Making Feed at Home

[U_Stormcrow]

Honestly, it gets requested a bunch. Its an interesting effort to test if I've learned from all the reading I've done. Just a matter of filling in the blanks now.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Before I start plugging in values, do you see anything in the Ingredient list I should also consider??? (I'm adding Oats now)

and are there any ingredients you would prefer that I try and work with (other than wheat, which I know is a major crop in your country), and will be where I start my efforts.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Barley grain is there. I'll try to work some into the recipe if you want. Its inferior to hard wheat in every measure I'm tracking (I'm not looking at all the trace minerals, where there may be some useful differences), and is usually used in the US to save cost. It is superior to soft wheat in a few measures (Fat, Lysine, Threonine), but those are easily obtained elsewhere.

So if it impacts cost in a good way, sure. Otherwise, I'm going to work primarily with hard (winter/durum) wheat on the assumption that its readily available to you and without significant price differential.

 

[RoosterBird]

Sure
We have Basmati Rice (white)
I don't know if I ever ate brown rice

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Noted. Basmati is wonderful. Brown rice hasn't had the hulls polished off. I'll make those changes later. Got to get some work done around here.

 

[RoosterBird]

Yes Sure,
We have two types of rice
Basmati White rice and
Sella Parboiled Rice

 

[TundraFang]

Ooh! This is interesting so I'll be stalking this thread

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Sorry this is taking so long, I keep coming up with ingredients to add. Here you see it populated with a popular (here in the US) "Make at Home" Chicken Feed. I still need to add yet more ingredients to try out some of the old recipes @saysfaa linked above, partially to provide a good starting point, and partially to satisfy my curiosity.

Note that I DO NOT recommend the "Make at Home" feed shown below, I was just curious and needed to test my calculator. Even it was a good feed (its not) and was reasonably priced (its not), the ingredients likely aren't readily available to you.

Will work on it more tomorrow, while I sip coffee before I butcher some birds.

 

[JDGreene]

In order to get some of the percentages higher than what is in the ingredient (example protein and meat) you have to dehydrate it to make that nutrient stronger by a weight percentage which makes the feed dry, which is why some numbers don't seem to match each other by weight.

Then because the feed is dry, the bird drinks more water which technically would lower the percentage back down.

So what if you just fed the ingredients (homeade feed) without drying them, which would be a lower percentage of course, but then the bird may not drink as much water which would make the daily intake of nutrients come out the same as if it were dry feed? Sounds like a conumdrum to me.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

In order to get some of the percentages higher than what is in the ingredient (example protein and meat) you have to dehydrate it to make that nutrient stronger by a weight percentage which makes the feed dry, which is why some numbers don't seem to match each other by weight.

Then because the feed is dry, the bird drinks more water which technically would lower the percentage back down.

So what if you just fed the ingredients (homeade feed) without drying them, which would be a lower percentage of course, but then the bird may not drink as much water which would make the daily intake of nutrients come out the same as if it were dry feed? Sounds like a conumdrum to me.

These charts work (mostly) with dry ingredients, as its the only way they can effectively be stored without spoilage, and all season. I *CAN* work with fresh ingredients for many of these things, but then you are left with some guesswork as to what the final diet is, since consumption weight will go up, being as so much of the feed is water.

The real reason there is variation is because different varieties, harvested at different times, from different fields and different locations around the world, tested by differing methods, show some reasonable variation in measurement. High quality professional feeds specify to their suppliers various nutritional ranges, then test periodically and adjust ratios to ensure a nutritionally stable final product wrom nutritonally unstable sources - by upping the corn, or the soybean, or the oats, or reducing same - so that the final Percentages fall within the claimed ranges. That sort of testing is beyond the ability of backyard owners.

Yet another reason why I normally recommend this effort not be tried at home.

/edit and looking further at the recipes @saysfaa offered above, I see they were recommending an all grain, low value (10-11% protein) "scratch" to be combined 60/40 with a high value "mash" (over 30% protein!) to end up with a final product around 20% protein - most of those mashes contain a moderately high percentage of "Meat scraps" which I'm having a beast of a time finding nutrition info on. Its not an ingredient that's allowed anymore in many (most?) countries, so I'm looking at possible substitutes. Likely some combination of fish meal, pountry by-product meal, blood meal, or meat and bone meal will offer an equivalent profile - will work backwards tomorrow to figure it out.