Is raw oat meal and cooked rice good for chickens?

[LALASD4]

I have not done it myself but my in laws feeds their chicken raw oat meal mix with 50% cooked rice, is that good for chickens?

 

[A.T. Hagan]

It won't do for a sole ration, but as a treat it's fine. Cooked or uncooked oatmeal or rice is perfectly digestible by chickens.

 

[ChickensAreSweet]

A.T. Hagan :

It won't do for a sole ration, but as a treat it's fine. Cooked or uncooked oatmeal or rice is perfectly digestible by chickens.

+1​

 

[LALASD4]

I think they are planning to give it to the chickens 50% of the time.

 

[ChickensAreSweet]

The following is an excerpt from this website:
http://nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/vitamin_b1/eijkman.html

"If the chickens were fed polished rice, plus the skin which had been removed, they didn't get sick. For a change, Eijkman fed the chickens with raw meat, and the chickens stayed well. Eijkman's conclusion was that starch had some toxic effect on the chickens. He thought that the skin, which had been removed from the white rice, contained a substance that made the poisonous rice innocuous. Eijkman called this the anti-beriberi factor.

Brown rice has its outer husk removed. White rice is polished further to remove the thin skin and the germ. Since the germ is ground off from the white rice grains, they have a slightly pointed appearance.

Eijkman described the trials in a report. He also wrote about them in Dutch scientific journals, so that other scientists could learn from them.

In 1895, after nine years of research with animals, Eijkman wanted to find out if humans could avoid getting beriberi by eating unpolished rice. He asked a doctor named A. G. Vorderman to carry out investigations in the prisons. The reason why he decided to do this in the prisons was that it was easy to control what people ate, and that the same persons stayed there for a long time. It soon showed that prisoners who were fed polished rice were a lot more likely to get beriberi."

This website says that chickens fed only white rice DIED. Because of the lack of vitamins. But brown rice- they did ok.

You also want your (their) chickens to get enough protein. Here is a website where you can enter a food and get its protein content:
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

Layer feed is usually around 16% protein. Some people buy feed that is 20% protein. Eggs are protein. So they won't get many eggs from their layers unless they are finding protein somewhere else.

If they will be free ranging, they will find bugs. Unless it is snowed over. It's tricky to say if they would be ok with just oats and rice, even with free ranging. If not free ranging, they will be definitely deprived of quite a few nutrients. I would not limit my birds to just those two foods (even brown rice) unless I were in a dire situation, personally.

Chickens are like people in that they benefit from a wide variety of foods.