Читать книгу Hobby Farm Animals - Chris McLaughlin - Страница 55

While your chickens’ nutritional needs vary depending on age, sex, breed, and use, their diets must always include water, protein, vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, and fats in adequate quantities and proper balance. All chicken keepers are in agreement on this point. But when it comes to the question of how best to supply all of those dietary elements, it’s a different story. Ask any fanciers how each feeds his or her chickens, and you’ll find two distinct camps: those who never feed their birds anything except commercial mixes, and those who never feed their birds commercial mixes without supplementing them. Opinion runs high on both sides about which approach is better.

Which one you should take really depends on your primary reason for keeping chickens. If you raise birds strictly for their meat or eggs, commercial feed is the way to go. Commercial bagged rations are formulated to serve up optimal nutrition, thus creating optimal production. Supplementing commercial feed with treats, table scraps, scratch (a whole- or cracked-grain mixture that chickens adore), or anything else will upset that delicate nutritional balance.

However, if, like us, you see your chickens as friends and don’t care if their growth is slightly slower or if they produce fewer eggs, then consider supplementing their diets. They’ll appreciate the variety, and you’ll appreciate the much lower cost of a supplemented diet.

Waste Less Chickens waste about 30 percent of feed in a trough feeder that’s full. If the same trough is only half full, they waste only 3 percent. Save yourself some time and money by spreading less feed for your chickens in more troughs.

Water

Consider this: an egg is roughly 65 percent water, a chick 79 percent, and a mature chicken 55– 75 percent. Blood is 90 percent water. Chickens guzzle two to three times as much water as they eat in food, depending on their size, their type (layers require more water than broilers), and the season—up to two or three cups per day. So whether you use a commercial or home-based diet, your chickens require free access to fresh, clean water.

Chickens need water to soften what they eat and carry it through their digestive tracts; many of the digestive and nutrient-absorption processes depend on water. In addition, water cools birds internally during the hot summer months. If you eliminate water from your chickens’ diet, expect problems immediately. Chickens don’t drink a lot at any single time, but they drink often.

Water temperature can affect how much chickens will drink. They don’t like to drink hot or too-cold water, so keep waterers out of the blazing sun. When temperatures soar, plop a handful of ice cubes in the reservoir every few hours. In the winter, replace regular waterers with heated ones or add a bucket-style immersion heater to a standard metal version. You can also swap iced-up waterers for fresh ones containing tepid water every few hours. In subzero climates, heated waterers are a must; even a heated dog bowl is acceptable.

Even if one waterer is enough, choose two. Otherwise, bossy, high-ranking chickens in your flock’s hierarchy may shoo underlings away from the fountain.

As with the feeders, hanging waterers from hooks or rafters with the drinking surface level with your smallest chickens’ backs will give the best results. If you can’t hang a waterer, make certain it is level to avoid leaking.

Whichever type of waterer you use, and wherever you hang your waterers, clean and rinse them every day. Scour them once a week (more often in the summer) using a stiff brush and a solution of about nine parts water to one part chlorine bleach.

Chicken waterers are designed to keep the water clean.

Commercial Feeds

Whether you buy it or mix it yourself, a healthy, happy chicken’s diet should provide the following:

•Sufficient protein based on the age and needs of the bird

•Carbohydrates, a major source of energy

•Thirteen vitamins to support growth, reproduction, and body maintenance: fat-soluble vitamins A, D3, E, and K; and water-soluble vitamins B12, thiamin, riboflavin, nicotinic acid, folic acid, biotin, pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, and choline

•Macrominerals (those needed in larger quantities) and trace or microminerals (those needed in only minute amounts) to build strong bones and healthy blood cells, supporting enzyme activation and muscle function and regulating metabolism; hens require additional minerals, especially calcium, to lay eggs with nice, thick shells

•Fats for energy and proper absorption of fat-soluble vitamins and as sources of fatty acids, necessary for supporting fertility and egg hatchability

Commercial feeds are designed to meet the aforementioned needs precisely. To meet protein requirements, commercial feeds include a variety of high-protein meals made of corn gluten, soybeans, cottonseed, meat, bone, fish, and dried whey. Too much protein can be as bad as too little, so balancing this nutrient is especially tricky. Carbohydrates are much easier; they naturally compose a large portion of every grain-based diet. While some of the thirteen vitamins listed are plentiful in natural foodstuff, commercial feeds cover all bases by adding a vitamin premix. As for fats, commercial feeds contain processed meat and poultry fats in measured amounts. Fats provide twice as much energy as other feed ingredients, making them especially useful in starter feeds and growing rations. Mixing your own commercial-style feed is an option (and often a must for producers of organic meat or eggs), but balancing the nutrition is a complex task.

Common ingredients in commercial feeds include corn, oats, wheat, barley, sorghum, milo, soybean, and other oilseed meals; cottonseed or alfalfa meal; wheat or rice bran; and meat by-products, such as bonemeal and fishmeal. Ingredients are finely ground to produce easier-to-digest mash; sometimes they are pelleted or processed into crumbles so there is less wasted food.

Commercial baby chick food is usually medicated; some feeds for older chickens are medicated, too. Each type of feed, designed for a specific group of birds, contains nutrients in slightly different measures, so choose the correct feed: starter, grower, layer, breeder, or finisher. That information will be printed on the label, along with precisely how much to feed, so always check to be certain.

Commercial feeds also contain ingredients that many fanciers don’t approve of, such as antibiotics and coccidiostats for birds that don’t need them, pellet binders to improve the texture of pelleted feed, and chemical antioxidants to prevent fatty ingredients from spoiling. Again, read the labels! If you’d like to offer your chickens commercial feed but want to avoid the questionable additives, ask your county agricultural agent or feed store representative what “natural” commercial feeds are available locally. The Murray McMurray Hatchery sells organic feed and ships throughout the continental United States.

ADVICE FROM THE FARM Feeding Your Chickens My chickens get yummy breakfasts every other day: oatmeal, rabbit feed (for a nice greens-based meal), raisins, scrambled eggs, cat food (protein—and they love it), apples, leftovers, mac and cheese (a favorite!), green beans, and Cheerios (another favorite). —Jennifer Kroll Let your chickens graze. My chickens keep our 3 acres almost totally free of ticks. Ticks for eggs—that’s a really neat trade! —Sharon Jones

Maintaining Nutritional Value and Freshness

To retain full nutritional value and assure freshness, purchase no more than a two-to-four-week supply of commercial feed. Don’t dump new product on top of remaining feed; use up the old feed first or scoop it out and place it on top of the new supply. When storing feed, place it in tightly closed containers and store it in a cool, dry place out of the sun. Plastic containers will work, but if gnawing rodents are a headache, store grain in lidded metal cans. A 10-gallon garbage can holds 50 pounds of feed.

If your chickens refuse commercial feed, examine it closely. Sniff. It may be musty or otherwise spoiled. If it seems all right, you’re probably dealing with picky chickens that prefer scratch, treats, and table scraps. Cut back on goodies until they eat the chicken feed, too. Distributing treats only after they’ve dined on their regular rations will encourage them to be less picky.

The Supplement Approach

According to proponents of supplements, supplemented hens lay better eggs, and supplemented broilers taste better. That’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself. What we present here are methods that chicken keepers can use to supplement their chickens’ diets.

Grit and Oyster Shells

Since chickens don’t have teeth, they swallow grit—tiny pebbles and other hard objects—to grind their food. If your chickens free-range, or if you use easily digestible commercial feed, you won’t need to provide your birds with grit. Otherwise, commercial grit (ground limestone, granite, or marble) can be mixed with their scratch or container-fed to chickens on a free-choice basis.

Ground oyster shell is too soft to function as grit, but it’s a terrific calcium booster for laying hens. Feeding oyster shell to hens on a free-choice basis allows the hens to eat it when they wish.

Scratch

Many hobbyists and small-flock owners supplement commercial feed with scratch in measured proportions to not upset the nutritional balance of the feed. Scratch is a mixture of two or more whole or coarsely cracked grains, such as corn, oats, wheat, milo, millet, rice, barley, and buckwheat.

Chickens adore scratch grains. Chickens instinctively scratch the earth with their sharp toenails to rake up bugs, pebbles for grit, seeds, and other natural yummies. Scratch strewn on their indoor litter, anyplace outdoors, or in separate indoor feeders satisfies that urge.

Greens and Insects

Hobby farmers and poultry enthusiasts often grow “chicken gardens” of cut-and-come-again edibles like lettuce, kale, turnip greens, and chard. Chickens of all types and sizes relish greens. Greens-chomping hens lay eggs with dark, rich yolks.

Insects add protein to chickens’ diets. Free-range chickens harvest their own bugs, but coop and run-caged birds don’t have that chance. Capture katydids, grasshoppers, and other tasty insects to toss to your chickens. If you do, they’ll soon come running when they spot you.

Good Home Cookin’

Chickens happily devour table scraps. Avoid fatty, greasy, salty stuff; anything spoiled; avocados; and uncooked potato peels. Also, strongly scented or flavored scraps, such as onions, garlic, salami, and fish, can flavor hens’ eggs. Almost everything else from your table will be fine—even baked goods, meat, and dairy products. Your chickens will love it all.

Many folks assume that free-range chickens will grow healthy eating seeds, weeds, and bugs. They won’t. However, if you supplement free-range findings with scratch or commercial feed, your chickens will cheerfully rid your yard and orchard of termites, ticks, Japanese beetles, grasshoppers, grubs, slugs, and dropped fruit. One caveat: they’ll also strip your garden clean, so think “fenced garden” if you raise free-range chickens.