Category: Chicken feed

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:

Percent protein in three types of chicken feed

March 4, 2010 Chicken feed, Chicken Products No Comments

Commercial chicken feedThe first thing to understand when you begin
to formulate your own chicken feed is that there are different types of
feed out there.  Basically, chickens of different ages or types
need a different ratio of protein and calcium in their diets.
Here are the top three types of chicken feed:

  • Starter.  The
    starter ration you buy in the store is a high protein diet (usually 18
    – 20%) that gives your chicks a jump start on life.  Feed this to
    young chicks for their first six weeks.
  • Grower.  When
    raising chickens for meat, you should feed slightly different amounts
    of protein as the chickens age.  After six weeks, lower the
    protein to 17%, and then lower it again at 15 weeks to 14%.  Of
    course, you can keep feeding the starter ration to your birds, but it
    costs more to feed the high protein diet, and your chickens may get fat.
  • Layer.  The layer
    ration is for adult, egg-laying hens.  These girls can get
    slightly lower proportions of protein than chicks (usually 16 or 17%)
    but will need calcium added to their diets to replace the nutrients
    used up while making egg shells.

Of course, different breeds of chickens also need slightly different formulas.  In addition, time of year can make a big difference — many sources recommend feeding more carbohydrates (mostly corn) in the winter to give your chickens the energy to stay warm.

Stay tuned for homemade chicken feed recipes.

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