How and what to feed your backyard chickens could have been the topmost question on your mind when you either keep them as a pet or just for home or family consumption.
You may be much interested in given them quality feed so as to have quality meat and eggs. Reading this would help you answer the question.
Grain, grit, corn, granite, oyster shell, pellets, crumbles, mash, best chicken nutrition. chicks, pullets, hens, laying chickens.
One of the best ways to keep your chickens tamed is hand-feeding them. Visitors and children enjoy feeding chickens and if you establish that early, they can come to people for food then they will look forward to your visits.
Even the wariest birds can be tamed by hand feeding. We will talk about different types of feed and how best to use them.
When chickens are not outside ranging they need a balanced diet available it’s your job to provide the best possible diet.
Don’t be stingy when it comes to buying your feed don’t look for the lowest price, look at the contents of the feed talk with the salespeople and make sure you understand fully where these nutrients are coming from and their composition.
Calcium – Oyster Shells
Here are some feed options of course when you start the birds use crumbles or mash starter and then you go as they grow to the grower-finisher portion which is available in pellet form and is also available in crumbles.
I prefer the pellet form and as the birds get older or in the wintertime, you have to have an adult bird ration which is a layer ration a laying hen can have a number of supplements.
For example, some pieces of the oyster shell would help build the calcium level and a hen that’s laying eggs need calcium for shell production.
However to younger or developing birds as it may damage their organs are not prepared so after they have laid their first egg we can go to a layer ration which has calcium in it and you can offer calcium also as a supplement on the side in the form of crushed oyster shells
Note: Oyster shells should not be fed unless they are at the laying stage
Granite
now one of the things when you have young chicks and they are starting to ingest their bedding and things like that.
They need to be able to break them down.
Birds at any stage of development, you can put these granite chunks its sold hereunder something called granite grit or granny grid.
It’s little tiny pieces of granite that they put in their crop and then it goes to their gizzard where their food is ground up and if they have been eating little bits of wood shavings and things like that chunks of granite will help grind that up it really has no nutritional value.
Parasitic control
the other thing that you can have and I have used it before has a parasitic control is this diatomaceous earth, remember the diatomaceous earth is silica and can also be a respiratory problem if you are going to breathe it in so it should be handled carefully.
and I recommend that you wear a respirator when you are using it you can take diatomaceous earth and put it in your feeders with the chicken feed regardless of what form you are using and it will serve to absorb moisture and prevent that feed from spoiling due to high humidity levels and things like that also if a chicken eats diatomaceous earth along with their food then it helps to rid them of internal parasites as well exactly the same way that it rids them of external parasites are defeated with diatomaceous earth because it lacerates their exoskeleton and draws moisture out of them.
Crack corn
crack corn which is a great energy resource but can serve to make your birds fat it also helps them generate heat though if you have for example a broody hen that is trying to hatch eggs and the pellet form which make sure that they get the full complement of the feed ration and they don’t get to pick and choose the crumbles which allow them to pick and choose and are available in any formulation whether it’s for a starter chick a grower a finisher or even a laying ration.
In the wintertime when they are kept inside the coop you may want to go to this crumble form because the crumbles give the chicken more time to feed when they come and gobble up these pellets of course they eat a lot of food in a very short amount of time also if you are going to throw food on the ground which I really don’t recommend but if you want the birds to be able to find it easily and pick it up because maybe you have young visitors that just want to feed the chickens throw the pellets out because pellets are easy for the birds to pick out in the grass and make sure to clean it all up and you won’t be leaving anything for night predators or for other wild birds to come and feed.
So remember the granite grit is also used to help grind up their food which isn’t necessary I mean when they have a formulated feed it’s already ground so just the water will soften it up and they can digest that just fine the reason that you‘re giving them granite grit is for the parts that they eat that may be indigestible and things they may find on the range or even when young chickens eat their bedding.
Chickens on the open range are omnivorous which means they eat both plant and animal matter so they could get most of these from the mother earth.
Tell me what you think about these options…
