Category: Chicks

Success With Baby Chicks was at the top of my chicken reading list for 2011, but I was a bit disappointed by the contents.  Robert Plamondon compiled a lot of information from old poultry-keeping documents and mixed in a bit of his own experience, which sounds like a recipe for success, but I found the book dry and lacking in the information I was really looking for.  To be fair, most people nowadays do order chicks from hatcheries, so the absence of tips on incubation and hatching is understandable, but that was the part I wanted to know about most.

I would recommend Success With Baby Chicks to beginners planning to raise lots of chicks (perhaps to sell broilers or eggs) but probably not to the mainstream chicken-keeping public.  That said, Robert Palmondon’s website (and his email list) are fonts of fascinating information and you should definitely check them out.  His book is also very reasonably priced ($11.64 on Amazon), so it wouldn’t hurt to buy the book to support his work.

What’s next on my chicken reading list?  Backyard Poultry Naturally by Alanna Moore, Jackie
French’s Chook Book, Day Range Poultry by Andy Lee, Feeding Poultry by Gustave Heuser, and — most intriguing of all — The Small Scale Poultry Flock by Harvey Ussery.  The last is not yet published but is top of my list since I love everything Harvey Ussery has written.  What chicken-related books have you read and enjoyed or plan to read soon?

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.

I 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.