Our Right to Self Reliance

Feeding chicks does not have to be a matter of pouring crumble you bought at a feed store into a feeder.  Alternative feed stuff for baby chickens is not really that hard to figure out or formulate.  While keeping chickens is often a part of self reliance, relying upon the feed store as a lynch pin for that self-reliance can still be something that can trip you up.  So, let’s take a look at alternatives to commercial poultry feed.

I’ve always loved really old poultry science text books.  Anything published before about 1945 has all sorts of fairly well lost techniques and formulations.  The information in such books has spared me grief more than once.  I recently was gifted with two such books, and they are treasures like the few others I’ve kept.  One is The Poultryman’s Handbook, published in 1912.  It recommends starting chicks out with only stale bread barely moistened with milk till they are about five days old, then changing to stale bread crumbs with fine oatmeal mixed in (it does not give ratios; I’d personally phase it in to about half  and half).  It is recommended that the chicks be fed in small quantities at frequent intervals.  It is most important that grit be kept available.  Once the chicks are a week old or more, a simple ration is recommended comprised of 4 parts, by weight, of cracked corn, 2 parts of broken wheat, 2 parts of oatmeal, and 2 parts of granulated meat scrap.  The meat scrap must be lean.

The protein requirements in these old recipes have always stymied me to a degree; “meat scrap” is no longer readily available, so a body must come up with a reasonable facsimile thereof.  Depending upon where I was and what was available, I’ve used finely minced beef, red worms sold for fishing bait, and feeder crickets from pet stores as the meat supplement.  I’ve also used boiled eggs, shells on, very well shredded and crushed.  A combination of soybean meal and flax meal will work to a degree, but chickens are designed to eat bugs and benefit from it.  Beef is a poor but sufficient substitute, and for some reason the vegetable protein supplements just don’t grow good chicks in my experience.  Yogurt is also an excellent feed for baby chickens, if a little messy.  The milk protein is quite assimilable and the probiotics help properly populate their little guts from a very young age, which I feel strongly helps create strong immune systems in adult birds.

The above is something that I’ll engage in for six or ten chicks; a batch of twenty-five or more may have to make do with commercial poultry feed, at least until I have a rabbit herd set up to feed large enough worm bins to keep up with the appetite of more than two dozen growing birds.  That’s a goal, though!

Never be troubled if you run out of commercial chicken feed, even for chicks.  Chickens are omnivores and delight in variety in their diet.   If it’s a couple three days or even more, the chickens certainly won’t be harmed.  Remember that people raised chickens for decades before Ralston Purina came along, and did quite well with the birds.

You chicken keepers out there—what do you feed your chickens other than commercial chicken feed?  Have any of you gotten all the way away from commercial chicken feed?  Are you trying to?