Poultry Feed & Nutrition

The most important part of keeping poultry, is feeding them. Of course it can be argued that water, housing, medication, light and so on are equally important and they are! But feed is what makes or breaks a flock’s health and so that seems to be a place to start our poultry discussions.

When I began to work in the commercial egg business, we had just started our flock. Feed for us and for many, if not most flock owners, was something you bought at the feed store, trusting the owner and agribusiness to provide suitable nutrition. As I studied every aspect of chicken husbandry, I also learned that the company I worked for provided the barest minimum of nutrition to keep the birds laying until their first molt and some until their second molt. The birds were then removed and new “pullets” young females, were placed in the houses and the cycle began again. We had a contract with Campbell’s soup at one time, who took our spent hens and processed them into chicken soups.

The company lost that contract and I was told it was due to the fact that our hens had virtually no salvageable meat on them! The girls had put all their energy into eggs and when their “time was up”, they were past ready to die! With no buyer, the company killed and buried the hens, sometimes 20,000 at a time, in pits.

Antibiotics and steroids kept them laying one egg every 16 hours until Nature forced the molt on them, when they would stop laying…… for about 8 weeks…. Then start again laying fewer, but bigger eggs. The expense of feeding them for eight non-productive weeks, coupled with the reduced egg production when they started again, actually made it more expensive to keep them than to replace them, particularly after losing the income from the as spent hens.

I mention all this, because from my observation, nutrition may well be the key to reducing the outbreaks and the mortality from avian diseases, including HPAI. While it may be an impossible task to convince agribusinesses to change their feed practices due to a variety of factors, small to medium flock owners and owners of specialty, “niche” varieties of poultry can easily do this with little or no impact on their income!

I have received many contacts from Asia & Africa, as well as from backyard poultry owners here in North America. I always research the questions before responding and try to give the best answer for that particular circumstance. I do not have all the answers and the ones I have, may not be best suited to every flock, but using my knowledge, such as it is, along with the knowledge from the MANY other great flock owners out there, can guide you on the path to a healthy, profitable and satisfying flock experience. So please take whatever I present, ALONG WITH the information others (other than agribusiness) offer use it to manage your flocks!

So, I posted two videos about my “secret feed mix”, which is not a secret, but IS something that company with the “checkerboard” does not want you to know. Some 40,000 people have viewed it! While the kitten in a teacup, or elephant eating an ice cream cone may get millions of views, I still think the opportunity to inform 40,000 people is extraordinary!

The feed mixture I use was developed using the feed mix used by the egg producer I worked for, adding missing elements necessary for a long, healthy, productive poultry life. I am talking right now about a feed mix, not an overall diet, or even the best diet, just what I feel is a great feed mix. Another post will get into the overall diet, which is equally important.

The chicken house feed recipe was simple: ground soy & ground corn, blended to 18% protein, with a vitamin/mineral premix added. The hormones, antibiotics and steroids were added to the water. This mix is also a very good base mix for rearing hogs. Humans and animals with a little, key word LITTLE, bit of “fat” have always seemed healthier to me, probably due to the ready availability of the fat to be converted into nutrition when needed…… which is most of the time long before visible illness symptoms appear. To me, this is the most important part of my “secret” to keeping healthy poultry: A LITTLE FAT!

Also, a couple of amino acids are missing in the soy/corn mix and while they are added to the pre-mix, I feel that getting them direct from foods is a better option. So I added several grains, which you can customize to your location and even add fish meal!

My mix, which you can download here: http://eco-ranch.us/POULTRYFEEDMIX.pdf is location specific. It adds sorghum or milo, wheat and millet to the corn/soy and increases the base protein level to 19-20%. IT also MUST have a vitamin/mineral pre-mix added, as well as calcium carbonate for layers and increased protein for babies, waterfowl and turkeys.

But some in Africa cannot get milo and also tell me that corn is expensive. On the other hand, millet is readily available and as a “miracle grain” is a better option that can be used to replace some ingredients. Wheat tends to slow digestion a bit. It should be omitted from the feed for chicks up to 6 weeks of age for this reason, we want good development and faster digestion! Some parts of Asia cannot get corn, substitute rice! Cannot find wheat? Substitute rolled oats! Want to substitute even though it is all available? Go ahead! Soy is expensive, but fish meal is not? Use fish meal!

The key to the feed mix is VARIETY and PROTIEN, not the exact recipe and NEVER, NEVER forget the premix if your birds are kept in coops or under 8 weeks of age!

I spoke at length with a Cambodian immigrant here, who made yearly visits back to Cambodia to help his home villagers to move out of poverty. He feels that poultry is a great way to do this. I agree! However, poultry has been in Cambodia for millennia, as it has in much of Asia, in the form of “Village Chicken”. These are more feral breeds of chicken that are tended by women when they are not gathering water, feeding children, washing clothes, or any of the myriad of things rural Asian women are tasked to do. Village chickens therefore, are a small source of income and eggs, but have great flavor when butchered.

My Cambodian friend was telling me of a disease that would wipe out flocks virtually overnight. It was close to but not Newcastle’s, not coccidia, not Marek’s. He could not name it, but the villagers fear it and won’t invest a lot in their chickens because of it. I studied about 20 publications and found it to be: HPAI, or “Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza. This is not the dreaded “bird flu”, or H5N1, but just as devastating to flocks.

Oddly enough, as I did the research, hidden between the lines, was the cause of the nearly 100% mortality. It is something few think about in the West, but is the reason disease outbreaks in Africa are so deadly and the reason the America pioneers were equally devastated by 19^th century cholera outbreaks….. NO FAT, no stored nutrition reserves to utilized BEFORE the disease symptoms appear! It is the same for animals and for us here: CHICKENS!

I am not saying a fat guy would not die from cholera in 1840’s Kansas, or every chicken in Thailand or China would be spared HPAI or H5N1. I am saying stored nutritional reserves mitigate disease!

The same chickens my former employer could not give away to Campbell’s, produced eggs for me for years and were still laying when we culled our flock to move back to Texas (somehow, a few of his hens got to my farm). Some were 8 years old and still laying!

Feed is the single most important part of flock management, period.

I am also a big believer in:

·         pasturing poultry

·         meal worm farming

·         soldier fly farming

·         maggot traps

·         collecting produce from grocery stores or harvested fields

·         feeding “culled” fruits & vegetables

·         omnivorous diet

These will be the subject of a future post, or the next one. For now, think about feed and ADEQUATE feed. This begins the journey to a healthy, profitable, happy poultry farm!

Happy New Year everyone!!!