As a poultry farmer, after having a
good coop designed and constructed it for your chickens, the second most
expensive and most important part of keeping chickens, the food? Feeding a hen
scraps, scratch and leftovers will not help her live a long and healthy life or
reach her potential in egg production. With high quality feed and consistent
diet, chickens can live to be ten years old. Some even make it to fifteen.
Thousands of researchers through a
lot of experiments, have clearly identified the dietary need of commercial
chickens. Your chickens in your backyard may not be the same breeds as those
used in commercial production and therefore likely do not need to produce eggs
at optimum performance level. Regardless, you still need to understand the
basic requirement of a chicken's diet.
Chickens are amazing creatures;
with the right nutritional building blocks, they can produce for you an egg a
day during their first year. But that required the correct ration formulation
to allow the chicken to convert feed appropriately for its body.
Poultry feed ingredient; components
of a chicken diet are as follows:
Water
·
Protein
· Carbohydrates
·
Fat
·
Minerals and Vitamins
But in this post, we will look at
the water and protein components while we go further in the next post.
Water
Water is perhaps the most
overlooked yet most essential nutrient in a balance diet for chickens. On
Average, every day, these birds consume twice as much water as they do feed.
Clean water free of algae and bacteria is essential to the overall health of
their gastrointestinal tract and associated immune systems.
Chicken use water to lubricate
their body system and for temperature control.
The liquid makes up components of
their muscles, blood and bone, plus 66 percent of the egg we eat.
A laying hen, by percentage of body
weight, is 62.4 percent water, higher than the percent of water found in most
four legged livestock animals. Without adequate fresh, clean water, the hen has
no choice but to stop laying eggs.
Not just any water will do. Keep in
mind that average chickens cannot access water that is frozen. They also avoid
water that’s too hot. A good rule of thumb. Water too hot for you to drink is
too hot for the chickens too. During cold weather, keep your water warm and
during hot weather keep your water cool.
Protein
The building blocks of protein are
amino-acid. About half the protein in the average poultry diet comes from
soybean meal or other related grains. When getting feed for your poultry, the
feeding bag label should list soybean meal as one of the two primary ingredients.
The other half comes from high protein supplements such as plant or animal
sourced byproduct meal. What is most important when it comes to protein in the
poultry ration is the balance of amino acids.
Note: A
divers diet will help ensure overall health.
Supplementing the diet with
proteins from multiple sources simulated a chicken's diet in the wild. Remember
chickens are by no means vegetarians but omnivorous.
Plant Proteins include the following;
-
Oilseed meal
-
soybean meal
-
coconut meal
-
cottonseed meal
-
peanut meal
-
rapeseed
-
sesame meal
-
sunflower seed meal
Animal proteins in the following;
Meat and bone meal,
Blood meal
Feather meal
Poultry byproduct meal
Dried milk protein,
Dried buttermilk
Marine by products
(fish meal, fish liver shrimp meal, crab meal, dried fish soluble and whale
meal)
Note:
Soybean can work well as part of your chickens' diet, but
keep in mind that soybeans contain an irritant called trypsin inhibitor. Chicken
cannot digest this, and in fact, it prevents them from accessing the soybeans
essential nutrients. To inactivate the trypsin inhibitor, roast the soybean
first before grinding.
I hope you have gain some knowledge from this post, let me
know what you think in the comment below.
To be continue in the next post.