How would I make my own feed?

[FractalFarmer]

Here is another good source for feeding (and butchering) from Gene Logsdon (1985)
WIth Update - November 2008
Garden Farm Skills:

http://organictobe.org/index.php/2008/11/11/feeding-catching-and-butchering-chickens/

Home-Fed Chickens
Since chickens have a wonderful digestive system for grinding grains, you can just feed them whole grains as I do. But if you insist on grinding grain for chickens, you’ll be way ahead if you take your grain to the mill and have it ground there instead of buying commercially ground grain. I hear you saying, well, my grains won’t have all those vitamins and minerals and protein supplements in them, all scientifically mixed to give the chicken a “perfectly balanced” ration. I don’t want to get into an argument about the relative merits of these “perfectly balanced” rations,… but in some feeds there are still various antibiotics and drugs…

If your hens have access to the outside at least a few hours every other day in nice weather, they will balance their own rations quite well with bugs and worms and grass and leaves (and your garden fruits if you aren’t careful). If you can’t let your chickens out for part of the day once in a while (the best way is to turn them out 2 hours before sunset—they won’t stray far and will come back to roost at dark), you can bring them grass clippings, table scraps, and garden surplus and provide them with a salt-mineral block, oyster shells, and water. Along with your grains, and in winter a bit of high-quality clover or alfalfa hay (you can dry the clover right off the lawn), you will have provided as balanced a ration as any you can buy. It may be a sight more balanced, in fact, because your egg yolks will have a rich orange-yellow color, denoting a higher carotene and vitamin C content than those pallid-yolked eggs from the egg factories.

If you are into grinding grains, the ration formulas you can use are myriad. The conventional mixture is invariably about 2/3 corn and 1/3 oats or wheat, or oats and wheat. Barley, wheat, and oats can all take the place of corn, but in larger amounts, because corn provides more energy. You can also mix in a bit of protein supplement. If you have good-quality alfalfa, you can feed that instead of the supplement…​

 

[AJcantsay]

Yes I would like to know about the home made dog and cat food as well. I mean really I'd like to know about any home made animal/live stock feed. I plan on having cows and horses along with my dogs (maybe 1 barn cat) and chickens. I'm open to hearing about the advantage of other animals though. Like turkey's or guinea's(sp?) or even goats and rabbits. Like I said, I'm trying to gather all the information I can from where ever I can.

If you guys know of any good books on growing your own grains I would appreciate that as well.

 

[greyfields]

To make your own feed:

Find bulk grain. Wheat, Oats, Rye, Corn, etc. Buy it by the ton right after the harvest when prices are lowest.

Find bulk seed meal. Soybean, linseed, cottonseed, any seed meal. Buy it by the ton right after harvest when prices are lowest.

Purchase your mineral base. Poulty nutri-balancer by Fertrell is the most common one.

Mill the grain. A small roller or hammer mill works. Combine it with the seed meal to achieve the correct protein %.

Mix the grain, seed meal and nutri balancer in the right proporations. If it's layer feed, you'll also add oyster shell at this point.

With nearly all grains, they do not meet the energy requirements, so you will probably also end up mixing in about 40-50# of vegetable oil per ton to give it a little more ooomf.

If you try doing this in small batches throughout the year, you will gain experience.... however, it's not going to save you any money. We grew our own rye grain this yea and mixed chicken and pig feed for the first time. It's a LOT of work. I'm doing it again. But realize being self sufficient is cool; but it's a LOT of work. If you have a day job, grinding/mixing your own feed really can become a drag and takes up your free time.

 

[freemotion]

For the cats, I use the 80/20 rule, 80% muscle meat and 20% veggies. You can go higher with the meat, some people do 100%. I used to use ground turkey as a base and cook string beans, zucchini, collards, pumpkin, and carrots, along with some chicken livers, and throw the veggies and livers in the blender before mixing with the cooked turkey, then freeze it in daily serving size containers.

For some reason, it is hard to find ground turkey reliably here, so I switched to whole chickens. Turkey is over $2/lb, and chicken can still be found for $0.69/lb, so it is much cheaper, too.

Once a month I roast 6 whole chickens, strip all meat and skin, and run that through the meat grinder on my stand mixer. Meanwhile, the bones are boiling to make broth. (I reserve the breast meat from one or two of the chickens for us for chicken salad sandwiches, and save the wings while raw for the dog.) I also run the raw livers through the grinder, too, and mix it all up. I usually buy 4-6 containers of liver, depending on the size container available, to get 4-5 lbs liver.

Then I puree the veggies, usually a frozen lb bag of green beans OR zuchinni from the garden, a lb of fresh carrots, half lb of leafy greens, and a couple cups of frozen pumpkin from the garden in some of the broth.

I mix it all with lots of the broth, and can it in pint jars for 90 min (pressure canner only.....otherwise, freeze it.) My freezer is so full, I prefer canning it now. Also, I plan to get ahead in the winter when I have more time and am stuck indoors, so I won't have to make any catfood all spring and summer.

The cats prefer the canned version to the frozen. I add some vitamins when opening each jar. The cooking will destroy them. When I freeze it, I can add the vitamins to the lukewarm mixture before freezing.

I have two gigantic cats, strays with health issues. This amount lasts one month. For normal-size cats, it would last closer to three or four months per cat. If I had one normal cat (imagine that!) I would probably can it in half pint jars, for one-per-day convenience.

I do enjoy the food-making process, so it might be overwhelming for most people. My hubby helps, though, by buying, cooking, and stripping the chickens the day before, and I often do the grinding the night before while watching a favorite show to make it go faster!

I usually set the broth pot on simmer and leave it overnight, sometimes closer to 24 hours if I am working that day. The bones get so soft, after I strain out the broth, I mash the bones in batches with a potato masher and bag and freeze them for the hens for when the bugs are gone in winter. They go nuts. The bones are extremely soft, no danger. I like the fact that nothing is wasted, too. They tend to lay better for a few days after getting this, too, interestingly. They are omnivores, after all.

The dog is on a raw diet. It started in desparation, he was at death's door as a puppy, I went to several vets and finally tried raw. His health turned around instantly, so now I am a convert. He is 30 slim lbs and gets two raw chicken wings a day, and on Wed and Sat gets a veggie puree with carrots, collards, brown rice cooked in broth (frozen in baggies for convenience, usually made on catfood day.) and peanut butter for flavor and some vitamins. He also gets food off our plates, cooked eggs and veggies and a tiny taste of meat. NO grains, other than the bit of rice with his veggies.

Raw bones don't splinter like cooked bones do. Think coyote, fox, all the predators we protect our live, raw chickens from.....if choking on the bones were a problem, after the first attack, the predator would go off and choke to death! I also give wings because they are softer bones. Also, dogs need a "poorer" diet, less rich muscle meat than cats. Straight muscle meat will give diarrhea. I also prefer whole to ground, as I can then wash it myself. You can purchase whole ground chicken wings in some areas.

Use caution when introducing this to an adult dog who has been on commercial diets. They are not used to chewing their food, and may swallow a wing whole. I have a friend, a vet, who feeds their bull mastiffs on raw wings. They whack the wings with the back of a cleaver to break the bones up a few times, without cutting the wings up. They have had no problems, doing this for years.

Look for info on the BARF diet. It stands for bones and raw foods. These dogs also have fewer, if any, dental issues, which I've read makes up about a third of many vets incomes!!!

Hope this helps....oh, and I use a plastic airline-type crate to feed him in. Occasionally, he is not very hungry, and will want to save his wings for later. So the instinct is to bury. And in the house, the best place is in the sofa cushions!

Also, raw foods should be fed at body temperature, never frozen. I run warm water over them to thaw and to wash, so he gets them nice and warm....in his crate, with the door shut!

 

[freemotion]

Fractal, nice article, just a note: Alfalfa is around 17% protein, so although a great addition, will not balance lower protein grains.

Grey, cool, self-sufficiency rules! Yeah, baby! Consider turning off the grinder for less work, trust me, it works out fine.

When I was a kid, my farmer-boy dad would put whole oats, bought practically off the combine, in five gallon pails to soak. He never rinsed them to my knowledge. The idea was to ferment them, and when they got bubbly, they went to the pigs. The pigs were always healthy and gained weight, so again, a simple way. His father also fed potatoes to the pigs, but boiled these in a large outdoor cauldron. He grew them as well as oats on their farm in Maine with their 11 kids to feed! Then the universities encouraged the small farmers to copy the huge operations, and Pepere wanted to be "modern," and switched over to some of those methods.

Some of these valuable techniques are becoming lost, sadly. We don't have to copy the large commercial "farms" where getting hens to lay one more egg one day earlier is important, when you have tens of thousands of hens.

 

[chickenma]

AJcantsay and freemotion

 

[beautifulbirds]

If you get a domestic (relatively cheap) coffee grinder that will grind small amounts, or you could buy a commercial coffee grinder if you like, the sort they have in cafes - that will deal to any grains you have on hand and your birds will have fresh ground grains daily

 

[AJcantsay]

Would it be better to feed fresh bits of corn just taken off the cob or make it hard pieces? And how do you get corn to be hard? Does it have to dry in the sun or just be left alone for a certain amount of time after it is harvested?

I really need specifics on this stuff. So far from what I've gathered is to (for the winter) put cracked corn only when I need it and then put the corn and oats together to soak in whey. Now I can add soybeans and sunflower seeds to that but do I soak them in the whey? Do I do anything special to them at all?

How do you make soymeal? And what is it exactly?

 

[vermontgal]

As far as dog food goes, I can go to my local natural-raised chicken farm (that sells the expensive chicken to the organic food stores) and get their chicken backs / necks and turkey wings for $20 for a 50 lb box. That's a better deal than you will get in any Walmart or bigbox grocery store, and it puts money into your local farmers. It is their waste products, but great for dog bones (BARF diet).

For chicken feed, there have been several articles in Backyard Poultry about feeding chickens via a rich compost method -- giving the chickens worms from composting, or allowing the chickens to scratch around on a big compost pile to get the bugs, worms, and good bits of veggie matter.

Storey's guide to raising chickens (written by Gail Damerow) has recommendations for feeding chickens grains in terms of ratios of corn, oats, etc. to get the right protein mix.

 

[freemotion]

Quote:
There is a ton of info on the internet on how to grow various plants...I do a search and try to find information for my area (think Idaho potatoes and Florida oranges!)

Sweet corn, that we eat as corn-on-the-cob, is not the same variety as feed corn. You can also grow popcorn, which I've done, you leave it on the plant until it is mostly dry, then bring it in and continue drying it. The squirrels got most of mine, all in one day. I checked it every day and planned to pick it all at the first sign of animal teeth. They were too quick, I got three ears instead of 100 or so. Plant way more than you need!

Next year, I will do popcorn and the darker, decorative corn. I read somewhere that it has higher protein, slightly. If you are in the West, try dent or flint corn. It is grown here for fall decorating, and I occasionally find an ear when walking the dog on farm roads. I pick it up and bring it home for my girls, just for fun. I just rub it, and the kernels come off.

The sunflower seeds don't need to be soaked. The soybeans must be processed in some way, cooked in the crockpot, or roasted in the oven. Soybean meal is a byproduct of extracting the oil, it is a ground up cooked soybean, basically. It has somewhere around 37% protein or more. You can buy it at the feedstore, but you may have to call around, depending on where you live. I cannot find it in Mass. but bought a few bags when I travelled to Maine, where they grow soybeans up North. I don't go through a 50 lb bag a year for my 20 hens, but they free-range and get meat scraps in the winter. I put a gallon in the hanging feeder about a month ago, and it is down by 3 quarts. I did not have to add any all summer.

Using the hanging feeder with soymeal makes balancing the ration super easy.....the chickens will balance their own ration! No more Pearson's Square for me. Much of what you read is for chickens that are stuffed wing-to-wing in wire cages and have to eat what moves on a conveyor in front of them. You do not have to feed this way if you have room. If you just have a pen, no room for pasture, you can bring variety to them.

Work with whole soybeans if you cannot find out if the meal you want to buy was exposed to solvents. Lots of processers use nasty solvents to extract the oil and it remains in the meal. Some use a cold-press method, so the meal will be safe. Not everyone is concerned about this, and that's ok, pick your poison. It is very difficult to live toxin-free in today's world, so do your best and know you are reducing exposure for you and your family, even if you need to choose soymeal that is not as pure as you'd like.

Some people in the Northern states, grow worms in the basement. It seems to be quite easy. I may add that next year....one thing at a time! Lots of info online and you just need a large storage tote or two and some family vegetable scraps. I can't imagine having enough scraps, all goes to the hens now!

You don't have to do it all at once, you know, you can just grow part of your own feed, and increase that every year if you enjoy it. Or just grow some, what works for you. The important thing is to have fun and experiment! Feed as wide a variety as you can, and your hens will do just fine.

I have neighbors with kids, and they like to feed my animals over the fence. I gave the mom a list of what is ok, and they supplement my girls' feed with fresh foods every week, and thank me for the privilege!