Making homemade feed

SandraMort

Songster
11 Years
Jul 7, 2008
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I was looking at a recipe for homemade flock raiser and it said that the midday hot meal for wintertime should have meat in it. Does anyone know what kind of meat they mean and what inexpensive sources one could use? Home grown grubs, leftover scrap donated by a seafood or butcher shop or what?
 
I was thinking of getting a meat grinder for my kitchenaid and running fish heads from the fish store and tendons and so forth from the butcher through it, then offering to the birds (either raw summer or in the winter mash) and after a while, giving the leftovers to the BSF grubs... thoughts?
 
I have been wondering the same thing. I have been reading a lot about feeding whole grain and supplementing protein with meat scrap. I would like to pursue this type of feeding, except that I was wondering if I could use mealworms, yellowjackets, and other 'bugs' that seem to thrive all about us. Has anyone tried providing protein in this way? If so, do you put out a certain amount or just fill a feeder with bugs and let them pick all day?
 
Mine love leftover meat. They've eaten bits of steak as well as picking the meat bits off pork chop bones, which we string to their cage to make it easier for them to pick at. For peace of mind we only give them scraps that are cooked through, nothing raw. If there are any pathogens in the meat, in theory they could be transferred from the raw flesh to the birds, so everything they get is fresh and cooked to the same doneness as we like.

Also, as we discovered shockingly this afternoon, the hens love mice. So if you have a mouse problem and lay traps (not poison!), you could probably feed the chickens the dead mice if they were "fresh" (again to avoid pathogens). Yuck, that makes me shudder, but my hen Rose was extremely happy when she caught that mouse....
 
LOL! That doesn't help, I like meat slightly warm!
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Yes, I get the concept of cooking it. I wonder, though, if it really is necessary. Free ranging chickens aren't getting cooked mice and lizards...

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Uck, chickens eat the darndest things. Does anyone know if mice/rats carry any diseases that are transmissible to people via chickens? I know they are bad news in large quantities by themselves, but once eaten by a chicken..? If there are no health risks, hooray, I have just found out what to do with the "presents" our cat insists on leaving outside out door.
 

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