it might have been a family friend. He said something along the lines of "if you really want them to lay eggs throw the hog feed to them."

Right now I feed them chicken layer feed, and they're laying, I just wondered if there might have been truth to it because layer feed is expensive

 

[NatJ]

I don't exactly remember where I heard it. I think it might have been a family friend. He said something along the lines of "if you really want them to lay eggs throw the hog feed to them."

Right now I feed them chicken layer feed, and they're laying, I just wondered if there might have been truth to it because layer feed is expensive

Depending on which kind of hog feed, it might be a difference in protein. You can sometimes also get that by using chick starter or an all-flock feed.

Or maybe he just happened to give them hog feed at the time of year they were going to lay best anyway. That kind of thing does happen sometimes, that several things change at the same time and the person gets to try to figure out which of the changes actually made the difference.

Layer feed has the extra calcium that laying hens need, but it tends to have the bare minimum of protein (because protein is expensive.) Laying hens can get their calcium from a separate dish of oyster shell, and then they can eat chick starter or flock raiser or all-flock or any other complete chicken feed. Some of those have higher protein, and sometimes one or another is cheaper.

In general, if something claims to be a complete chicken feed, you can just check the protein, calcium, and cost. Calcium around 3% to 4% is for laying hens, calcium closer to 1% is for other chickens or layers can eat it when they have a source of oyster shell or other calcium supplement. Layers can often manage with protein as low as 15%, but may do better with levels up to about 20%, and higher than that is still safe (just usually more expensive with no noticeable benefits.)

If you are comparing cost, watch out for the bag sizes. 50 pound bags are common, but I've seen some chicken feeds in 40 pound bags which can make them look cheaper while actually costing more per pound.

[Note, when I'm talking about protein percent, this mostly applies to chicken feeds in the United States. Some other countries formulate chicken feeds differently, and can have lower protein numbers while still providing what the chickens need. They mostly do it by paying attention to the particular amino acids that make up the protein, and supplementing just the ones that are lacking, rather than increasing the total protein so much.]

 

[Kentuckiana Chicken Lady]

I've heard several variations of that advice, but I think it always ends up boiling down to simply being a variation of "give them an offering of something higher in protein than usual to give them a boost".

Edit: except, I *just* looked it up and it appears that in GENERAL, all the hog feed that is cheaper than layer feed seems to be significantly LOWER in protein, so I clearly have no idea what I'm talking about here (not the first time lol)

 

[TinyChickin]

I've heard several variations of that advice, but I think it always ends up boiling down to simply being a variation of "give them an offering of something higher in protein than usual to give them a boost".

Edit: except, I *just* looked it up and it appears that in GENERAL, all the hog feed that is cheaper than layer feed seems to be significantly LOWER in protein, so I clearly have no idea what I'm talking about here (not the first time lol)

aw man I wanted to save money guess those freeloaders are gonna keep getting expensive food

 

[NatJ]

I've heard several variations of that advice, but I think it always ends up boiling down to simply being a variation of "give them an offering of something higher in protein than usual to give them a boost".

That sounds likely to me too. Another common one is to add cat food. But when I look at the prices, it is cheaper to just buy chick food, rather than buying layer food (lower protein) and cat food (higher protein and MUCH higher cost).

I *just* looked it up and it appears that in GENERAL, all the hog feed that is cheaper than layer feed seems to be significantly LOWER in protein,

If someone was already raising of hogs, and they were buying the high protein feed in large quantities (= cheaper per pound), it might be cheaper for them to use hog feed instead of buying small quantities of chicken feed (inflated price because of small quantities.)

For people who just have chickens and no hogs, the numbers would be very different.