What is Regular Feed for chickens?

[frizzyfizz]

Hi,

I'm new to chicken keeping and am shopping for chicken feed on Amazon.

And there are so many types of chicken feeds around!

I wanted to get mixed grains, but it says "Scratch is not fortified and generally should not compromise more than 10% of the diet."

I am currently feeding 16% laying pellets to my roosters and hens who are housed together.

Is this considered a regular feed?

 

[Keeperofmunchkins]

It is recommended to feed all flock or grower pellets and provide oyster shell on the side if you have roosters and hens. Layer pellets contain too much calcium for non laying birds.
Scratch grains can be given as an extra treat only

 

[Ridgerunner]

Sorry, this can get long. Hope you are not on a small device.

There are three different basic forms of chicken feed; mash, pellets, and crumbles. They make mash by gathering all the ingredients they want for the formula for a specific feed and grind them all into a powder. This is called mash. To make pellets they make a paste out of mash and water, extrude that through a dye, and flash dry it. To make crumble they partially crush the pellets. To try to keep this shorter you probably want pellets or crumbles, not mash.

Scratch is not a complete chicken feed. Chickens need a lot of different nutrients, basically a balanced diet. Scratch is generally just certain grains. If you look on the label of a bag of chicken feed you will see an analysis or how much of many different ingredients are in that feed, including some strange-looking names. Those are additives in chicken feed that they do not put in scratch so scratch is not considered a complete chicken feed.

There are a lot of different chicken feeds; developer/finishers, starters, growers, layer, or other specialty feeds with different marketing names like flock-raiser or all-flock. There re two main differences in these feeds, percent calcium and percent protein. If you look at all the other ingredients on the label, they are all fairly closely the same. There will be some differences but not significant differences for your flock unless you are raising specialty chickens like show chickens.

The calcium levels in layer are probably pretty close to 4%. If layer is all they eat that should provide enough calcium for egg shells. All other feeds should have calcium levels somewhere around 1%.

The protein levels can be all over the place, typically from 15% to 20%. Anything higher than 20% is probably going to be labelled for game birds, not chickens, but some people like to feed those to their chickens. We have different preferences for which is the best protein percent to provide to out chickens. I have my personal preferences but unless you are raising specialty chickens I don't think it matters that much after they reach adulthood. Others have strong opinions that are different.

Studies have clearly shown that excess calcium can be harmful to growing chicks. That much is clear. There is some debate on here as to how harmful feeding excess calcium to adult non-laying chickens like roosters or hens nor laying actually is. Some people think it is absolutely horrible, others do it and think it isn't a big deal. I don't know who is correct so I avoid the issue by feeding a fairly low-level calcium feed to the entire flock and offer oyster shell on the side. The ones that need the calcium for their egg shells seem to know it and eat enough oyster shell. The ones that don't need that much calcium don't eat enough to harm themselves.

So what is regular chicken feed? It is one that has those additional ingredients that scratch doesn't have. Which one of those you feed will depend on ho you manage calcium and protein.