Chick starter food out of stock, need advice

[Perris]

There's no "ugly stuff" in meatbird feed, it's simply a higher protein feed to support the fadt griwth rate of meaties. You can also feed all flock feed, or any high protein, low calcium feed.

really? poultry manure, poultry by-product meal, poultry offal meal anybody?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579119524774
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579119321479
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579119402101

 

[FrostRanger]

What feed uses manure? The poultry by product meal doesn't worry me as chickens are omnivores but none of the feed bags I read use any of that stuff. I imagine they're looking into that more for commercial birds which absolutely, feed for factory farmed animals can sometimes contain questionable stuff, but most feed intended for the general public to buy unless you're buying a really questionable brand of dubious origins you're probably not going to find manure in any gamebird feed you buy at your local feedstore

 

[Perris]

if you look at the first paper linked, you will see. "The nutritional value of two samples of an aerobically fermented poultry product (Fermway) were evaluated for broiler chicks. Fermway is a combination of broiler house litter and offal from a broiler processing plant. A significant (P<.05) growth stimulation was obtained with one sample at 8 to 16% of the diet."

Most producers used euphemisms or acronyms for gross ingredients because they want to avoid the yuk factor impacting sales.

 

[FrostRanger]

Can you link to any feeds that contain fermway? None of the feeds I checked contained that, the ones I checked had mainly soybeans and their byproducts, grains and their byproducts, probiotics and vitamins. The only meat I saw was some porcine (pork) byproducts that was in one of them. I can't say I checked every feed in existence, but I did check some of the more popular feeds such as dumor, Purina, and nutrena

 

[Perris]

Have a look at this.
See the section on 'Uses of poultry litter As an animal feed'
https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/60820000/Manuscripts/2010/Man849.pdf

eta, is it coincidence that bird flu has appeared in cattle and milk in the US, where dairy cows are fed waste industrial chickens processed into a homogenised feed, a little while after bird flu appeared in chickens there? The processing that is supposed to make poultry manure safe as a feed is as prone to failure as any other industrial process.

 

[FrostRanger]

Both of these seem to be implying use in feeds intended for commercial operations rather than feeds available to the everyday consumer. Feeds intended for commercial operations indeed do contain questionable material sometimes but I am speaking of the meat bird feed the average poultry owner can buy from the local feed store, not feed fed to commercial birds. The feed available at feed stores is different from commercial feeds and the ingredient lists reflect that

This page has the ingredients for dumor: https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/dumor-meatbird-24-poultry-feed-1031102
This one for Purina:
https://shop.purinamills.com/products/purina-meat-bird-crumbles
And this one from nutrena:
https://nutrenaworld.com/products/naturewise-meatbird-feed/
None of them have have fermway listed as an ingredient
Anyways i'm sure this is going on in some capacity for feed for commercial broilers, but based on the listed ingredients this doesn't seem to be an ingredient in at least the most popular brands of meatbird feeds available to the average poultry keeper

 

[Perris]

All I have to say about those is that the one boasting about its crumbles "crafted with high-quality natural ingredients" lists them as
"Ground Corn, Dehulled Soybean Meal, Corn Distillers Dried Grains with Solubles, Corn Gluten Feed, Corn Gluten Meal, Calcium Carbonate, Dicalcium Phosphate, Monocalcium Phosphate, Citric Acid (a preservative), Salt, Choline Chloride, Dried Trichoderma reesei Fermentation Product, Dried Bifidobacterium thermophilum Fermentation Product, Dried Enterococcus faecium Fermentation Product, Dried Lactobacillus acidophilus Fermentation Product, Dried Lactobacillus casei Fermentation Product, Yucca Schidigera Extract, Verxite Granules, Manganese Sulfate, DL-Methionine, Vitamin E Supplement, Yeast Culture, L-Lysine, Sodium Selenite, Vitamin A Supplement, Vitamin D3 Supplement, Silicon Dioxide, Oregano Essential Oil, Thyme Essential Oil, Rosemary Essential Oil, Star Anise Essential Oil, Dried Bacillus subtilis Fermentation Extract, Sodium Silico Aluminate, Dried Bacillus licheniformis Fermentation Product, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Riboflavin Supplement, Niacin Supplement, d-Calcium Pantothenate, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Folic Acid, Menadione Sodium Bisulfite Complex (source of Vitamin K activity), Thiamine Mononitrate, Biotin, Manganous Oxide, Ferrous Sulfate, Copper Sulfate, Zinc Oxide, Ethylenediamine Dihydroiodide, Feed Grade Hydrolyzed Vegetable Oil, Mixed Tocopherols (a preservative)."

OK, this one doesn't include poultry excreta, offal, feathers (at least in their natural state) but it's difficult to visualize the ingredients as anything other than powders and potions when they are atomized into constituent chemicals like this; what exactly are 'solubles' as item 3?

Anyway, it doesn't name them as such but it does include the growth promoters copper and zinc, the vast majority of which your birds won't absorb, so those metals will just pass through to contaminate the land where you put your coop litter (in addition to all that excess N and P of course).

And it is a perfect example of an ultra processed food, with the bonus of claiming to be natural and healthy.

The real question is, do you want to eat this? We are what we eat. Our bodies have no other source of nutrients than what we consume. Same goes for our chickens. Especially ones that live only a few weeks and for whom this is all they eat. And then we eat them.

 

[BDutch]

I ordered organic starter last year to pick up at the mill, they gave me a bag for broilers and I asked around.
People said it was fine to give to all chicks. I did add water to make a mash because the pellets were too big for my tiny bantam chicks.

They did great on the organic broiler feed. No health issues, not growing fat.

Ordering feed by mail would be another possibility for me (but expensive).

 

[Perris]

I imagine a little is going to be fine. The problems really show when it's given exclusively and en masse. It's the industrial production model that's the root of this problem, as with so much in agriculture.

 

[EmmaDonovan]

We had a delivery of chick starter that was delayed. We gave them peas blended with some oatmeal and a little molasses, they did fine on that.