Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Skyeknight]

I have Roosters and babies and pullets and hens all together so I feed a 20% all flock -- and even though my birds get massive amounts of natural protein from bugs and forage and all that good stuff, I am still super glad I provide enough protein for all their needs.

I want to change over into all flock but that one is I think around 16% protein, while layer feed is 14.4%. The highest protein chicken feed I have found so far was 19.1% chick crumble. Although this was all in the Welkoop shop, so maybe I need to change shops.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

I've read plenty on fermenting real foods. It's papers on the effects of fermenting of an already processed feed that I lack.

So much confusion arises from people not distinguishing clearly exactly what feed they are talking about; processed or unprocessed. I think that what you feed would be called 'scratch' by a lot of people on BYC, and regarded as a 'treat', OK for up to 10% of their diet, not more. I think that's nonsense, fwiw.

Well, they’d damn well better not (call it scratch), is all I can say. It’s a balanced, complete feed, much of which is in whole grain form, the rest being those random pellets containing the micronutrients that they don’t have a whole-grain source for.

Plus they forage to some extent.

I’d like to get away from corn and soy being the first two ingredients, but it’s really hard to find no-corn/ no-soy/ high-protein feed in whole grain form (not available in my area; ludicrously expensive; low protein, etc.)

I think that the main problem is that feed producers figure the market for that is the organic, non-GMO, possibly vegetarian crowd, which I’m mostly not. So the first two ratchet up the price, and the third precludes animal protein.

Maybe once the two new pullets are here and maturing, meaning five nearly full-size, it will become economically worthwhile to roll my own.