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I would love to do this study. However, I have different ages in different enclosures. I buy my feed weekly, and am unsure how much goes to each enclosure. If I had a week to prepare, I could report this with accuracy.
Fantastic!
Contributing towards a more sustainable poultry farming discipline is one of our central objectives. In order for the Poulterer to make educated decisions in regards to flock management -especially as it relates to the farm's budget-over the long term- We all need to be keenly aware of how much food is going in and how much food is going out.
This is not as simple as how many bags (outside some empirical data study) of feed you are going through a month. It is combined with the time and petrol it takes to travel to and from that feed store.
Food goes in passed from the feed store into the vehicle and driven home. Feed goes into the livestock pantry, or wherever your feed is stored. Feed goes into the poultry as their primary consumption.
Most of the feed put out is consumed by poultry with some percentage likely being consumed by rodents, wild birds and the like.
Food going out is expunged as fecal material and urea. Food going out is also the wasted material, both particulate dust as readily appreciable in dry mashes and whatever is disintegrated; scratched into the substrate. The substrate of an enclosure is quickly its own organism within a few years of keeping birds on the same soil or not adequately sanitizing the environment before shifting. Feed going out is not always a negative thing. Manure is arguably as valuable a commodity as eggs and meat. At least this were the case when everyone of our respective ancestors, in all their diverse cultural origins, were farming as a primary means to not only survive in miserable seasons of weather, but also thrive during the worst of it. In other words, manure was stored up as valuable as gold for the garden. It should still be. Nevertheless, the amount of time it requires for the Poulterer to thoroughly remove fecal material and adequately sanitize the hen house must never been underestimated. THIS is where people, all of us, me included, try and push the accumulation of manure in a hen house to the back of our minds- because we are no longer rushing to the hen house to harvest that material. Today we only want to harvest eggs. The manure is just dealt with in 6 out of the 10 people reading this. Please correct me if Im wrong- Id love to be here. People wait until the last minute to clean a henhouse, thereby exposing their stock and their flock's confined environments to a dangerous level of fecal contamination.
So feed going in is valuable in terms of energy and nutrition. It costs money. One has to spend energy to nurture and maintain one's poultry yards.
Examining our protocol -from day to day, from week to week, twice a year- here is where can discover if and where time, energy and money are not beings used as wisely as they might be.
Now to be clear here, if you are a hatchery selling chicks every year- you are responsible for bringing in potential future heirlooms of every new farming family, that is, sending brand new chicks to young children and their parents= the rootstock of decades of stewardship to come- we can only hope- the hatchery would never skimp on nutrition. You still can't squander money but the biggest way to squander money when you are a hatchery or rearing birds for hatcheries, is to skimp on the value of their nutrition. Your fertility may or may not be deleteriously effected because you generally use very young stock as breeders. But rather than provide them an optimal diet, we provide them a high quality diet - deficient in key nutrients- the chicks hatch well enough but they do not thrive- ok that is a major digression.
The small family farm, the backyard poultry farmer, take a closer look at energy consumption in your yearly poultry initiatives.
How much energy goes in? How much energy goes out? Energy includes gasoline to drive to and from the store. It includes recycling cast off bags. Energy used in poultry farming includes electric brooder lights, timed egg production encouragement lighting and heat bulbs for exceedingly cold snaps; - The amount of time and energy it takes to put out the feed- this an important expenditure of energy. The time and energy required to maintain the highest level of sanitation at each feed and water installment within each enclosure. Vitally important expenditure of energy. The most important expenditure of energy is going to be in the removal of fecal material; the maintenance of sand baths, the maintenance of roost sites- the preventative measures against parasitic infection and disease.-
These are a few of the most important issues to examine closely- and revisit every few months and years. Build in some assessment. What is your exit strategy- if you were obliged to liquidate your flock- where would they go? Would your investment be lost? Would your stock be conserved as heirlooms or dumped off at a swap meet?
Is selling your eggs for money equally important or more important to feeding the family? Of course, if you are selling eggs to your community you are living in the ideal reality of ageless Poulterers of every time throughout history...
So getting back to feed trials. Everyone should be able to practice this exercise and compare data. ( From experience, a word to the wise, don't choose a partner that over indulges in small talk- chit chat- you'll not be evenly yolked and your data ends up junked because you are not working with the same parameters as other members of your peer group.
We would like to know
1.On Average how many adult birds live in each separate enclosure?
2. On average how many juvenile birds ( of the last year's progeny) are maintained in their respective enclosures?
3. How much dry maintenance feed is fed out per enclosure per month?
4. What is your primary dry maintenance feed?
a. Over 50% lay pellet
b. Over 50% mash
c. Over 50% crumbles
d. Over 50% scratch
e. Over 50% whole grains
f. Over 50% corn
If you utilize one hundred percent of one of these feedstuffs please document which one - wiriting I use 100% lay pellet
If you mix your own feed determine which of the aforementioned feedstuffs makes up the largest percentage or weight of dry feed put out.
If you were to staple up shade cloth or some other fabric beneath the nocturnal perches-
1.~ How much manure in weight are you collecting from under the perches?
2. What is the consistency of these droppings? Document this in your egg diary.
3. What is the odor of these droppings? Is it very acrid? What is the colour?
Some people will be throwing up their hands - no way in hell that they are going to involve themselves in collecting bird poop and playing with it.
Ok and no offense to those folks, this study is not going to be of interest to you.
As a farmer on a fixed budget and a family to feed, I need to know how much of the food I'm feeding out each day is actually being digested and how much is just being pooped out?
Every single Poulterer can begin this process of discovery. How efficient is your feeding/maintenance protocol and more importantly how sustainable is your poultry husbandry?.
This all leads to the discussion of selective breeding- egg shell colour- plumage and conformation type of the Marandaise hen-as well as the Marans and Every other breed , strain, mongrel or otherwise- first off everyone benefits when they can make more informed decisions- less guess work involved.
I worry about surplussing my stock out to other Poulterers even friends- what if they throw feed onto the ground for the birds to scratch? What if they leave whole hoppers of feed out for two weeks a time? How can we work together if a health problem arises? How can we collaborate to keep costs down for all of us and work in cohesion- so as to build a guild of sustainability Poulterers?
As for feed trials -