Is this too much to ask of my chicken feed?

[GreenMountainEric]

I am curious about the percentage of Calcium Carbonate in this feed. Calcium Carbonate is nothing so much as oyster shell and your ration also contains crab meal which is the dried up macerated shells and other body parts of crabs or other [COLOR=545454]crustacean[/COLOR] seafood like lobsters or shrimp.  Crab Meal could be making up too big of a percentage of the ration and even being used as a filler ingredient because some seafood processors may even be paying the feed manufacture to take crab shells off the processors hands instead of land filling them or making concrete with them.

In my humble opinion the buyer should always be doubly aware when buying any kind of new age animal feed.   In other words you are likely feeding Calcium Carbonate in the form of fish meal, crab meal, oyster shell, and some other source of Calcium Carbonate or limestone like perhaps more crab meal.   But I'm betting that a chemical analysis will not show crab meal, fish meal, or oyster shell, but instead this feed will test positive for massive amounts of the naturally occurring chemical, Calcium Carbonate.  The up side is that your hens will not suffer with heart burn.

I am not sure if there is a question in there or not..... But these are my thoughts on the post.

- You referred to the feed as "your ration". Not sure if you were referring to the OP, or if you were under the assumption that this was a feed made by my company. If it was the latter, I have no ties with scratch and peck, or anything they manufacture. My previous post was only based on the online information on their tag.

- Crab Meal would be the absolute last ingredient that any feed company would use as a calcium carbonate source, or for a filler. Crab Meal is used only as a protein supplement, and is about 54x more expensive than ground limestone. Crab Shell would be a different product, but is still a lot more expensive than oyster shell or ground limestone and doesn't have a useful purpose in the average layer feed.

- Fish meal would be the same story. It is $1300+ dollars per ton, versus ground limestone at only about $26.00 per ton. Fishmeal would only be used to meet protein requirements, and not a pound more than required to meet those requirements. It is way too expensive.

- Neither Fishmeal or Crab meal is very high in total calcium.