yet another Poultry Feed Calculator

[modernsettlers]

Hi all! I've been wanting to mix my own feed at home, so I made a web tool to help design feed mix recipes, calculate nutritional information, and to visually compare my mix to "recommended values" or the values of pre-packaged feeds. I found a few other feed calculators online, but none of them were comprehensive enough (only calculating for, say, protein and that's it), and I felt like this should exist already.

Anyway, I just put it online, and wanted to share the link for a few reasons:

1. I'm not an expert in poultry nutrition. I've double checked my calculations... but do these numbers look right?
2. Feedback makes it better! Is there a functionality that would make it more useful? Did I leave out a common ingredient? Is the interface clumsy or confusing?
3. I hope it helps others. To me, figuring out nutrition has been "hard" and I wanted to build something that other people could use, that might help them as much as this community has helped me.

I'm only sharing this here, since it's version 1.0 and may have (many?) bugs, but I'd love to hear what you guys think. Thanks much!

Here's the link

 

[Lazy J Farms Feed & Hay]

I checked a couple of your ingredients and the values for energy and protein are not accurate compared to what is actually found today. In addition, it appears the values you are using are expressed on a Dry Matter basis while the requirements are expressed as As Fed. Nutrient requirements for monogastrics are expressed on an As Fed basis.

 

[modernsettlers]

Lazy J Farms Feed & Hay - THANK YOU! I really want to make this thing right, but as you can tell, I need help

All of the nutritional info used for each ingredient is from the USDA. For example, here's the page for Hulled Barley. I couldn't find anything pertaining to weather this info is for "dry matter" or not... but it does show amount of water composition.... so maybe it's not?

It does seem like the usda site lists food and nutrition for human consumption though, and so these might not be the same (nutritionally) as grains used for animal feed (IDK)... is there a better source for the data? Where do you get your information? Anything that could point me in a more accurate direction is appreciated. Thanks again!

Oh! and here's the link to where I got the "nutritional requirements". For anyone interested, there's a ton of info there (not just for chickens), it's a really fascinating read.

 

[Lazy J Farms Feed & Hay]

i understand that the merck Manual is available but I would not use it for your calculations, there is a better source for nutrient requirement averages. Search for NRC Poultry Nutrient Requirements.

 

[modernsettlers]

The Merck data isn't a part of any calculations. It's just there for comparison, so the user can see how their mix compares to what others recommend (so you can easily see what's deficient, etc). I will definitely add data from NRC in the future as well. It looks like a great source!

I checked a couple of your ingredients and the values for energy and protein are not accurate compared to what is actually found today.  In addition, it appears the values you are using are expressed on a Dry Matter basis while the requirements are expressed as As Fed

Since those numbers ARE a part of calculations my questions are:
1. Are you saying the USDA numbers are wrong? If so, where can one find accurate nutritional data for the ingredients? Can you share some values you have that are accurate?

2. I dont think the nutrition data is for "dry matter" since it includes water composition, BUT maybe I'm wrong here. Can you confim that I'm at least using the right "as fed" measurements?

THANKS AGAIN! Current issues aside (it's been impossible to find 2 sources that have the same exact numbers) is this something anyone else would use, or find helpful?

 

[modernsettlers]

**Update**

I've added new ingredients (like oyster shell), and made a few tweaks to the interface to make things a little more straight forward. I'm thinking maybe a video (just a narrated screen capture or something) might help explain this tool better. Any thoughts?

I recently used this feed mix calculator to formulate a "milk-soaked grain" mix for finishing my American Bresse. All sources I can find say that the French finish theirs with "milk-soaked grains" locally grown and whatnot, but I can't find a single recipe or nutritional information for that mix. So, knowing that crops in that area are corn and wheat, I started with those, and then added sunflower and oyster shell, adjusting the amounts until my graph closely resembled the "Recommended requirements for 18wks - 1st Egg". The milk is extra, so I did not factor that into the mix. That was the first time I've used this tool to develop a real feed mix, and I think it worked great! Will post before/after weights of the birds to see if they gain on this new mix.

I've double checked many of the USDA numbers against information I obtained from an independent third party (Feedipedia) and found them to be consistent and within the standard deviation. So science will back me up, the numbers shown are right. The next set of updates I will make should allow users to change the ingredient nutrition values to anything they want, in case they know the exact nutritional facts for their specific feeds and want to use those.

Link - Poultry Feed Calculator BETA

 

[Dan Clucker]

@modernsettlers A great resource to those in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah is the Intermountain Farmers Association. They have posted some information on their site about their recommendations and feed mixes as well.

• Poultry Feeding Chart - http://ifa-coop.com/bulk-feed/bagged-feed/poultry-feed/poultry-feeding-chart
  
• 20% Lay Mash Formulation - http://ifa-coop.com/bulk-feed/bagged-feed/poultry-feed/20-lay-mash

Hope it helps in some way.

Is your calculator open sourced somewhere (in case there were contributions we'd suggest via a pull request)?

 

[aliciaplus3]

I like this idea and I LOVE that you have made it available to us.... I have put values in and like it. Maybe I am using or have different ingredients available to me?? I do not see a poultry Premix, Like the hubbard premix? or distillers grain??

 

[Aziara]

I know this is an old thread, but this is just what I was looking for!
Is there any way for users to add in new ingredients? I'd like to add in fish meal, millet, brewer's yeast, BSFL, superworms/mealworms... etc etc, lol
Also would like to add the option for whole oats/barley, like the kinds used in fodder.

 

[Taliasun]

Do you have (or plan to have) a feature for adding ingredients?