wasps and hornets----yucky, get someone to take care of it if your not into doing it.LuvMyChicks1491-Great sum up. haha
All summer we kept getting stung but couldn't see why. After the leaves left, we saw why. Different lenses on my camera shows it a little differently.
Quote: That is exactly the problem. If you feed only fermented grains, you will leave out important nutrients that processed feed has. Years ago I went to the all grains method. I also had in each coop a bucket with fish meal, calcium, and a vitamin mix. The theory was, that it most mimicked what a bird eats naturally free ranging and each bird will eat out of the "protein bucket" what its needs are. . What I found was, they really love the whole grains, but didn't eat much from the protein bucket, so egg production was not very good. When you think about it, birds in nature, only lay eggs seasonally. If we did not supplement with more protein, probably no one would keep chickens because it would be #1, hard to keep them alive in the winter, #2, supplementing them is costly for the amount of eggs produced..
I also found, when I first tried grains, and I mixed oats, corn & wheat, that they picked out the corn first, and they maybe ate the rest. Corn has the lowest % of protein, so that inn itself was a deterant.
Ideally, we would all just let our chickens free range without supplementing their diet. I for one, would be out of chickens faster than I could say "free range", not only because they would die in the cold months, but they would all be eaten by predators....now I'm asking myself, why do I have chickens inn the 1st place with all the aggravation....
That is exactly the problem. If you feed only fermented grains, you will leave out important nutrients that processed feed has. Years ago I went to the all grains method. I also had in each coop a bucket with fish meal, calcium, and a vitamin mix. The theory was, that it most mimicked what a bird eats naturally free ranging and each bird will eat out of the "protein bucket" what its needs are. . What I found was, they really love the whole grains, but didn't eat much from the protein bucket, so egg production was not very good. When you think about it, birds in nature, only lay eggs seasonally. If we did not supplement with more protein, probably no one would keep chickens because it would be #1, hard to keep them alive in the winter, #2, supplementing them is costly for the amount of eggs produced..
I also found, when I first tried grains, and I mixed oats, corn & wheat, that they picked out the corn first, and they maybe ate the rest. Corn has the lowest % of protein, so that inn itself was a deterant.
Ideally, we would all just let our chickens free range without supplementing their diet. I for one, would be out of chickens faster than I could say "free range", not only because they would die in the cold months, but they would all be eaten by predators....now I'm asking myself, why do I have chickens inn the 1st place with all the aggravation....
