HOW TO FEED YOUR CHICKENS if there is no scratch or pellets?

[allenw]

Before electricity chickens were a walking fresh meal, meat during the hot months was what had been canned or cured the winter before.

I know Grandma talked about Grandad killing wild rabbit during the winter and hanging them by the back feet in the chicken house and opening them up for the chickens to eat when they got to eating on each other, They kept a good bunch of chickens, at one time she sold eggs to a hatchery, I believe they provided her with chicks to raise for hens.

And don't forget the hogs followed the cattle in the fattening pens and the chickens followed the pigs and the last two weren't fed.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

If you feed pellets from a farm store... It's usually half as much to buy from a feed mill.
If you have time to soak or ferment the feed that will net you half the cost also.
If you really want to go for it, buy the grains whole and grind them yourself, just make sure the ratio is correct and they're getting the minerals also, then ferment/soak that mix.

Im finding the feed mill about 70% the price of the farm store, and fermenting offers a 5-10% benefit at most, about the same as I get by feeding crumble as an oatmeal like wet mash to reduce waste. I've seen no credible study suggesting fermentation reoughly doubles a feed value for chickens, which is what it would need to do to halve costs yet again as you suggest.

It would also beg the question of why commercial chicken ops, trying to cut every last penny out of costs, had not adopted fermented feeding practices decades ago if they were nearly as beneficial as you suggest.

Here is a good overview of a number of studies, including a few observing degradation of lysine during fermentation, and highly variable results of fermentation based on both method of fermentation and material being fermented. Lysine, you no doubt know, is particularly important in the early life stages.

As with virtually everything in life, "its complicated".

Full disclosure, I'm not opposed to fermentation. I am opposed to outrageous claims about the benefits of fermentation. I sometimes ferment feed myself, though I don't go to any effort to do so - its an acceptable consequence of my management methods when I am travelling and need to pre-prepare measured amounts of feed for my expected absence.

 

[EliteTempleton]

Im finding the feed mill about 70% the price of the farm store, and fermenting offers a 5-10% benefit at most, about the same as I get by feeding crumble as an oatmeal like wet mash to reduce waste. I've seen no credible study suggesting fermentation reoughly doubles a feed value for chickens, which is what it would need to do to halve costs yet again as you suggest.

It would also beg the question of why commercial chicken ops, trying to cut every last penny out of costs, had not adopted fermented feeding practices decades ago if they were nearly as beneficial as you suggest.

Here is a good overview of a number of studies, including a few observing degradation of lysine during fermentation, and highly variable results of fermentation based on both method of fermentation and material being fermented. Lysine, you no doubt know, is particularly important in the early life stages.

As with virtually everything in life, "its complicated".

Full disclosure, I'm not opposed to fermentation. I am opposed to outrageous claims about the benefits of fermentation. I sometimes ferment feed myself, though I don't go to any effort to do so - its an acceptable consequence of my management methods when I am travelling and need to pre-prepare measured amounts of feed for my expected absence.

Fair enough, I saw those numbers on YouTube and fell into the trap of believing what I saw on the internet. Plus the price changes so much lately on feed if the mill goes up before the farm store you might find a better deal there. Also depends on how much you buy, my feed mill bulk sells by 250lbs minimum, that would go bad before I could use it all unless I split it with the pigs (bad idea).

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Fair enough, I saw those numbers on YouTube and fell into the trap of believing what I saw on the internet. Plus the price changes so much lately on feed if the mill goes up before the farm store you might find a better deal there. Also depends on how much you buy, my feed mill bulk sells by 250lbs minimum, that would go bad before I could use it all unless I split it with the pigs (bad idea).

My discounts are cash and 500# at a time (those are the prices I quoted), but I can mix and match - rabbit feed (50#) plus goat feed (200#) plus chicken feed (200#+ of Layer, another 200#+ of Game Bird) gets me over my 500# minimum, and that fed the flock for about 4 weeks in winter.

and yes, unsourced Internet claims are one of the things we try and challenge here on BYC, so new owners aren't lead astray, to the detriment of them, and their birds.

 

[EliteTempleton]

My discounts are cash and 500# at a time (those are the prices I quoted), but I can mix and match - rabbit feed (50#) plus goat feed (200#) plus chicken feed (200#+ of Layer, another 200#+ of Game Bird) gets me over my 500# minimum, and that fed the flock for about 4 weeks in winter.

and yes, unsourced Internet claims are one of the things we try and challenge here on BYC, so new owners aren't lead astray, to the detriment of them, and their birds.

Good to know, I just stared my first feeder pigs and they came early so I just filled the feeder on a Saturday with the farm store 16% stuff that had probiotics. I'll have to see if I can mix and match too, will keep fresher feed for the bacon seeds to enjoy if I can. Currently it looks like everything in the yard is good on feed for a month though, cat included!

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Good to know, I just stared my first feeder pigs and they came early so I just filled the feeder on a Saturday with the farm store 16% stuff that had probiotics. I'll have to see if I can mix and match too, will keep fresher feed for the bacon seeds to enjoy if I can. Currently it looks like everything in the yard is good on feed for a month though, cat included!

as a matter of curiosity, how are you making the math work on the pigs? We've looked at adding them several times - I brine large chunks of meat routinely, do most of my own butchering, sausage, smoking, corning - have made my own bacon from slab. But I can't make the economics work.

In this area, chicken on special is $1.79/# for thighs (taste better anyways) if you don't mind that it looks like a gorilla ripped the birds apart to butcher, whole bird $1.49 - the figure I use on my ledger when I eat one of my males - but I can pick up an 8# ham shank at $0.99 or butt $1.09/lb on special about once a month. (Sure, there's loss - skin I dispose of or use for cooking greens, bone will go into a soup, fat gets added to sausage - see below). I just can't compete with those figures, and have no source of free restaraunt waste or the like I can use to help with the feed budget. Bacon is still $10/lb, sure, but I'd rather have sausage, honestly - which I make from my goats, and my old chickens. Old duck becomes "ground burger".

 

[EliteTempleton]

as a matter of curiosity, how are you making the math work on the pigs? We've looked at adding them several times - I brine large chunks of meat routinely, do most of my own butchering, sausage, smoking, corning - have made my own bacon from slab. But I can't make the economics work.

In this area, chicken on special is $1.79/# for thighs (taste better anyways) if you don't mind that it looks like a gorilla ripped the birds apart to butcher, whole bird $1.49 - the figure I use on my ledger when I eat one of my males - but I can pick up an 8# ham shank at $0.99 or butt $1.09/lb on special about once a month. (Sure, there's loss - skin I dispose of or use for cooking greens, bone will go into a soup, fat gets added to sausage - see below). I just can't compete with those figures, and have no source of free restaraunt waste or the like I can use to help with the feed budget. Bacon is still $10/lb, sure, but I'd rather have sausage, honestly - which I make from my goats, and my old chickens. Old duck becomes "ground burger".

View attachment 3056554

You mean how much more am I paying per pound for my hobby because it tastes better?
Let's see:
$460 in 8 Combo, 2 hog and 1 cattle panel to make an extra good pen that's taller in case I got a climber jumper. We'll call it 31'x 29'. The two hog panels are for the loading shoot and the cattle panel for their shelter hoop.
$260 for two small gates at each end of the shoot.
$50 Used IBC Tote with a broken valve in the next county that has prune juice in it before.
?$20 in parts to make a double nipple auto waterer. Includes spare nipples but I got the plumbing parts with other stuff so I'm not sure on total cost.
$0 old tarps to cover the hoop pen, and old tin for the back side that was here when I bought the place. Two old scrap short 4x4's to hold the gates. Pen in a spot that is in an old growth spruce area that usually grows weeds like crazy (free weeding labor not factored in), so it's good drainage soil on a hill for about 4" then it's clay so we dug 18-24" deep and used a steel bar to compact the clay back in, no concrete bag costs, large dog crate I already have for transporting them.
$20 for the first 5 bales of straw, this is a good price from my neighbor.
$60? T post clips, T post driver (I have not needed to put many in before so I always used a sledgehammer before but looking at about 25 I finally bought one) temp zip ties to hold the panels for final fitment and a scraps rubber bowl.
$180 double door hog feeder.
$60 for the first 200lbs of food because I only had 8 days notice, was expecting them at the end of May. I fit about 185 lbs of feed into the 100lb feeder...
$160? Fuel to get all this stuff... take the pigs to slaughter, and pick up the meat.
$0? Assuming one of my many friends or family will let me borrow a livestock trailer in 4 months.
?? One dewormer treatment in 2 months.
?? AG lime mixed with wood ash to keep the smell down.
= $1,000+ of sunk costs all the folks talking about making $ selling pigs fail to mention and I haven't decided if I need any barbed wire or electric fencing yet. So ignoring all of that sunk startup cost...

$300 for 3 weened and wormed piglets, New Hampshire. Price agreed to in December, I bet they cost more now with the higher feed costs.
$740 for 1,850 lbs of feed mill bulk priced at $.40/lb and pretending I didn't buy the 4 bags at the farm store because I was rushed for time, also assuming prices don't go up by the 4th of July. Typical consumption from 2-6 months is 600-800 lbs each. I live next to a sweet corn farmer so I have free access to unmarketable corn (stuff that didn't sell on the stand and is starting to wrinkle a bit, stuff the worms get into, and the smalls), I don't think much of that will be ready for these 3 but I have many bags of frozen cobs from last year still so I'll share knowing I have free fresh resupply 100' from my door in August. Plus scraps and garden overflow I'm hoping to supplement about 150lbs of feed costs.
$35?? Electric pump cost to get the well or rain water into the 275 gallon IBC Tote.
= $1,075 cost to market weight (200-260 lbs)

So I used to buy market feeders from a 4H kid but that source isn't available anymore, but processing two years ago was about $2/lb for what we actually got in meat. Roughly we would pay $3/lb. This includes costs for some smoking and sausage seasoning with premium vacuum sealing. Since I don't have current prices but know it's higher let's call it $2.50/lb processing to the table.

Will sell the biggest pig, markets expecting $90 per hundred weight this summer so $90x2.5 (~250 lbs) = $225 income (let's be real this isn't profit) offsetting costs. This seems off based on what we used to pay and craigslist adds for $300-400 but let's roll with it.

So $1,075-$225= $850 for 500lbs of butcher processing typically results in 360 lbs of meat x $2.50 to table = $900 processing cost.

So if I did all that right it's $1,750 out the door cost for 360 lbs of higher quality meat. $1,750/360 = $4.86/lbs. (Excluding $1,000 of "other" costs you could call long term ROI I suppose.)

I built the pen big enough to grow out 8 at a time to sell 5 or 6 in future years if I want. This year it's a hobby where my son gets to learn where his food comes from. Priceless. Also worst case some other crazy world event happens and further destroys the food supply this year and we'll have more than pot chickens to eat for a while.

The YouTube videos claiming to make thousands selling pork are likely not counting all of their actual cost, let alone their labor time. Or like you mentioned maybe their buddies with a scraps food supply...

 

[U_Stormcrow]

You mean how much more am I paying per pound for my hobby because it tastes better?
Let's see:
$460 in 8 Combo, 2 hog and 1 cattle panel to make an extra good pen that's taller in case I got a climber jumper. We'll call it 31'x 29'. The two hog panels are for the loading shoot and the cattle panel for their shelter hoop.
$260 for two small gates at each end of the shoot.
$50 Used IBC Tote with a broken valve in the next county that has prune juice in it before.
?$20 in parts to make a double nipple auto waterer. Includes spare nipples but I got the plumbing parts with other stuff so I'm not sure on total cost.
$0 old tarps to cover the hoop pen, and old tin for the back side that was here when I bought the place. Two old scrap short 4x4's to hold the gates. Pen in a spot that is in an old growth spruce area that usually grows weeds like crazy (free weeding labor not factored in), so it's good drainage soil on a hill for about 4" then it's clay so we dug 18-24" deep and used a steel bar to compact the clay back in, no concrete bag costs, large dog crate I already have for transporting them.
$20 for the first 5 bales of straw, this is a good price from my neighbor.
$60? T post clips, T post driver (I have not needed to put many in before so I always used a sledgehammer before but looking at about 25 I finally bought one) temp zip ties to hold the panels for final fitment and a scraps rubber bowl.
$180 double door hog feeder.
$60 for the first 200lbs of food because I only had 8 days notice, was expecting them at the end of May. I fit about 185 lbs of feed into the 100lb feeder...
$160? Fuel to get all this stuff... take the pigs to slaughter, and pick up the meat.
$0? Assuming one of my many friends or family will let me borrow a livestock trailer in 4 months.
?? One dewormer treatment in 2 months.
?? AG lime mixed with wood ash to keep the smell down.
= $1,000+ of sunk costs all the folks talking about making $ selling pigs fail to mention and I haven't decided if I need any barbed wire or electric fencing yet. So ignoring all of that sunk startup cost...

$300 for 3 weened and wormed piglets, New Hampshire. Price agreed to in December, I bet they cost more now with the higher feed costs.
$740 for 1,850 lbs of feed mill bulk priced at $.40/lb and pretending I didn't buy the 4 bags at the farm store because I was rushed for time, also assuming prices don't go up by the 4th of July. Typical consumption from 2-6 months is 600-800 lbs each. I live next to a sweet corn farmer so I have free access to unmarketable corn (stuff that didn't sell on the stand and is starting to wrinkle a bit, stuff the worms get into, and the smalls), I don't think much of that will be ready for these 3 but I have many bags of frozen cobs from last year still so I'll share knowing I have free fresh resupply 100' from my door in August. Plus scraps and garden overflow I'm hoping to supplement about 150lbs of feed costs.
$35?? Electric pump cost to get the well or rain water into the 275 gallon IBC Tote.
= $1,075 cost to market weight (200-260 lbs)

So I used to buy market feeders from a 4H kid but that source isn't available anymore, but processing two years ago was about $2/lb for what we actually got in meat. Roughly we would pay $3/lb. This includes costs for some smoking and sausage seasoning with premium vacuum sealing. Since I don't have current prices but know it's higher let's call it $2.50/lb processing to the table.

Will sell the biggest pig, markets expecting $90 per hundred weight this summer so $90x2.5 (~250 lbs) = $225 income (let's be real this isn't profit) offsetting costs. This seems off based on what we used to pay and craigslist adds for $300-400 but let's roll with it.

So $1,075-$225= $850 for 500lbs of butcher processing typically results in 360 lbs of meat x $2.50 to table = $900 processing cost.

So if I did all that right it's $1,750 out the door cost for 360 lbs of higher quality meat. $1,750/360 = $4.86/lbs. (Excluding $1,000 of "other" costs you could call long term ROI I suppose.)

I built the pen big enough to grow out 8 at a time to sell 5 or 6 in future years if I want. This year it's a hobby where my son gets to learn where his food comes from. Priceless. Also worst case some other crazy world event happens and further destroys the food supply this year and we'll have more than pot chickens to eat for a while.

The YouTube videos claiming to make thousands selling pork are likely not counting all of their actual cost, let alone their labor time. Or like you mentioned maybe their buddies with a scraps food supply...

THANK YOU for the break down. I was around $3.50 a pound in my own math, but figured I'd be doing a bunch of the butchering, and ultimately, the animals are too big to justify maintaining enough to breed replacements while only seeing to the protein needs of my wife and I, so you have some things I hadn't considered. Your numbers look much more reliable than my back of napkin math.

No dispute its better quality meat.

 

[EliteTempleton]

THANK YOU for the break down. I was around $3.50 a pound in my own math, but figured I'd be doing a bunch of the butchering, and ultimately, the animals are too big to justify maintaining enough to breed replacements while only seeing to the protein needs of my wife and I, so you have some things I hadn't considered. Your numbers look much more reliable than my back of napkin math.

No dispute its better quality meat.

There are ways to change the formula for sure, like one woman I saw had a wagon wheel pasture setup that looked realistic. So you know if you have like 5 acres and rotate the into 7+ different pastures. Like you said you can self butcher, I've got that setup but I wouldn't want to do 250lbs x3 in August in my garage. The deer is enough work in colder temperatures. For lots of no b.s. info check out the "Homesteading the hard way" channel and the best feed and water setup I saw (and copied) without buying a $600 commercial feeder is here on "Keeping it Dutch" do yourself a favor and skip to 8:23. I basically did his setup with a hoop house and a loading shoot. If I have time to relearn how to post pictures I'll share. I think it's an awesome setup for growing them out but I've had them exactly a week. I like it a lot so far though and I have a YouTube University P.H.D. degree in pig farming over the last 3 months.

If I thought I was going to start breeding I would look up breeds that don't keep growing their entire life. The red wattles look interesting but that wasn't a focus of my studies.

 

[Cfinley829]

I'm definitely interesting in this topic. I am mildly concerned about the possibility of chicken feed becoming unavailable. I am at least interested in finding ways to supplement the diet to reduce the feed consumption.

An idea posted on another thread was to grow black oil sunflowers, and harvest the seeds. I plan on getting a bag of black oil sunflower seeds and trying to plant some next week. Also experimenting with sporting grains, or growing fodder.

We planted ours today.