Author: Anna & Mark

Of
course, protein isn’t the only factor your
should consider when formulating your chicken feed (although it is very
important.)  You’ll notice that our recipes
for chicken laying feed and chicken
starter/grower feed contain additional vitamins and minerals. 
What should you add to your grains and beans and why?



First
of all, laying hens need extra calcium to keep their eggshells strong.  Most people add some
combination of aragonite,
ground limestone, marble, bone meal, or oyster shells to
their feed, but on a small, backyard scale, you can feed eggshells back
to the hens.  Just be sure to crush the shells well so that your
girls don’t realize that the eggs they’re laying are food, and be aware
that just feeding the eggshells back isn’t quite enough.  Luckily,
calcium sources are pretty cheap — drop by your local feed store and
chances are you can find one of the sources for a little over a dollar
a pound.  Many people who mix their own feeds simply offer one of
the calcium sources in a separate trough to their hens — the girls
will eat as much as they need and no more.



The
other additive to feeds is either salt or poultry nutri-balancer (which is a combination of
calcium, phosphorous, salt, and trace minerals.)  If your chickens
live in chicken
tractors, like ours,
and have access to forage every day, chances are you can get by with
just feeding some salt to your birds — which is a good thing because
nutri-balancer is seriously expensive!  If you feel like your
birds have a deficiency, you might consider growing some dynamic
accumulators to feed
your hens, keeping them naturally healthy.



While you’re at it, give
your birds an automatic chicken waterer, because a hydrated bird is
a healthy bird.

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:

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!