Making your own feed

[MarkRainbolt]

I was curious who makes their own feed for their chickens ? Was watching a YouTube video on a young lady making her own feed, she was using whole corn, black oil sun flower seeds,white millet, flaxseed , whole oats. She said she gets 22% protein out of the mix instead of 16% you get out of layer feed. She also said that the cost of her mix comes in at .23 cents a pound compared to the .26 cents a pound for the layer feed.
Was wondering what you all use in making your feed if you do make your own.
Mark

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I was just asking if anybody made their own feed!!! I don’t want to start a fight with anyone, just asking a question.
Mark

No fight. Some few do make their own feed. Most efforts are nutritionally nferior, and often more expensive - but some have no choice, and a rare few can make it work in their conditons.

Finding a good recipe on the internet, however, isn't as easy as many might think. Likes and shares and follower count is no guarantee of good nutrition for your birds.

If you do want to look into doing it, and you don't know much about feeding chickens, I suggest you start with Justin Rhodes' recipe, and price that out for comparison with a decent, non-premium, off the shelf feed.

 

[SandyRiverChick]

I can tell you from experience that these easy to follow You Tube recipes, are dangerous at best. I actually REALLY LIKE Becky from "Becky's homestead." And she has a "recipe" almost identical to this one in the OP. Most people viewing these recipes like me, don't have a food science, nutrition, chemistry, biology, dietetics, or biochemistry degree, they just think that it may actually be far superior to a simple bag of crumble. It sure does LOOK and sound better.

WELL, I followed the recipe and started feeding it to my flock of 9. First thing I noticed, they don't love oats. They pick out what they like and indeed you have alot of rolled oat waste. To bad I don't have a horse. THEN their health suffered. I noticed combs went from beautiful red to pale pink. Over the winter I lost 2. One I chalked up to old age, the other had been a strange runt her whole life. Then they went through 2 back to back dramatic molts and stopped laying eggs. I should have woken up sooner but it did finally occur to me that the real change for them wasn't the season or the runtiness, it was the change in feed. They've fully recovered since I went back to good ole Layer crumble with this stuff only as a treat/scratch and I do add a little quality puppy kibble and tuna when they need more protein in winter.

Again, just my experience and lesson learned that I should stick with my actual skills and get off You Tube.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I was curious who makes their own feed for their chickens ? Was watching a YouTube video on a young lady making her own feed, she was using whole corn, black oil sun flower seeds,white millet, flaxseed , whole oats. She said she gets 22% protein out of the mix instead of 16% you get out of layer feed. She also said that the cost of her mix comes in at .23 cents a pound compared to the .26 cents a pound for the layer feed.
Was wondering what you all use in making your feed if you do make your own.
Mark

LINK????

Before I tell you about fatty liver disease, recommendations for optimum chicken diets, and how grossly deficient in amino acid profile that recipe is, I'd like the exact ratios, so as to do it proper justice.

I'd also like to know when the video was made, since feed costs are up roughly 50% in the last year or so.

and I still don't pay that price for layer, but $13/50# for layer would be VERY good at a TSC, Rural King, or the like right now.

 

[Lazy J Farms Feed & Hay]

The as fed, if you use dry ingredients, typically drops things about 10%, since most things are dried to a moisture content of 10% or less.

and if you have a better source for current nutritional assays on various ingredients, I'd be happy to update my calculator. We can only work with the info available to us - and like any good calculator - garbage in, garbage out. I understand the limitations of it.

Of course, most of the home brew feed recipes are so bad that correcting for as fed only makes them a little more terrible.

The problem with using averages is that it is an average. The key to any feed formulation is having the proper nutrient loading. This is one of the first things you learn as a nutritionist in Grad School. I have several different loadings for corn and soybean meal depending on what part of the USA the feeding is being made. The SBM I use in Ohio is different than what I use for farmers in South Dakota.

Don't get me started on DDGS. That one is a beast to tackle, definitely not a one size fits all ingredient loading.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Is this the Justin Rhodes' recipe you're referring to? Is it suitable for chicks or just adults? Is there another protein source that isn't soy that could replace the fish meal? Even touching feed with soy gives me a very severe allergic reaction. I have similar issues with fish.

• 30% Corn
• 30% Wheat
• 20% Peas
• 10% Oats
• 10% Fish Meal
• 2% Poultry Nutri–Balancer
• Free Choice Kelp
• Free Choice Aragonite

That looks like the Rhodes' recipe, yes. and replacing the fish meal would require completely reformulating the thing.

I'll demonstrate real quick* (IMPORTANT CAVEATS BELOW) just how important the fish meal is to his recipe.

In my calculator, J RHodes recipe outputs as (theoretically):
20.05% Protein, 4.12% Fiber, 3.68% fat. Its AA profile for the big four are 0.4, 1.15, 0.74, 0.21 against targets of at least 0.35, 0.7, 0.6, 0.2. In short, its as good or better (apart from the fact that you don't know your ingredients are actually up to average) as most commercial feed bags.

Take away the fish meal?
(Theoretically) 13.9% Protein, 4.58% fiber, 2.87% fat, and the big four are now 0.2 (grossly deficient), 0.65 (borderline), 0.48 (low), 0.14 (deficient).

Yes, a full 1/3 of the protein, and most of the the amino acids, come from that 10% fish meal. It makes the rest of the recipe possible.

Now, you can attempt to juice the recipe with higher value ingredients.

"Naked" or hulled oats to slightly increase protein and reduce fiber. You can use hard red winter wheat instead of soft wheat to again increase protein. You can't add more peas, they are already present in quantitity greater than the industry recommends (as is the fish meal, honestly). You could use alfalfa meal, if you can find it in good quality, but its chock full of the same chemicals that most try to avoid when they cut soy from their diet. You can cut back on the corn, increasing costs.

20 Alfalfa meal, 20 corn, 10 dehulled oats, 30 hard wheat, 20 winter peas and your numbers are more like (theoretically) 16.6, 8.74, 2.75, 0.24 (deficient), 0.77 (fine), 0.59 (close enough), 0.18 (near there)

At this point, we hardly resemble the Rhodes recipe, we are inferior to most everything on the shelf, we mostly haven't avoided the things that make people avoid soy, and we've greatly increased our price per pound.

THAT is why I don't recommend people try this at home. Also, IMPORTANT CAVEAT BELOW.

*understand, these are AVERAGES obtained from a feed website, not an assay of the ingredients you are actually using. The nutrition label on the bag (if there is one) always trumps the averages. Be aware also that some common feed sources are now routinely lower than this published average as crops have changed, AND that I'm offering a theoretical value, not "as fed" - again for speed. "As fed" is usually about 10% +/- less nutrition than this calculates, for feed mixes based on dried ingredients.

/edit and his recipe is appropriate for all ages. Chicks actually have higher nutritional requirements - and are more sensative to dietary deficiencies and imbalances - than adult birds are.

 

[3KillerBs]

They pick out what they like

Which is a good reason to serve any whole-grain feed -- even a commercial mix with the correct nutritional balance -- fermented or, at least, wet.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I thought so.

First, she needs to go back to grade school. She can't do algebra.

Second, I have no idea where she gets her nutrition info from, but her protein numbers for her raw ingredients are WAY WAY off. Possibly she got them from Garden Betty, another source of terrible feed info.

This is my source: Feedipedia.Org

Corn
Flax Seed
Proso Millet
BOSS
Whole Oats
End result: 12.69% protein, 10.99% fiber (between 2x and 3x the recommended), 19.4%!!!!!! fat (roughly 6x recommended), with an amino acid profile below recommended levels in the four most critical - honestly, It takes doing to miss on Tryptophan, and yet...

Sources for recommends:
NRCS/USDA
UGA
2021 Metastudy
Others...


PLEASE don't do that to your birds.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

From her own video:

Protein Analysis:
Black Oil Sunflower Seeds - 26% protein (40 lbs = 10.4% protein)
Whole Corn - 9% protein (40 lbs = 3.6% protein)
Whole Oats - 15% protein (40 lbs = 6% protein)
Flax Seed - 37% protein (5 lbs = 1.85% protein)
Millet - 9% protein (5 lbs = .45% protein)
=22.3% protein

Ummmm. NO.
That's 22.3# of protein in 130# of ingredients, using her own figures for the nutritional values. 17.15% protein.

Again, I have NO IDEA where she sourced those from.
Her numbers for flax seed are roughly twice what I can find on any reputable source. USDA puts it at 18g/100. So does Hodgson Mill (roughly) who sell the stuff. Likewise for Bob's Red Mill. Studies on ResearchGate, Healthline.com, VeryWellFit.com, FeastGood.com, and even less reliable sources all in the same 18% range. All agree fat content is roughly twice the protein content. What you want in chicken feed is protein content roughly 5x fat content. (Bobs red mill label, below)

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Her nutrition source for BOSS seems to have been for SHELL REMOVED, and "generous" at that - not what she used. Also, much more expensive.

Here's BOSS from Chewy:

I hope you see several problems there.

Here it is from the TSC website, for the brand she seems to be using:

Crude Protein (min): 14%, Crude Fat (min): 25%, Crude Fiber (max): 30%
These are even WORSE numbers than what I use in my calculator.

Different source (Meijer)
13% Protein, 30% fat (min), 30% fiber (max)

etc...

If you can't do math, and you can't read a label, I'm not trusting your recipe.

I would suggest you not trust her recipe either.