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

[GigitheBackyardHerbilist]

I've heard soy plants are good. We're planting the sunflowers around the fence line, blueberry bushes. I had two and they died last year from neglect on my part. I broke my hand in July and had them in big containers, planned on transplanting in the back yard and they died. They didn't get enough water I guess. Everything else lived but I think they need lots of water Also we plan on planting Jerusalem artichokes. More strawberries and sorghum. Sorghum has a lot of uses. Comfrey as well. I have a list of things I'll have to get them out. But good pants, herbs and consumables for both chickens and humans.
I watched a video where you take an old bucket or new your choice, drill a bunch of holes in the bottom, hang it about chest height where your chickens hangout and put meat in it. Old meat cooked or raw. Let the flies do their job and the larva drop through the holes and the chickens eat them. He says the higher you hang it, the breeze takes the stink away. I'm not sure about it, but I thought about hanging one from a tree in the far back of my yard by the compost bins. Anyone with thoughts about that?

Out of curiosity, where did you get those seeds from? And is there any difference in seeds for planting and seeds for birds/eating?

That's where we're getting it from bird food. The huge bags of blank oil sunflower seeds. I have several heads of mammoth I saved from last year plus a few others, but I want a massive think privacy fence of sunflowers. I had a garden patch my grandson dropped almost any entire mammoth head into on accident last year and we loved it. The birds loved it the chickens loved it, my watermelons and cantaloupes love it. My chamomile not so much. Lol but the chickens loved the chamomile so it has to move.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

In Vegetarian literature, it is suggested that corn with beans produces a complete protein. I don't get the science behind that, but the Inca and Mayans lived off that for hundreds of years. Good thing chickens can eat worms and grubs, too.

It has to do with amino acid complimentation. Plant-based proteins are incomplete - they often have low (or effectively no) levels of certain critical amino acids making up their proteins. For purposes of chicken keeping, the four most inmportant, in order, are Methionine, Lysine, Threonine, Tryptophan.

In general, Methionine is hard to find adequate amounts. PERIOD. Its also the most important AA, particularly for hatchlings. A chicken's need for it declines as they age. Per pound, your best sources come from legumes and dried legume forage (soybeans, soybean meals, cottonseed meal, peanut meal), plus sesame seed, tef, hemp seed, and white "proso" millet. Italian "green" millet, amaranth, fenugreek and gram are all average sources. Won't boost your Met levels vs target, but won't hurt them, either. many of those sources are very high fat, so their use needs to be limited.

Lysine is next most important. Once again, soy and soy meal do very well here (its about as close as you will get to a complete and balanced plant protein). Cottonseed and peanut meals. Then come all the beans (ever wondered about rice and beans? This is the bean's contribution). Faba beans, cowpeas, lentils, winter peas, gram and fenugreek slip in there, then chickpeas. Most of these need heat treatment to correct some antinutrituve properties, and some need to be kept to small portions of the chicken's diet for other reasons as well - usually the presence of tannins, beta glucans, tryptosin inhibitors.

Threonine is next - and the list looks much like the Lysine list, beginning, once more with soy meal then descending thru the beans.

Finally, Tryptophan. Yeah, there's that soy meal again. As it turns out, birds don't need a lot of tryptophan, and its almost impossible to make a diet low in the stuff in the typical wheat-based or corn and soy based diet.

Regarding millets, in general, the darker the millet, the less nutritious it is for your birds - not only on the basis of chemical assays, but also due to increasing tannin levels, which can interfere with absorption of nutrients.
As to the beans, in general, cowpeas (black eyed peas, etc) are superior to faba are superior to lentils are superior to winter peas are superior to chickpeas - but the last two reverse with regard Lysine and Threonine.

Since all this stuff is complicated, and involves delicate balancing, I strongly recommend avoiding monolithic plantings of a single crop or two, which can easily imbalance a diet, and instead placing a large number of scattered plantings from multiple categories - I have four varieties of clover growing, for instance - each comes into seed at a slightly different time. I've planted amaranth, sorghum, buckwheat, millets. Have a number of herbs - fenugreek, yes, but also thyme, oregano, trying to get some mint to take hold. Planitng peanut this year, if I can find some. None of the peas have done well for me, will make more effort at those next year.

Then let the chickens forage.

 

[Lazy J Farms Feed & Hay]

I believe, and I'm going to flag him so I don't misquote, but I believe @Lazy J Farms Feed & Hay says the industry recommendation for fish meal is not to exceed 5%. But I could be misremembering, and hope he corrects me.

Correct, we try to limit the amount of fish meal in feeds. One must be careful with "fish meal" when making decisions. Menhaden is the main fish used in livestock feeds and the quality can range wildly. The concerns with any fish meal are two fold: Risk of Rancidity and Salmonella Contamination. These are two reasons many feed companies are moving away from fish meal, well that and the almost prohibitive price right now.

 

[Weeg]

Explain fodder please. I've read the term but don't really know what that is.

https://the-chicken-chick.com/sprouting-grains-for-chickens-fodder/

 

[Freedomrange]

With the current events and talk of no fertilizer. The fear of losing animal feed is real. So I've been researching going through all of my homesteading books trying to find ways to feed my chickens and keep them healthy and producing with no layer pellets and no grains. I have found a few amazing videos as well, on composting with chickens which I've been doing since I've got my chickens. (Last spring) That was one reason I was really thrilled to have my own so I didn't have to go to my friend's house and beg poop from them.

What I'm finding is that composting and letting your chickens pick through compost, they eat the bugs they turn the compost and they leave their own little nuggets of nutrients behind. Is an excellent way to grow my crops.
Also there are crops you can grow just to feed your chickens which I was doing last year to supplement but now know, that there are ways to feed and I don't have to grow an entire crop of corn for the girls, which I have been failing miserably at, just trying to grow for our own table.
Hoping that my chicken poop would help me yield a better crop of corn for our family plus all my other veggies. But I do not have to grow another crop just for my chickens?
Which I just do not have the room.

So I thought I would start sharing some of the things that I am learning on how to feed your girls and boys, if there is no rural King to supply you with your chicken feed.
Anyone else interested in this? Anyone else have their own advice to give an ideas to share? I'd be happy to hear.
Just for fun, this is fluffy. Who's not so fluffy at the moment. She's molting. Lol

I see We have some who pay attention and Act Accordingly as We all should be doing.
Thanks for the Post!
I foresee Us having to capture all possible rainwater as We live in a water haul situation.
Millet seed by the 5lb, bags will be planted in a 1/2 acre area to lower the dependency on pellets.
Greenhouse to be reset in May for growing the vegetables that grow well in Northern Arizona.
I may need to let groups walk around outside their areas. Armed of course.
We are all living the Greatest Moments of His-Story. Time to be Tough As Nails.
Persevere, Adapt, Overcome!
STAY FREE!

 

[dirkandlorie]

I have never relied solely on store bought feed for my chickens, though they have that available 24/7. I grow a lot of food but struggle in the wintertime to supplement them as much as I like. They are fed a plate of oatmeal/wet fines with mixed greens and blueberries topped with a thyme vinaigrette every day. Everything is free but the oatmeal, and there's only a little bit of that in the wet fines. Many greens can be grown indoors in the winter by a sunny window, and any excess produce from the summer is chopped small and put in the freezer to dole out over the winter. I also sprout wheat berries to stretch things further. Spring through fall is never a problem, free ranging, compost piles, gardens overflowing...my feed bill is minimal then. Winter time? Oh man its a struggle, I only have so much space I can grow inside the house. Mustard greens do well by a window, and romaine. Sweet potatoes do well under a grow light. Swiss chard will survive the winter outside under a row cover, but doesn't grow much but I can pick off it til late Jan or Feb, so that helps. We get way more eggs than we can eat, so I scramble these up and feed to the girls also when the fridge is overflowing with them. I've never tried feeding them without the commercial feed always available, so not sure of health consequences long-term if they didn't have it. But that said, my girls range from 4 years old to 8, all are healthy and everyone but the 8 yr old Cochin is still laying. Also want to say that I think variety would be important

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I would love to know more about this as well. How did pioneers feed their flocks before the convenience of local Tractor Supply store? Even very small homesteads fed themselves and their animals. How? I would imagine it takes planning, determination, and a lot of work, but there must be a way to maintain a healthy flock throughout the winter on a limited budget without depending an increasingly unreliable and expensive supply chain.

We have answered that question, repeatedly, in this thread and others. We've even linked recipes.

Once again, I recommend this very excellent thread assembling info by @Lauravonsmurf, with contributions by @saysfaa @rjohns39 @Rangergord and others.

The short answer is, their birds were - by modern standards - tiny, slow to grow, produced eggs very poorly, and subsisted (not thrived) on a diet consisting of spilled seeds and grains, plus what they harvested from the fields of (largely grains) plantings and vegetables, plus any feeds missed by the horses, the cattle, the dogs or cats, kitchen scraps, and what they could forage as part of a working farm system, usually on the edge of failure. Take away the spilled feed for the horses, the dogs, the fields of grain, mom's veggie plots, etc and the whole thing falls apart.

Or they were fed - usually a mix of corn, wheat, and one or two other grains (whatever was local and cheap - sorghum, rye, barley, etc) supplimented with a source of needed amino acids (though they didn't know this is what they were providing) from an animal source, typically milk, buttermilk or "meat scraps" together with green forage (alfalfa was commonly recommended, and clover - we tend to use soy today). On that diet, a productive hen produced maybe one egg every third or fourth day, generally medium to large in size, and an old rooster might be six or seven pounds. Chicken in the pot was a special treat - so special it was often a Sunday dinner, and the basis for numerous political slogans, "a chicken in every pot". And the reason it was in the pot, apart from its small size, was that only long moist cooking methods made it edible.

/edit and you ate your flock going into Winter, so you didn't need to feed them, keeping only the best birds and maybe a single rooster, two at most, so you could build up the flock's numbers come Spring.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Even now, with feed and food prices rising, any way to save on the feed bill and still get high quality eggs is welcome.
I think I have a pretty good formula that I'd like to try, maybe as a supplement to commercial feed, but from the math I could plug in it looks like this should have a good balance as a sole ration.
19 pts corn
7pts brewers spent grain
3pts fishmeal
1pt oyster shell or free choice
Maybe a bit of gypsum

It's on the high end for fat and fiber, but it should be acceptable. I'm still not sure if I have the amino acid calculations right. It's not clear if the are listed as % of ration or % of protein.
@U_Stormcrow I would love to hear your opinion on this.

I've assumed the Fertrell's Fishmeal. I've also assumed dried Brewers grains (and Note: HUGE variation in the value of brewers grains).

End result? Much better than I first anticipated. Good to be pleasantly surprised. The Fishmeal (of course) is a bit part of it.

Anyhow, without correcting for the moisture content, which will lower these results less than 10%, and the addition of oyster shell would lower it further still (about 3%) the quick summary is:

18.7% Protein, 5.8% Fiber, 4.9% fat - Methionine 0.4% (Good, thank the fishmeal), Lysine 0.85% (Good, again, the fish meal), Threonine 0.68% (Fish meal + Spent Grains compensate for the low corn - this is well within the 0.6-0.8% desired range), Tryptophan 0.19% (0.2% is target, this is likely "close enough"). A little more fish meal, or a fish meal wirth a higher protein than Fertrells will do it. A bit of blood meal. Some soy, peanut, or cottonseed meal will all also do it - very little (1 part) would be enough.

and I can't do the vitamin breakdowns yet - that's days worth of work I've not found motivation for yet

/edit How huge? Feedipedia's data is based on 101 samples of Dried Spent Brewer's grains. The protein content varied from just 19.5% to 31.9%! The average (which my calculator uses) is 25.8%, with a standard deviation of +/- 3.1%

One of the limitations to home brew feeds, you can't test your inputs, you have to rely on averages and assumptions which may not represent the product you are actually using.

 

[TooCheep]

I am not sure if anything actually eats Japanese beetles. I am sure the neighbors will love you for drawing them away from their land.

My chickens happily eat Japanese beetles. I don't know how many they get naturally, but I collect the beetles for them every year.

The Japanese beetles tend to congregate on a few of my fruit trees and berry bushes. I take a container with some water and simply knock the beetles into the container. The beetles primary self defense is to drop down off the plant and then fly away, so I simply place the container under them and they often end up jumping into the container on their own. When I collect enough, I let the chickens play "bobbing for beetles".

 

[saracarver3]

If you sprout those sunflower seeds you grow it gives them a lot more food and nutrition from them! I have scratch grains I am planning on sprouting just as soon as there is nothing at all to glean from the garden.

If you can grow regular sunflowers also grow Mexican sunflowers for the greens (leaves). They grow abundant and are sooo easy to propagate. My chickens and turkeys fight for these and jump and fly to eat the plants growing out of reach. They are a chop and drop, high nitrogen plant.