Author: Anna & Mark

How much food do chicks need

October 10, 2011 Chicken feed, Chicks 5 Comments

Six week old chick on pastureI’ve written before about how
much to feed adult chickens.  But what about growing chicks whose needs change almost daily?

One option is to give them free access to an automatic chicken feeder, but then you’ll have to worry about attracting rats into the coop and will also end up with lazy chickens who don’t forage.  To keep my chicks hunting for bugs (thus paying the least for storebought feed), I give my chicks a certain amount of feed in the morning and then leave them on their own for the rest of the day.


Success With Baby Chicks has a handy table telling how much feed chicks need per day, which I’ve tweaked a bit and then reproduced here.  These figures assume you’re raising heritage breed birds — Cornish Cross chickens need more food faster — and that the chicks aren’t getting anything from pasture.  Robert Plamondon estimates that it takes about 7.7 pounds of chicken feed to raise a chick to the twelve week age at which I recommend slaughtering heritage broilers.  Here are the specifics:

Age Pounds of feed per chick per day Cups of feed per chick per day
0 – 7 days 0.014 0.056 (a bit less than a tablespoon)
8 – 14 days 0.029 0.116 (nearly two tablespoons)
15 – 21 days 0.043 0.172 (nearly three tablespoons)
22 – 28 days 0.057 0.23 (about a quarter of a cup)
5 – 8 weeks 0.093 0.372 (a bit more than a third of a cup)
9 – 12 weeks 0.146 0.584 (a bit more than a half of a cup)

 

So, for example, a six week old chick would need around 0.093 pounds of food per day, or a bit
more than a third of a cup.  If  you had 14 chicks of that age, you’d need to give them 1.3 pounds of food per day, or about 5 cups.  (A pound of chick feed is roughly equivalent to a quart or four cups.)


Despite being armed with all of this data, I have to admit that I’m pretty sure I fed our first three batches of chicks this year more than they needed.  First of all, they were living on pasture, so the chicks were getting a good amount of their nutrition from insects, worms, and clover.  Second, I actually ended up feeding them more than the recommended amount for birds who don’t have access to pasture.  It’s just so easy to think your chicks are starving when they come peeping to greet you at the gate, but the truth is that chicks expect treats when they see me, so they scamper over even if their crops are bulging.


The two sets of Black Australorps I raised are a good example of the fact that overfeeding doesn’t lead to any extra meat.  At 12 weeks, I’d fed our first batch of australorps 10.79 pounds apiece, and the cockerels dressed out to 1.87 pounds each.  The second batch “ate” 15 pounds of feed apiece, and the cockerels dressed out to 1.76 pounds apiece.  Clearly, the extra feed I gave to the second batch just went to waste.



Full cropBut my gut tells me that even feeding using the chart above will waste storebought food in when chicks are getting a lot of nutrition from pasture.  Which brings me to a better way of estimating whether you’re feeding pastured chicks enough.  With my final batch of
chicks for 2011, I’ve taken to peering at their crops a couple of times a day, and have noticed that even though I’m feeding my chicks only about 80% of their recommended allotment, the chicks’ crops are always full.  Now, it’s possible that malnourished chicks could still have full crops due to eating things that aren’t really food since they’re feeling hungry, but our chicks are also perky, with shiny feathers and seemingly stout bodies.  I figure that as long as
chicks look healthy and have full crops, they’re getting enough (or too much) food, but I won’t know for sure until I kill the broilers at 12 weeks and weigh their carcasses.

Annual chicken pasture with oats and peas

October 7, 2011 Posts No Comments
Chickens grazing oats

We planted one of our
over-grazed pastures in oats, Austrian winter peas, oilseed radishes,
mustard, and chicory on September 9.  The oats, especially, grew
quickly, although I noticed that the leaves were a bit sparser than I’d
hoped — I think that on rough ground, I should increase my seeding
rates.



Chicken eating mustardIt’s a tricky topic to decide
when to turn livestock into annual
winter pastures. 
On the one hand, young grains are most nutritious before the stems
start to elongate, a change that occurs within about a month if the
weather isn’t too cold.  On the other hand, tender plants are more
likely to be totally eradicated by grazing rather than just losing some
top growth and rebounding during the following rest period.



Conventional information
on grazing annual winter pastures comes from studies with ruminants,
but chickens have the additional habit of scratching up the ground,
which would make me inclined to let the pasture mature more before
turning in the chickens.  On the other hand, chickens have
stomachs that can’t deal with very much roughage, which would make me
inclined to turn the chickens into the pasture when the grass is even
younger than is optimal for cows.



In the end, my decision
was a bit random — I just opened the fence one day and let the flock
in.  Here’s what the pasture looked like on October 2:

Oat pasture



And the next day on
October 3:

Chickens knock down oat leaves

As you can see, the
chickens did a bit of trampling damage in the first 24 hours. 
I’ll keep you posted when I have more of an idea of whether I should
have waited longer, how long the chickens can spend in the annual
pasture without causing long term damage, and so forth.  Right
now, our fat and happy pullets are lazily resting along the fenceline
— I think I need to cut back their storebought feed.


Our chicken waterer makes it easy to rotate
chickens through pastures — fill a five gallon bucket in each pasture
and forget it.

What to do with wet chicken feed

October 5, 2011 Posts 2 Comments

Light Sussex chicksWhat should you do if
your chicken feed gets wet?  In a perfect world, this never
happens, but the reality is that sometimes rain will leak into the
trash can where we store our chicken feed and the pellets in the
bottom of the bag will go moldy.  If you catch the damp chicken
feed on day 1 or 2, there’s no problem — feed it right to the
flock.  But after that, you’re risking the health of your birds by
giving them food in which disease-causing bacteria may have had a
chance to grow.



Previously, I’ve played
it safe by composting the problematic feed, but I accidentally stumbled
across a better solution last week.  We had dumped the bedding
from our brooder in a pile outside, knowing it was full of spilled
chick feed lost in the leaves but not wanting to find a way to carry
the poopy mass to the adult chickens to be picked through.  Weeks
of intermittant sun and rain passed, and then I decided to see how our
five week old chicks would do free ranging through the yard.  Four
of them made a beeline for the old bedding and I ran right after them,
worried they were eating spoiled grain and making themselves sick.


Chick eating maggot

Dirty chickI should have given those chicks more credit
for good sense.  With a yard full of late summer insects and
garden debris, they weren’t interested in rotten chicken feed. 
However, the maggots that had been eating the damp feed were top notch
protein sources.  The chicks ate until they nearly popped, and I
patted myself on the back for finding a way to turn that lost chick
feed back into food for our youngsters.



In the future, I think
I’ll try to replicate my success whenever I end up with moldy feed
during warm weather.  Mixing wet feed in with leaves keeps the
area from going anaerobic, which allows maggots to thrive.  The
only trick is to let the flock in to scratch through the pile at just
the right time so you don’t instead end up with a bumper crop of flies
to plague your days.


Our chicken waterer solves another problem —
POOP-filled waterers.