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O/T Chicken feed

F

Fullers Farmalls

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We have a few chickens and I got my hammer mill running tonight. We have corn now but what else can I grind and mix to give them some good feed. They are egg layers. I also will be using this mix eventually feed some pheasants that we will be getting. Thanks
 
You can feed them just about anything, and it doesn"t have to be ground up either. Anything out of the garden they will eat. Mine get weeds, left overs, as well as most garden stuff. They love watermellon so if you have one that broke open or just the rind left over from one you feasted on toss it in.....they will love you for it!
 
You can add oats to the corn . My chickens don"t eat the oats but some do . Once I had caught a mouse in a trap , threw it into the weeds . I"ll be darned if one of the roosters didn"t eat that mouse . So, that proves what I"ve read about chickens being carniverous . So if you have a chicke get injured & is bleading , get it away from the flock or they will kill the injured chicken . God bless
 
When we had laying hens we tried mixing a load of feed as an alternative to buying feed. Can't remember exactly what it was mixed at, but it would have consisted of corn, barley, oyster shells, and maybe some oats. Egg production went way down so we just went back to a commercial ration. Not sure how much production matters to you but just be aware of it. You could likely get production back up by changing the ration a bit, but we had to keep production up.
 
We grind our corn with a Letz burr mill, then mix in poultry base from the local feed supply at a ratio of 50lbs. to 200lbs. of ground corn. Our hens lay well and seem content.
 
Check with your county extension office. They should be able to provide you with a menu of minerals that should be added, as well as the appropriate grains.
 
Soybean meal at a ratio to make around an 18% protein mix, 1 lb. of ground limestone per 100 lbs. and 5 lbs. of alfalfa hay per 100 lbs. if you have it.
 
don't forget some crushed oyster shell to aid in their chewing and for calcium for the egg shells.
 
I have several dozen homing pigeons that get nothing from me but whole kernel corn. But they are free flyers and scavenge from nearby fields.
 
Corn dosent have enough protein by itself.Alfalfa meal and meat powder is used in commercial feeds.I mix bacon fat with flour or corn meal.I worked with a fellow who had a flcck of hens as a teenager.He went to agricultural school where they were taught to cook meat scrap to feed hens.His mother had the sme size flock.She fed just corn and got no eggs in winter while his hens produced eggs in winter. My mother kept a few hens.I remember she made a stew for the hens during winter on her wood fired cook stove.
 
We had some for a while and we let them roam free. They followed the cows around and scratched through the manure for bits of feed that made it through and when the cows lay down in the shade the chickens would peck flies off their faces. They ate lots of grasshoppers and other bugs I'm sure and what food the dog didn't clean up they did. We had more eggs than we could use.
 
Personally - If the goal was to save money, I'd just use the ground corn as an extender of store bought poultry feed.

It's hard to beat the mix from a bag - it's got evertyhing they need in there.

Adding the corn will make the grain go further. Obviously it won't be as nutritious, but as long as you keep the ratio reasonable they'll do alright.

Unless you're growing a variety of grains yourself, buying the grains and trying to mix it yourself is just going to ultimately cost you about the same as the poultry feed itself.

You just lose the benefit of having experts who know what they're doing mix it in optimal proportions.

Of course - if cost doesn't matter, adn the purpose is to have fun mixing your own feed - that's quite different.
 
We feed our chickens 50% ground corn and 50% lay feed (16% protein). They seem to lay pretty good - we average about .70 eggs per chicken per day. The egg yokes are the brightest yellow (actually a deep orange color).

They are "free range" chickens and get plenty of other food too - like my freshly planted grass, anything that's small and moves too slow in the yard, the "cleanings" from my son's fishing trip.
 
I used to work for ADM formulating feed. They have several products to choose from for small producers, but not all are listed on the website. This one is quick and easy but probably not the cheapest. They will have other premixes that have a lower inclusion rate that you would mix with corn, soybean meal and limestone, you need to talk to a salesman for those. This one is 50/50 with corn. Let me know if you have any questions, I can decipher the ingredient list for you too.

Nate
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I have never saw a hen lay more than one egg a day! That being said , I would like to buy some of those chickens that lay 70 eggs per chicken per day!
 
(quoted from post at 22:29:39 06/12/12)I would like to buy some of those chickens that lay 70 eggs per chicken per day!
Click to expand...

He said [b:535278c9da][size=18:535278c9da].[/size:535278c9da][/b:535278c9da]70 eggs per day. As in less than 1 egg per day per chicken.

We feed layer mash mixed by the local coop and get about [b:535278c9da][size=18:535278c9da].[/size:535278c9da][/b:535278c9da]8 eggs per chicken per day.
 
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