Question about feed and laying.

[bsruther]

What did people do to get their chickens to lay eggs before they made the modern high protein feeds?
Did they just keep a lot more chickens and hope that they got some eggs once in a while?

 

[A.T. Hagan]

Before modern day complete feeds folks let their birds free range mostly. They'd feed whatever they had, typically corn or maybe some other grain, or not feed anything at all but just let the birds cleanup the feed spilled by the other livestock plus whatever they could forage for themselves. From early spring through about late fall they would get eggs, more in the spring with the number slowly dwindling until they stopped laying. Works as well today as it did then - if you can let them free range over some good ground and maybe clean up feed spilled by other stock, get access to manure piles, and so on. If not it's going to work badly.

There were commercial poultry farms going all the way back to at least the mid-nineteenth century and perhaps further. We did not know enough then to create complete feeds so the birds were typically kept in large pastures, fed scratch grains, and whatever mash mixtures they were able to create. It worked well enough, but made things like eggs and chicken meat pretty seasonal. Cheap in the spring, expensive in the winter.

.....Alan.

 

[digitS']

James Dryden was probably the "father" of modern egg production in the United States. He was a professor at what is now Oregon State University, originator of the California Gray breed of laying hens, the first person with a 300 egg/year hen, and author of a few books on poultry.

One of those books is "Feeding for Eggs." It is really a short booklet and the OSU library has it available to download. Click on "bulletin_no4_ocr.pdf" at the top of the page.

http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/jspui/handle/1957/3401

This book was written in 1909. Dryden expected farmers to be putting together these formulas themselves.

Steve

edited to say, beef scraps and milk products were important feed components for Dryden.