Resolution, it is very hard to get used to the idea of not keeping food available to the peas all the time. When you say a teaspoon is all they need for 8 hours then for a full 24 hours in a day would they need 3 teaspoons? I have feed here so am still keeping feed available in the pens with ultra kibble in the pan as well. They always finish up the Ultrakibble so I add more. With Breeding Season coming up we're suppose to change to a Gamebird Breeder Ration. Does UK replace their need for it??
If you're using commercial crumbles or pellets as a sole ration it's in your best interest to keep food in front of your birds at all times. This is particularly true if you intend to butcher them for market or are managing an egg operation. These "soft" feeds are made from pulverized feedstuffs ground into the finest flours. They rapidly disintegrate upon digestion. Soft feeds are designed to move rapidly through the digestive system. The birds eat their fast food, absorb the most readily accessible nutrients and expunge the rest.
In other words, the birds eat and poop all day.
If birds maintained solely on these rations fail to keep a full crop, they'll not thrive in those conditions of intensive farming where commercial feeds are designed, tested and proven.
The material in these rations is of less than optimal nutritional value unless it is consumed for several hours of the day every day. People that have to keep a full hopper of feed out each day are ensuring that their birds consuming enough low quality nutrition to survive and stay in good health.
Smaller portions of high quality nutrition are preferable for any number of reasons. But they're not fed all by themselves. It's important to try and mimic nature as best we can. Birds forage over wide areas and it's not every day that a peahen managed to catch a baby rattlensnake or consume half an ants nest of larvae. She's more likely to fill her crop with low quality food items like leaves and grass stems and small drupes and rootlets, which are largely indigestible but coated in resins containing essential acids and volatile oils that are high in antioxidant and/or chelating properties.
Unprocessed grains, i.e., milo and proso millet, whole oats and brown rice and other sources of vegetable based nutrition like kale and celery are less nutritious in some key components than enriched commercial feed. Nevertheless, the bodies of birds, especially non-domesticated species and non-commercial heritage breeds, are better designed for unprocessed grains and fibrous vegetable matter than they are for soft feeds. These whole feed stuffs require extended periods of time within the digestive system to be processed. Intensive farming has designed commercial feed with the central objective of high yield. There are no long term health benefits of these rations, indeed there is evidence that yield decreases in some egg layers and general health decreases in some turkeys experimentally fed on these rations (solely) for more than two years. The internal organs like the proventriculus and ventriculus of those effected birds became ulcerated and developed systematic infections due to factors related to the PH of these rations in the gut and the consistency (or rather lack of) of the material within the digestive system for a protracted period of the study. In other words, these high yield feeds can eventually burn out even the species they are designed for.
This is one reason commercial poultry houses turn their flocks so rapidly. They feed them to produce and then turn them into other profitable chicken products before they've even begun to decrease their productivity, or developed secondary bacterial infections within their digestive tracts. New egg layers replace the year old birds-new breeder turkeys replace the two year olds. Let me reiterate that these studies were conducted on commercial flocks in controlled situations and the birds were fed solely on various different high yield rations.
It should also be noted that these birds developed ulcerations without exposure to parasites or the common pathogens they might in a barnyard versus a closed in facility. Treating birds for parasites when there are ulcers in the linings of their digestive organs is potentially damaging the health of the bird more than helping. A secondary infection on top of these ulcers may take place and this may be followed by protozoan reinfection.
Regardless, Turkeys and chickens grow rapidly by nature.-Their wild ancestors are both fully mature in their first year. They need to eat constantly as domestic species because they're bred for greater yield and fed on rations of lower nutritional quality/cost. This is the model of industrial farming.
Big yield first, long-term health last. Those birds are not intended for long productive lives. They are not even intended to reproduce.
Peafowl and heritage breed poultry, gamebirds, rare waterfowl and landfowl, none of these creatures need to be managed like commercial poultry.
This is particularly true for species like peafowl with delayed maturity that takes years to become adult. Why do people rear these birds like high production poultry?
Well-meaning people tend to treat their valuable birds this way because they've become conditioned to maintain poultry with commercial objectives.
Remember, leaving food out all day means there is always food out- for every creature you attract to your feeders and the spillage of that feed is going to contaminate the soil and grow mold and bacteria and so on. The feed companies want you to continue feeding your backyard flocks like commercial farms. This is good for business obviously.
Getting back to the topic of the thread, what I meant to impart about UltraKibble supplement is that as a supplement mixed together with your favorite maintenance feed, very little is required. As it's highly digestible, required consumption of the product is miniscule.
UltraKibble is comprised of essential nutrients, entirely digestible proteins -all the essential amino acids- + macro and micro nutrients, probiotics, volatile oils, essential fatty acids and so on- basically- the kibble is a superfood in of itself. Because UltraKibble is a supplement, it's designed to ameliorate the maintenance diet, whatever that is, be that gamebird crumble or organic lay pellet -whatever your choice is. The kibble is designed to slow down the rate of digestion as it moves through the body. Dietary fibres in the kibble,both soluble and insoluble, swell within the crop. This allows the birds to absorb more nutrients from everything ingested, i.e., whatever else you're feeding.
I generally don't use commercial soft crumbles or pellets but many people that I know through animal husbandry do and they use them in concert with UltraKibble.
Personally, my preference is for a grain mixture that includes milo, millet, corn and so on with a small ratio of UltraKibble. Generous amounts of chard and celery are put out at least a few times a week and cooked brown rice and soaked chick peas, bananas, grated sweet potatoes- on occasion.
As the birds are only fed enough dry food for them to consume in a few hours twice a day and UltraKibble makes up a very small % of the overall ration of that dry food, I can speak toward its efficacy when fed in small portions. The dry ration includes considerably larger proportions of ingredients like milo and millet which are nutritious but deficient in certain nutrients that are met with in the kibble. The bulk of their dry feed is nonetheless grains. There may be one teaspoon of UltraKibble fed out per ten teaspoons of scratch grain and four cups of chard and celery. Some days the birds will have extra food put out and that will generally include something like soaked chickpeas and cooked rice. Kibble proportions are increased exponentially for reproducing and moulting birds with up to five parts kibble to five parts scratch grain.
Some species like Crested Argus and Malay Peacock Pheasants, Congo Peafowl and etc. they are fed on UltraKibble as a maintenance fare with supplementation of ingredients like fruit and milo but these are deep forest specialists with different nutritional requirements than common peafowl and their domestic strains.
Green Peafowl are somewhere in the middle. A green peafowl should have 25-50% of its dry ration be UltraKibble, more so during the nesting season.
Take care to insure that males and growing birds of all species are fed the same as the breeding females during this period of time as this is when in nature the most optimal nutrition is available to the birds of all ages. IF you want your male peafowl to have perfect plumage the following year, you begin to condition him for moult during the first weeks of nesting, that two or three weeks before the first sign of moulting train plumes. Those feathers don't drop until they've been shoved out of the socket by new feather cells. You'll want to insure that the new feather cells are built with the best possible nutrition and this needs to happen before the moult begins not after as the cells are already being regenerated by the time the train has moulted. In short, during nesting cycle/pre-moult period through to the moulting cycle, ultraKibble should be fed at a higher %. It's up to you to decide how much. My personal choice, is ~ 55-65% of the total dry ration be UK during this period of the year for Green Peafowl.
25-35% for Indian Peafowl. So you can see the Indian Peafowl and its domestic mutations are fed even during their nesting/regenerative season only as much as Green Peafowl are fed during their non-breeding season-. That's how different the two peafowl are from one another.
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