Feed ingredients & Growing it

nuthatched said:

Articles here or elsewhere online? Most feed recipes aren't remotely close to a nutritous diet and any Joe Shmoe can post a recipe. If its a recipe that involves cat foid, or a garden betty recipe, avoid it, both are no good. Justin Rhodes recipe is a good starting point if you want to start making your own feed but by and large most recipes are lacking. Wheat, oat, flax and peas aren't a complete feed by any means, raw peas are actually harmful for chickens.
Chickens need protein, (you'll need meat by product meal, swine blood meal or fish meal) vitamins, minerals, calcium and amino acids, in the US, you can make a decent feed in everything except the amino acids, which typically involves soy, which is hard for you to grow.

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Weeg said:

I love the idea of homesteading and diy! I do a lot of growing for myself, and I actually make my own raw dog food as well.
I will say, that a chickens diet is going to be much much harder to fulfill than a dog, cat, or persons. Not because they have tricky nutritional requirements, but because the ingredients you need to source to reach those nutritional requirements are not easy, and probably not any cheeper than buying a commercial feed. Chickens need a wide variety of grains, and then supplements on top of that to be happy and healthy. Its really hard to create that at home by hand, and doesn't make much sense when a commercial feed is readily available.
But, what you can do is supplement that diet with whatever you can grow. Sprouted or flax plants are great for chickens! The seeds not so much as they contain a lot of fat. Sprouted or grown Wheat, Peas, and Oats are also great for chickens, I would feed the whole plant, or sprouted grains over just the seeds. Spinach and other leafy greens are also great for chickens. Almost all vegetables are as long as they aren't toxic.
Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, leafy greens, and herbs are the most nutrient dense.
While I wouldn't suggest trying to make your own feed, I highly suggest you grow some greens and plants for them.
Chickens eat a diet mostly of grains. They're built for that, but it also means its low in antioxidants, and omega 3's are always helpful since grains are very very high in omega 6's, which create inflammation. There are lots of plants, such as hemp seeds, that have omega 3's. Antioxidants are very important since we all have free radicals, which creates oxidize stress, premature aging, cancer, and lots of other diseases. If you don't get antioxidants, you will succumb to those side affects. Thats why chickens should get lots of forage, fruits, and plants, especially laying hens who age so quickly.

Fermenting your feed is also a good option if your looking for a more nutritious feed for your chickens.

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Chickengirl209 said:

Both. Where did find that raw peas were harmful to chickens? All the research I've done says they are fine, as long as they are not sweet peas.
Thank you for your reply!

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Chickengirl209 said:

Thank you! I am planning on growing broccoli. Mostly why I'm attempting at growing it is because of feed prices and incase of shortages.

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U_Stormcrow said:

@Chickengirl209 Producing a balanced, complete feed for you birds at home is very difficult - functionally impossible for most to hit an optimum diet for your birds, particularly with solely plant sources.

Everything you have has use in feeds, as well as individual antinutritional concerns.
I don't recommend it.

Wheat is the core of many complete feeds - a superior base to corn in a lot of ways, mostly in higher protein content and generally lesser fat, which allows you more "wiggle room" with your other ingredients. What wheat doesn't do is hit ANY of the amino acid targets for optimum nutrition - everything else you combine with it will have be more nutrient dense in one way or another to make up for its deficiencies (just as you would with a corn based diet).

Peas and other legumes need heat treatment to address some of their more common antinutritional factors, though you can also purchase strains lower in trypsin inhibitors, select for lighter seed colors (which generally have fewer tannins), and for seeds with fewer lectins. Depending on source, inclusion of peas whould not exceed 10-20% of the recipe, with most sources I've read suggesting 10-15% rates of maximum inclusion. Assuming your source of pea seeds doesn't tell you about the TIs, tannins, etc levels of the varietals they sell, look for white flowered wrinkled peas of light colors - odds are, they are lowest in the things you are trying to avoid)

Flax seed has high protein and an excellent amino acid profile - its one of those nutrient dense things. I have flax in my own forage. Unfortunately, its also very high fat - though better than sunflowers and certain others. The fat content (plus the tiny size and weight) significantly constrains their use by most. Purchased, cost is also a factor, throw grown you can avoid some of those issues.

Oats also see common use in feed, generally at low rates of inclusion. Oats are among the highest of the grains in beta-glucans, which contribute to "sticky" poops and can inhibit nutrient absorption. Again, you want to keep rates of inclusion low, 10-20%, and use methods like steam milling or flaking to address some of the anti nutritional concerns so your birds get the most out of them.

Still at a high level of overview, in order to make a complete protein, you need to provide your chickens dietary sources of methionine, lysine, tryptophan, threonine and a few others - but in the usual gain based diet, hitting the lysine and methionine targets are usually the hardest.

Grains have relatively low amounts of Met, pound per pound. About 2/3 of what a chicken needs. Doesn't matter whether you uses wheat or oats for that purpose, they are very similar in that regard. Wheat (soft) has about half the desired level of lysine, oats are a bit better on average. So if those make up the core of the diet, you need a dense methionine source, and a dense lysine source. Winter peas, on average, has lysine levels almost twice target levels. Flax seeds aren't quite so good, but roughly 1.5 or 1.6x target is the approximate range.

Unfortunately, Winter Peas only have about 5/6 the minimum recommended levels of Met - so you are forced to include flax seeds or another high met source in an effort to make up the short fall - and its significant.

A recipe of 6 parts (by weight) soft wheat, 2 parts oats, two parts winter peas would require 5 parts (by weight) flax seeds to meat the minimum recommended amino acid needs of a chicken. Unfortunately, that recipe would ALSO be about 14% fat - roughly 4x the usual recommend, and a recipe for fatty liver disease and other fat-related maladies.

Adjusting the recipe to reduce fats to more tolerable levels requires ingredients you either need to purchase (fish meal or similar) or heavily refine (processed soy, meal, alfalfa meal, peanut meal or some other legume whose oil contents have been extracted).

If you get all that right, you still need a calcium source, a source of non-phytate (that is, not plant based) phosphorus, a host of other vitamins and minerals that may or may not be present in your crops at desired levels (which is why many mills use Nutribalancer or similar products), and which is why most of us recommend against home made feed recipes. [there are other reasons besides - like the fact that my examples above are based on reported average values for the ingredients - your crops may be superior, or inferior - and will likely vary in quality throughout the year]

That's not to say your birds can't survive on less than the recommended diet - they simply will never live up to expectations.

Suggest you are likely better off growing what you want to grow for yourself, allowing the birds to forage spilled/missed grains, damaged ingredients, together with whatever bugs those crops attract etc and "taking the win" with reduced commercial feed consumption, rather than replacement of the complete diet. Its imperfect, its less than "optimum", but its achievable.

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