Protein content in chicken feed ingredients

March 4, 2010 Chicken feed No Comments

So you want to make a homemade starter/grower feed or a homemade layer feed, but you want to be able to mix and match some of the ingredients in a similar category.  For example, you’d like to swap oats for wheat or fish meal for soybeans.  How do you know how much protein the finished feed contains?


The chart below lists the percent protein in each of the main ingredients of chicken feed:

Ingredient Percent
protein
Dried fish flakes 76
Dried liver 76
Dried earthworms 76
Duckweed 50
Torula yeast 50
Brewers yeast 39
Soybeans (dry roasted) 37
Flaxseed 37
Alfalfa seed 35
Beef, lean 28
Earthworms 28
Fish 28
Sunflower seeds 26.3
Wheat germ 25
Peas and beans, dried 24.5
Sesame seed 19.3
Soybeans (boiled) 17
Wheat bran and/or middlings 16.6
Oats, whole 14
Rice polish 12.8
Rye 12.5
Wheat 12.5
Barley 12.3
Oats 12
Corn 9
Millet 9
Milo 9
Rice, brown 7.5
Milk 3
Whey 29 – 89


It’s easy to determine the percent protein of your finished feed using this chart.  For a 100 pound recipe, just multiply the percent protein of each ingredient (as a decimal) by the pounds of that ingredient in your recipe.  For example, if you add 30 pounds of oats you would multiply by 0.14 and come up with 4.2.  Add up the resulting numbers for each ingredient, and you have the percent protein of that batch of chicken feed.


If the percent protein in a recipe is too low, maybe you should back off on the ingredients at the lower end of the chart and increase the ingredients at the upper end of the chart.  For example, cut back on corn and increase your soybeans.  Soon you’ll be making your own recipe using the ingredients on hand!

This post is part of our Homemade Chicken Feed series.  Read all of the entries:

Recipes for homemade layer chicken feeds

March 4, 2010 Chicken feed, Chicken Health No Comments

Once your chicks grow up
and start to lay, you want to change them off the homemade
starter/grower feeds
and onto laying feeds with 16 or 17% protein.  Once again, I’m
listing several choices so that you get an idea of how to put together
your own feed recipe.  The numbers in the chart indicate a percent
of the recipe by weight —
to make a hundred pounds of feed, just pretend those numbers are in
pounds.

Generic
– 15-18% protein		 Modern – 17%
protein		 Modern (no
alfalfa) – 17% protein		 High corn –
15% protein		 No soybeans –
13% protein
Corn (shelled
or meal)		 48.25 48.25 60 53.5
Soybeans
(roasted or meal)		 30 30 8
Oats 5 10
Alfalfa meal
(can be eliminated in on fresh pasture.)		 4 5 2.5 5
Fish meal
and/or meat meal		 3 7.5
Aragonite,
ground limestone, marble, or oyster shells  (for calcium)		 3 8.75 8.75 6.35 3
Poultry
nutri-balancer		 3 3
Combination
of corn, milo, barley, oats, wheat, and/or rice		 53.5
Wheat bran,
mill feed, rice bran, and/or milling byproducts		 17
Soybean meal,
peanut meal, cottonseed meal, safflower meal, and/or sesame meal		 15
Yeast and/or
milk powder (for vitamins)		 2 3 2.5
Salt
with trace minerals (trace mineral salt or iodized salt supplemented
with 1/2 oz. of managanese sulfate and 1/2 oz. of zinc oxide.)		 0.5 0.4 0.5
Bone meal
and/or deflourinated dicalcium phosphate		 2
Wheat
middlings		 15
Wheat 30
Cod
liver oil		 1
Maine
herring meal (65% protein)		 3.75
Meat
and bone meal (47% protein)		 1
Kelp
meal		 0.6


Stay tuned for the next
post about protein content — this is the one that will really help
you make up your own feed. 

This post is part of our Homemade Chicken Feed series.
Read all of the entries:

Recipes for homemade starter and grower chicken feeds

March 4, 2010 Chicken feed, Chicks No Comments

Here
are several different recipes for homemade chicken starter and grower
feeds.  The numbers indicate a percent of the recipe by weight —
to make a hundred pounds of feed, just pretend those numbers are in
pounds.

 

Modern – 19%
protein		 Modern – 21%
protein		 Generic
–  15-18% protein		 Soy-bean free
– 15% protein		 Moderate
soybeans – 16-19% protein		 Low soybeans
– 13-14% protein
Corn (shelled
or meal)		 50.75 45.7 37.5 31 30
Soybeans
(roasted or meal)		 31.25 28.1 10 5
Oats 5 4.5 10 10 10
Alfalfa meal
(can be eliminated in on fresh pasture)		 5 4.5 4 5 5 5
Fish meal
and/or meat meal		 3.75 12.4 5 10 7.5 11.5
Aragonite,
ground limestone, marble, or oyster shells  (for calcium)		 1.25 1.1 1 2 2 2.5
Poultry
nutri-balancer		 3 2.7
Combination
of corn, milo, barley, oats, wheat, and/or rice		 46 30
Wheat bran,
mill feed, rice bran, and/or milling byproducts		 10 10 10
Soybean meal,
peanut meal, cottonseed meal, safflower meal, and/or sesame meal		 39.5
Yeast and/or
milk powder (for vitamins)		 2 5 2.5
Salt
with trace minerals (trace mineral salt or iodized salt supplemented
with 1/2 oz. of managanese sulfate and 1/2 oz. of zinc oxide.)		 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
Bone meal
and/or deflourinated dicalcium phosphate		 2
Wheat
middlings		 20 20
Dried whey 4
Cod oil
(especially for chicks raised entirely indoors and out of the sun)		 0.2


Chick and mother henI know this chart may seem a little daunting,
but I thought it would be
useful to take a look at a bunch of different feed formulas reported on
the internet.  First of all, notice that many of the recipes don’t
actually fit into the protein recommendations for starting chicks —
18 to 20%.  The lower protein feeds should be considered grower
rations.

Next, notice that the
components can be broken down into grains for
carbohydrates; fish meal, wheat meal, alfalfa meal, or soybeans for
protein; and
alfalfa meal, aragonite, ground limestone, oyster shells, poultry
nutri-balancer, yeast, milk powder, salt, bone meal, dicalcium
phosphate, and whey for vitamins and minerals.

Of course, we all know
that we’re healthier if we eat a lot of
different types of foods, so it’s easy to draw the same conclusions
about chickens.  Feeding them a constant mixture based primarily
on soybeans and corn (like the commercial feeds) isn’t going to be as
good for them as mixing it up and tossing in different grains and
ingredients in different batches.  If you live on a farm, chances
are that some ingredients are easier to come by than others at
different times of the year — be willing to change your formula over
time!  In a later post, I’ll list the percent protein of each
ingredient so that you’ll know how to keep your percent protein steady
while changing ingredients.

Stay tuned for homemade chicken layer recipes.

This post is part of our Homemade Chicken Feed series.
Read all of the entries: