Mixing your own poultry feed is a common practice for subsistence farmers and permaculture devotees around the globe. It’s also hugely satisfying and achievable for the highly motivated chicken keeper seeking a more personalized, regionally grown, and healthful alternative to premixed feeds.
With little effort, our garden has made a meaningful and frugal addition to the energy content of our feed. We’ve used a combination of homegrown corn (fresh and dried), greens, potatoes, stale bread and cereal, and a variety of fresh and frozen fruits in concert with a concentrated, high protein feed to improvise a complete ration. We appreciate the sustainable nature of this approach, but the hens seem more pleased about the variety of textures and tastes this adds to their primary diet of pelleted feed.
If you are primarily motivated by thrift, keep in mind that your from-scratch feed will generate savings only if you are able to use a substantial portion of homegrown ingredients or you buy in bulk—and in this case, bulk means whole bags, not scoops from the bulk bins at the grocers. Mixing your own feed in this way is most practical for large flocks, because to realize any savings whatsoever, you’ll need to purchase each of your major ingredients in a minimum of 50-pound bags and full pallets of 2000 pounds each.
Here’s the math: In our area, bagged feeds costs between 45 cents and 95 cents a pound. Use this for comparison when shopping for your components. A quick scan of a natural grocer’s bulk bins will reveal the challenge: organic grains and legumes are expensive, around $1.95 to $3.95 per pound. At these prices, a 50-pound bag of home-mixed feeds would cost about $100, not including relatively expensive optional supplements and essential vitamins and minerals and enzymes!
It was once common for farmers to feed their flocks with rations made with purchased feed concentrates blended with bulkier ingredients grown inexpensively on the farm. Concentrates are nutritionally dense, containing little or no energy (grain) but plenty of protein. They typically include small amounts of other ingredients impossible for farmers to manufacture themselves, such as vitamins and minerals, probiotics, and enzymes. The genius of this approach is that the energy (grain) portion of poultry feed is considerably bulkier and more expensive to transport, but it’s cheaper to produce, whereas, as the name suggests, concentrates are compact, delivering more nutrition in a smaller volume. By growing the grains and transporting only the protein and minor ingredients, farmers have the best of both.
We’re currently developing our own version of a concentrate that urban flock feeders can use to balance an economical, local source of energy. For instance, our concentrate would enable you to grow a supply of cultivated corn, potatoes, or other high-energy crops appropriate for your area and blend it with more difficult to produce, specialized ingredients needed to make a nutritionally complete food for your flock.
If you want to get really thrifty, you could combine our concentrate with a locally available, high-energy, edible resource that’s currently being composted or discarded. For example, you could partner with a bakery to take stale but edible bread to feed your hens. Assuming that the bread contains about 11 percent protein, and your concentrate contains 40 percent protein, you could use a tool such as Pearson’s Square to calculate the ratio of concentrate needed to balance the bread to achieve your particular feeding goal.
Pearson’s Square is a simple, quick way to calculate the relative weights of two feed components needed to meet a particular nutrient requirement of your flock. It’s most effective with two ingredients, but it can also be used to balance more than two if you are better at math than we are.
1. Draw a square. In the center of the square, write the percentage of a particular nutrient, typically protein, that you want to achieve in your mix. In our example, we’re using bread and layer concentrate layer ration, so write “16%.”
2. Now draw diagonal arrows, as shown, from the upper left corner to the lower right corner and from the lower left corner to the upper right corner.
3. At the upper left corner, write the name of the first ingredient (layer concentrate) and its content of the nutrient you are balancing (protein in this example) expressed as a percentage (40%). At the upper right corner, write “parts” and the name of the same ingredient, but leave a blank space and no percentage ( ___ parts layer concentrate).
4. At the lower left corner, write the name of the other ingredient (in this case, bread) and its content of the nutrient (11 percent). At the lower right corner, write “parts” and the name of the same ingredient, but leave a blank space and no percentage ( ___ parts bread)
5. Now subtract the center number from each of the corner numbers, following the direction of the arrows, and write this value in the blank lines in each corner. Be sure to follow each arrow, and ignore the negative numbers (because only the difference between the two numbers is important).
6. In our example, we subtract the middle number from the upper left (40 – 16), follow the arrow, and we can write “24 parts bread” in the lower right corner. Repeat from lower left to upper right: 11 – 16 = –5, but we ignore the negative number, and write “5 parts layer concentrate” in the upper right corner.
This tells us that to achieve 16 percent protein in our mix, we need 24 parts bread to 5 parts layer concentrate. You can now mix 24 units (ounces, pounds, grams, kilograms, or other unit of weight) of bread with 5 of the same units of the layer concentrate, mix well, and you’ll know that you’ve got 29 units of 16 percent protein homemade layer mix.
(Note that it’s a little more complicated than this because the ingredients are supposed to be alike—both dry in this case—and some nutrients other than protein in the bread are duplicated in the concentrate, meaning there will be an excess. To be more precise, you’d need to dry the bread first, but there’s not much to be done about the nutrient duplication—it should do no harm.)
We should say right up front that we are not as skilled as agronomists or professional animal nutritionists employed by mills to make feed formulas, and we do not have access to the tools and detailed ingredient analysis they use for this often complicated process. In our experience, this example feed recipe will get the job done, but if you are determined to feed your hens more precisely, you should consult with a qualified specialist from an agricultural university or mill.
A seemingly endless combination of ingredients can be included in a ration. This one features a few ingredients that you may be able to grow yourself or obtain inexpensively. Note that your results will be affected by many variables, including the specific ingredients you use, other things you feed your chickens, and the mistakes that authors of chicken books make.
This is a basic 17 percent protein homegrown feed mix for adult laying hens.
6 units dried cracked corn
1 unit hulled and roasted sunflower seeds
1 unit flax seeds
½ unit Fertrell Poultry Nutri-Balancer (vitamins, minerals, and kelp)
¼ unit brewer’s yeast
⅛ unit limestone grit (plus free choice oyster shell)
