Mom's dog breeder feeding high quality food one of the ingredients made the dogs less fertile on purpose she didn't know and had half the number of litter for a given year
Yes, chickens should be eating BUGS! Chickens eat bugs. Humans should not eat bugs, despite the propaganda. We can eat bugs indirectly, by eating the things which eat the bugs. And the eggs from those things.
@@y00t00b3r There's a cockroach farm in China that keeps them in large rooms, they feed them waste food from the local restaurants, about 50 tons a day, then they are used as chicken and animal food.
Utter nonsense, bugs even for humans are a far better and healthier source of protein then the garbage processed red meat that most people eat! @@y00t00b3r
Some towns way back in the day would allow pigs to roam free one day a week to clean out everyone's trash of organic material. Kind of a shame to see so much organic waste ending up in a landfill instead of getting cycled back into the carbon cycle.
To be fair I once chucked out some old-ish spagbol with a little bit of mold on it and lo and behold there was a dead chicken the next day.. I didn’t say anything to the ol lady, just told her the chook must have been getting old lol soo not sure it should be absolutely anything. Could have been a coincidence 🤷♂️
Best eggs I've had were from chickens raised on compost piles. They chose whatever food scraps they wanted, but also spent most of the day picking bugs out. When they have a lot of insects in their diet the shells get about 10x harder than store-bought eggs and the yolks look way more orange. The orange color comes from the carotenoids - bonus antioxidants. The yolks also feel way creamier.
I’m experiencing the same thing. We are swimming in eggs with less chicken feed. My mom was asking what is different. I have baskets of eggs too! I have a chicken bucket by the sink and my friends bring scraps. Happy girls.
@@cliveb9771 Here's the odd thing though, if you peel your vegetables outside, you can feed them to your hens/pigs, but you can't feed your peelings to them if you do it in the kitchen. That being said our hens and pigs used to get kitchen waste anyway, it's an almost impossible law to police in domestic settings.
In Europe eggs that are farmed for sale must come from hens that have been inoculated for Salmonella, and that have been kept segregated from wild birds to avoid avian flu (generally using large overhead nets for "freeranging" chickens). This means that eggs sold in supermarkets are not bleached, and will keep for months if you store them in the fridge. I assume that the matter of them getting fed human food scraps is to avoid transmission of other potential diseases from partly eaten food, stuff like epathitis and similar. But I bet that these restrictions only apply for eggs that are for sale. Kitchen scraps that are a byproduct of cooking and never reached someone's mouth should be perfectly safe.
We moved ours to better feed, and the eggs increased. They always get people food scraps, and all of the chicken food they want, but the high protein feed still made a difference. I find that table scraps make more quality difference than quantity difference.
Get with a brewer (all grain) and get some of the grains after a batch has been brewed. Feed that to your chickens and enjoy the harvest. A woman down the street from me used to take the spent grain when I was brewing. Chickens would go completely APE when they ate it. Produced more, and larger, eggs for those days. I've put brewing on 'pause' for now. Once I get into a place of my own I'll look at doing it again. Maybe I'll luck out and another neighbor will also have chickens so that I can get truely fresh eggs to eat.
Do an experiment pick 6 as equally matched health wise hens feed 2 nothing but feed, 2 nothing but table scraps, and 2 a mixture. That would be an interesting video.
We had an issue with Tractor Supply feed last year when our egg production came to a halt. We changed their feed to a different brand and within a couple of weeks we were back in business. We have relatively young hens producing 8-10/day over the summer but now that winter is here and the days are shorter we're down to 2-3/day. We spoil our chickens with good quality feed and lots of scraps, but egg production seems to be dependent upon the amount of light they get each day not what they eat.
I work with folks on how to set up a backyard chicken pens and feeding habits. After speaking with a few people from around my area, I went and looked at TS feeds. Although I did not send a sample to check for aflatoxin/black mold, I use a simpler storage method rule of thumb. If the relative humidity plus the temperature °f added together is above 100, mold starts through oxidation. This mold threshold occurs when the humidity of the product reaches 19%. Sometimes when bagged feed is trucked when it's warm for days then set inside the air-conditioned TS store, there can be condensation on the inside surface of the bag. It only takes a tiny bit of mold to form to contaminate the whole bag. It doesn't need to be clumpy or black to be present but if you do notice clumps, nix it. The TS folks say there were no issues found with their feeds but did they test it at the most likey point in the supply chain? They couldn't tell me.
I have a friend that this happened to, he was telling me his egg production was extremely low, almost nonexistent. I asked him if he had heard about the TS feed issue, and he had no clue about it. He looked into it, changed up his feed, and his hens started laying back to normal wintertime levels.
We have 20 chickens, and the feed I was giving them since I started raising chickens dropped my production down to 1-2 per day. I switched to a local farm that makes their own feed and in 1 week my production went back to 10-12 per day, as the days were already getting shorter. Never looked back. We are back to normal production of 12-15 a day.
The off-grid home steaders were saying the same thing here in the states about the store bought chicken feed. They said stop using store bought chicken feed and watch your hens produce 5 times more eggs!
@@johnscott2849 The grain in the chicken feed is soaked in Glyphosate right before harvest. Glyphosate is a known reproduction disruptor and eggs are part of the reproductive system. This is a relatively new process but farmers have really doubled down on the Roundup in the past 3-4 years.
Back when I kept chickens I barely fed them store bought feed during the green months. Kept them a pile of calcium. They got table scraps and I would run the maggot bucket on offal from the other livestock. They also got to roam the entire property. Side by side my eggs were bigger, the yolks were almost orange and there was a noticeable flavor difference. During the cold months I supplemented with hydro fodder (mostly winter wheat with a bit of sunflower sprouted in). There was still a noticeable difference in the eggs.
I work at a small Co-op and we legally can’t give leftovers away to anyone but staff. When the hot bar closes sometimes I grab about half or more of a 5 gallon bucket of scraps for them! Only issue I have with them is that they are now picky about their scraps since they had the good stuff!
We fed our hens a mixture of leftovers, home-kill beef carcass leftovers (maggot farm) and standard feed. Best eggs I've ever eaten. I think the difference may be that the hens enjoy diversity in their diet, just like we do. Variance in texture, flavour and smell. They like extra snacks rather than the big-food-pile-once-a-day thing. They like their food to be found in multiple places around their run. All of this probably promotes extra egg-laying because it gives the impression of plenty of food to go around. These things come from the jungle. Give them a really diverse jungle diet.
When I was a child I wanted to plant a few trees on our land. Dad agreed and sourced a few from the nursery. One was an oak. I wanted two oaks. I saw no reason why not to nab a sapling from the forest. We planted those oaks about 50 feet apart, all other things being equal. The nursery oak did fine. Slow growing as you would expect. The one I got from the treeline shot up straight and proud, and branched into a majestic shade tree beautifully proportioned over a decade and a half. In just 5 years the difference was glaring. I did not know oaks could grow that fast.
@@__WJK__ The question was, "What's going on?" It's not irrelevant. The answer is we are hamstringing everything and calling it better. Just because more calories are coming out of the ground does not mean we are flourishing. They want us to eat soybeans and insects because supposedly that's living in equilibrium with nature. There's a reason my body loves meat and sugar.
30 years ago I used to raise my own chickens. Rock x Cornish for meat and Rhode Island reds for eggs. The Roadies were fed blue seal layer mash and we had very good luck with them, never had any weird shells or anything strange about them we ate them for years . The strange thing with Sears would mail you the chicks wish you had to put in an incubator for a few weeks. Addition of the mash they were allowed to roam around the yard and eat anything they wanted mostly bugs. Got about one egg per chicken per day.
People were noticing this issue last year here in the States. I remember seeing one post about a guy hydrating new feed and some old feed he had lying around. New stuff wasn't expanding and hydrating. Some were concluding they were filling the feed with some sort of filler that the chickens were just crapping out. Good chance they had a supply shortage and need to make up the lost mass.
YES! Feed suppliers are either cutting major corners (which is similar to what we see with pet food) and/or someone's trying to totally sabotage people trying to homestead/live sustainably off their own land.
Fellow farmer and farm rescue here. Ferment your feed, especially the store stuff. They'll eat less and be more hydrated. Really helps with ducks and vitamin b.
Something changed in the big name feed a few years ago; my ducks just stopped laying. I tried a couple different feeds from smaller brands and found one that got them laying again.
We had a farm for a few years in Southwestern Onterrible, near Owen Sound. Until that is, the RBC loved our farm so much they took it away from us. Anyhoo, we had about 30 hens who had free run of the barnyard spring till fall, and avwhole corner of the barn in the winter. When we fed them straight grain, plus all our table scraps and garden waste, the egfs were huge, beautiful, golden yolks... I mean heaven. When we bought feed from a Purina mill as I remember, the shells were thin and the eggs tasted storebought. The real trick was to give the hens chickengrits - twofold purpose, grinding food in the gizzard and supplying extra calcium. A bag in the back of the pickup was also good on ice :)
@@MetalAsFork thanks for your interest. Nothing really special. My family immigrated to Canaderp in the early '80s, and bought a house 3 years later. Itself a feat, I mean just try doing that today. Anyhoo, they decided that they were going to have a farm, like their grandparents in the old country. So they sold their house, mortgaged the farm property so that they could use equity from the house to get the farm going. Got into a few shitty lines of farming and loat most of that cash. At 18% interest to the RBC, the payments on the farm got ahead of them. Their day jobs didn't cover the shortfall, and the RBC didn't want to negotiate (despite the fact that they were mortgaging for 9% by then). So it all went tits up, and they foreclosed. As I say, a story like thousands of others in the early '90s. Needless to say, I won't do any business with those RBC c***s.
We have only 21 chickens and 5 ducks. We are up to our navels in eggs, in the late fall. I credit/blame it on the dried soldier fly larvae we feed them with good commercial feed and vegetable scraps.
It's a communicative vibration psyching the chicks cause you've been holding out and they are digging on your groove, getting hot and laying for ya - eh!
All protein is not digestible by all animals. Back in the nineteen hundreds ,my father was raising feeder pigs and, a crafty feed salesmen sold him some revolutionary new pelletized pig feed for an amazingly cheap price. When asked about the protein content the salesman assured him that it had been scientifically tested and was guaranteed to have plenty of protein for the young swine. After a few days on their new ration Pop took a shovelful of the critters leavings and scooped it into a bucket. He then ran the garden hose into the bucket until he spied something very interesting, it was all that protein the salesman had talked about. It was chicken feathers. Technically protein but indigestible to hogs. I had a similar experience during the pandemic pause. The big box store layer feed was being mixed with a new formula and the girls quit laying. After a couple weeks of this I surmised that a crafty feed salesman was at it again. I bought a bag of 22% protein meat bird food and used it to supplement the 16% layer crumbles. Within a week we had more eggs than we could eat. Two different spices, two different salesmen, forty years between the two story’s but the same old scam. I suppose the moral of the story is either “follow the money” or “there is nothing new under the sun”.
AvE, like a flash it occurred to me that you haven't made a video in months. I feared some tragedy had befallen you! I logged on and checked, and sure as shit this damn RUclips unsubscribed me from your channel! I'd heard of that happening, but it was a first for me. Glad to see you're still living the life!
Enjoy the harvest. What you can't sell, boil and refrigerate after cooling...reasonable amounts though! I wouldn't be surprised that the feed isn't up to par...probably got more calcium in it so the shells of the Battery Farmed eggs are tougher for mass handling.. As the pinned comment says, "Real Protein begets Real Protein"...like the Fuel Economy Game...You can't win, you will never draw even, you will always lose...something! All the best Mountain Rancher, to you and all with you. Cheers!
In the winter my chickens don't find as many bugs or weeds to eat and rely a lot on bag feed, but summers (Florida) their yolks are amber to golden color, they produce MUCH more and even the shells are harder and the eggs are larger. The bag stuff is avail to them year round, but they simply don't eat much in the summer.
Yup, had the same problem. Changed feed supplier and got more eggs. Never used Purina or any other brands. Just farm store ground feeds. Also let them roam and give them the kitchen scraps. They love pumpkin , squash and anything red like tomatoes or strawberries
You need some French Marans, huge chocolate coloured eggs. We have limousin greys, old local breed, huge yolks, bright rich colour, beautiful, taste like butter! Let them destroy the veg patch at the end of the season, rest their usual ground and next year's veg will be well nourished. Bugs, lizards, snakes (if you have the coq for it!) they love meat, anything. Too much veg gives them the shits, plenty of space, they know whats good and thrive on finding it themselves. Mine especially adore the log pile/splitting area, lots of treats to be had. Edited for general crommulance.
My grandparents and some aunts / uncles, back in the old country (Greece), kept chickens in their yards. They would feed them table scraps and left overs. When I was a wee lad of 10 years I freaked out when my grandmother tossed a roasted chicken carcas into the coup. The chickens just devoured it. The would eat anything. I had a pet crab that I brought home from the beach one day, and I thought it would like to play with the chickens ... but it was a horror show man. Burned into my genetic memory so much so that my kids will remember it. Great eggs though. The best eggs I have ever eaten. Definitely a different flavour to North American eggs. They were just soooooo good.
I'm on the same quest to create the perfect egg. I'm playing with black copper marans, Blue copper marans, blue splash cochins, white leghorns, RIR, Barred Plymoth Rock, and Amaruacana. I'm also drowning in eggs. We feed our 3 dozen chickens high quality feed that is locally grown, none of this national super farmed grain that is soaked in Roundup. I believe why so many people are having egg problems is because the grain is soaked in Roundup right before harvest. Farmers have used Roundup for decades, but more recently, they have started the practice of using Roundup to force ripen the grains. They spray it a few days before harvest. What it does is dries out the grains and in the plant's final dieing action, it forces all it's energy into the seeds. The major problem with this is the Roundup never gets washed off the grain. That grain later gets feed to livestock and chickens where it then contaminates the chicken's reproductive system causing a rather steep decrees in egg production. The feed label won't reflect the added Glyphosate content in the feed, the feed mill (as far as they know) hasn't changed any ingredient. If you are having egg problems not related to simple molting, look at where you get your chicken feed, investigate where they get the grains that they use to mix the feed, then ask if they use Roundup (Glyphosate) to cure the grains before harvest. This will likely be the issue.
Just a clarification, the Gregorian calendar is what we use, and the Gregorian date is just today’s date. The code on the box is likely to be the Julian date. The actual Julian date is the number of days since the Julian calendar was introduced in 45 BCE by Julius Caesar. But more commonly in manufacturing the term “Julian Date” refers to what day number it is In the year. In the food plant I work we use the best before based on the date at the start of a product run and will use that date for the whole run even if it goes over multiple days. We will print the Julian date and time on the bottle for traceability of the actual day it was made. E.g. today 30th November is 2470278 Julian, or in the simpler usage day of the year 334. I’ve also seen the year included 23334.
I don't have any chickens now. I have a buddy that grinds his own feed and when the rumor was going around that the leading chicken feed producer changed the formulation to cut down on egg production he saw no drop in production.
Store bought chicken feed is less caloric per volume and contains a lot of material that chickens cannot digest as well as oils that speed up their digestion. The eggs are one difference, but seeing the difference in the chicken poop is even bigger.
Considering OSB was $40 a sheet when I built my coop, I'm so far in the hole I'm more miner than poor, poor farmer. That said, telling the ladies and their stud that I love them and hope the sleep well every night makes their eggs taste better.
Old man Cook down the road sticks some chopped apples and lettuce in his feed. He's been raising chickens for I think about 150 years. Best eggs I've ever had.
Our girls are on pasture, cracked corn, kitchen scraps and 3 cups of pellets. Egg production is spot on even my old hens are keeping up and they're 4 years old.
a LOT of homesteaders have been noticing this for the last year. if you buy the cheapest feed from tractor supply the chickens fully stop laying and the people who add water and ferment the feed have noticed it doesn't ferment properly anymore.
We've definitely had the same experience. Our chickens are fed with extra stuff from the garden, have scraps, occasionally a locally made feed that's primarily a grain mix, and every spring after harvest a super sack of the clean out from the local co-op. The mixed grains and whatnot that fall through the elevators
the 'okayish' feed I get in Australia, I get 6 eggs a week from each chicken, unlimited feed (self feeders). I give 1 small handfull of sunflower seeds per 3 chickens as a daily treat. If I give them more sunflower or any other treats they don't eat enough of the layer pellets and stop laying as much. Pellets are 100% better than mixed grain because the only eat the yummy bits of the mix and not what they need. Pellets force them to eat a balanced diet.
I wanna somehow get our chickens to lay eggs with GPs location tags in them so I can track where they're laying. Being free range with 600m2 of gardens to roam around in, they're hiding them really good.
A finely tuned Fit Bit, with some open source software would discern the difference between a raptor step and a "standing ovation", and coyld subsequently communicate GPS to an access point of your choosing. But if you're not so tech savvy, maybe the iYolk is what your brood needs.
Absolutely the universal experience. Feed from a bag is just above feeding them dirt. Cheap and plentiful, but barely food. Plus you have to worry about things like a year or two ago, whenever it was, that everyone that used those feeds suddenly stopped getting eggs. Ours stopped laying entirely for months. We stopped giving them bag feed and gave them scraps and foraged greens and whatnot and they started laying again.
Since my chickens started eating our spilled rabbit food, kitchen scraps, and whatever is in the compost bin they've kept laying even though its supposed to be thier off season for laying. They practically reject the high quality bag feed altogether.
This has been reported on homesteading channels on RUclips with the store bought bagged chook feed,the manufacturers are doing something to the feed that’s slowing chickens down on laying,even stopping them laying completely !
Feed suppliers are either cutting major corners (which is similar to what we see with pet food) and/or someone's trying to sabotage people trying to homestead/live sustainably off their own land.
Hi from the uk That store bought feed is highly processed rubbish just like the dog or cat food in the supermarket, animals need quality food to flourish. Back in the 70s people made a living out of collecting waste food from restaurants and takeaways in the mid to late 80s that stopped all waste food had to be scrapped it was deemed to be unfit for animal consumption, a bad day for farming
@@OnGuard3S - Real world experiance shows older eggs will peel better after boiling, though I wouldn't be the least surprised if breed "maybe" plays a part in certain (fresh) eggs being easier to peel (after boiling) than others(?) It was, and still is, common in practice our family to buy 6 dozen eggs 2-3 weeks before the Easter holiday, so all the Easter Eggs peel super-easy during our family's Easter brunch and dinner.
Yup, same thing happened with our last flock that were fed various large brand feeds. Since then we switched to a smaller/local no corn/no soy feed (plus all the kitchen/garden/yard scraps as usual) and we're back to getting plenty of healthy eggs. I'd expect similar results for anyone eating major brands of peoplechow. They want us unhealthy and/or dead.
We feed our layer ducks and meat turkeys a mix of some commercial feed, fermented grains from grain screenings out of a local grain elevator, garden scraps, table/kitchen scraps, buckets of apples when the local yard trees start dropping them and let them free range on pasture. Now they are also getting milled grain from field spills that we ran though our feed mill and are doing better than they ever did on commercial layer feed and the same for my sister in law's laying hens. We definitely can tell the difference the less commercial feed they get.
My guess is that it's the vegetables. My father grew up on a farm and he said they fed the chickens alfalfa in the winter and that helped with egg production.
Best stuff you can buy? The best stuff is usually the stuff you can't buy. When we had chickens they got kitchen scraps and whole grain And the old shells after we used the egg inside, you've gotta give them some form of grit or you'll get soft shelled eggs.
it's not gonna be something like seed oil or soy, but vitamins, minerals, and amino acid ratios. minerals in particular are very sensitive to high quality sources and make your absorption of all other nutrients more efficient and adds a great deal of resistance to the immune system which means more energy can be spent on processes like egg foramation
I’d guess it’s just digestibility. The dry hard pellets take more to break down in the gut than fresh greens and scraps, so the birds are able to derive more nutrients from the fresh food than the commercial pellets.
People noticed a big drop in egg production per hen about 3 years or so. I do not have chickens so just going off of what I saw others mention. Switching to goat feed apparently caused some chickens to double their egg production. Something in the feed changed. Maybe manufacturers switching to lower quality ingredients because of supply change issues? The theory that made the most sense I read was too little protein in the altered mixes.
It's not possible for chickens to double their egg production. They already lay 300 eggs a year. They can't start producing an egg every 14 hours. It's just not possible.
@littlejackalo5326 I think you are misunderstanding the post. The chickens saw a big drop in egg production prior to switching the feed. As in their production prior to the doubling was significantly lower than it should have been. It was not a doubling of the normal amount.
I've had all kinda of birds, turkeys,ducks and chickens, because of the great number of predators they were completely fenced in. Top, bottom all around. They would get store feed as well as any veg we could get our hands on. The church up the road had an apple tree and we would get the windfall off the ground, even the lawn cuttings(the ducks loved those) even raised a batch of worms for them. they were all one egg a day. So much better/ yummy than store bought. Currently I have quail. The eggs are small but consistent. I get a dozen every day. I'm thinking about pickling sum for Christmas gifts.
Ah, quail eggs, I used to drink a dozen or more every morning when we kept quails. Now we keep chickens only, about 15 of them for the family. I think I'll get some quail again. I heard somewhere that quail eggs are a healthier choice when comparing eggs. However, that claim could be a bunch of BS.
I've seen a huge increase in egg production since I've gave the birds more scraps also..chicken feed has gone way up in price too. We get a lot of eggs! Way too many I basically give em away, most ppl insist on paying me for them anyway. I thank God
Currently raising 3 Killer B's at our house nowhere near the Prairie. Betty,a Buff Brahma and Bea&Belle, New Hampshire Reds. Fed 'em people grade food as close to organic and "the source" as possible. This includes grass and worms which I gladly help them look for. They started egging at approximately 5 months,when the convention internet wise-dumb said 8. Yes,it's the feed. Commercial scratch is laced with synthetic vitamins and minerals-even the Fancy Feasting Brand. Nothing comes close to a True Free Range method for producing quality eggs which will be gooder for ya!
I have had chooks before, they can only lay so many eggs per day no matter what they are feed, I have used very cheep pellet feed and with others natural scrap feed which included free range style grasses, flowers, and even spiders and cocroches, I never noted any real difference in the amount they lay, although the quality of the egg was noted.
Nestlé produced chicken feed that restricted egg production. I believe the brand was Purina. They claim RNA sequenced feed doesn’t reduce egg production. How about they leave the feed TF alone.
Got 12 young Cream Legbar, they’ve bested our garden fence this year….so they’re eaten pretty well. All olive an light blue. Lots of double yolks. 🤷🏼♂️ We need a couple black Marans to get our rainbow going. Also want to ad a couple Indian Runners this spring. Love your farming content. 😊👍 Our more experienced and neighbor mentioned something about weird egg feed this summer, he’s using Walmart pellets with scratch grain as well. Said he threw in Goat feed an saw an increase in production. Said something about the “layer feed being off” 🤷🏼♂️
Here the States, a couple of years ago, egg producers were noticing the same issue. It was funny how when a fuss was raised, the trend changed, all of a sudden. Wonder if someone’s trying to unload that grain on you folks?
Raising chickens for twenty years……this year for the first time ever we are getting 2 to 4 eggs per day. In the past with the same amount of chickens (25 - 30) we would see about 10 - 12 eggs per day. We use store bought layer pellets.
As a Dutchman, who now gets his fresh eggs from a farm some 10 kilometers away; farmer feeds his chickens on rejects from the greenhouse farmer next door, and on whatever other farmers would throw away (grains, tomatoes, corn, the works) The guy next door to our chicken farmer grows (some extremely spicy) Peppers and Avocados, and whenever the little feathered bastards get Avocados mixed with Peppers, they lay eggs like the Devil were egging (hurr hurr) them on, as it were. Last week I got a box of eggs the feathered buggers produced while being fed Carolina Reapers; some of the best eggs I've ever had. Only during winter they get (some) storebought chicken feed, and it shows.
My Mother's aunt, many many years ago cooked the grain that she gave to her chickens and in turn the chickens we're healthier and grew faster than anyone else's according to my Mother.
Yes, same experience. 2 year old hens producing 0 eggs a day. I get maybe 2 eggs a week out of 4 hens. 2 years old should still be producing at 80% capacity.
"Chickens are evil creatures," to quote the former owner of my ranch. But eggs are delicious and healthy food. When I finally get chickens, it'll be a complicated relationship. Thanks for posting - thumbs up as always.
chickens are chickens. they don't have a concept of good or evil. they have one diety, the flock. the flock above all. roosters don't attack people because they're evil. roosters attack people because stay the fuck away from the flock. fight or flight - the problem with flight is that they're jungle animals. they don't fly because they evolved to jump and hide between dense undergrowth. a farm doesn't have undergrowth to hide the flock in, hence fight.
Not a clue about the feed, all I know is that my birds stopped eating it when they found out that bugs live in the leaves. I'd throw them a handful when I let them out in the morning as an easy snack, they'd only eat half, so I stopped, and they didn't seem to notice. Egg production was pretty much unchanged.
yes, have experienced the same..... people food = better eggs... approach the restaurant, give them free eggs for free people food scraps = free chicken feed
Real protein begets real protein
Mom's dog breeder feeding high quality food one of the ingredients made the dogs less fertile on purpose she didn't know and had half the number of litter for a given year
Yes, chickens should be eating BUGS! Chickens eat bugs. Humans should not eat bugs, despite the propaganda. We can eat bugs indirectly, by eating the things which eat the bugs. And the eggs from those things.
@@y00t00b3r There's a cockroach farm in China that keeps them in large rooms, they feed them waste food from the local restaurants, about 50 tons a day, then they are used as chicken and animal food.
@@y00t00b3rWhen all that is left to eat is bugs, it’s time for me to check out.
Utter nonsense, bugs even for humans are a far better and healthier source of protein then the garbage processed red meat that most people eat! @@y00t00b3r
Give them back the egg shells, lobster and shrimp shells, absolutely everything of scraps. Let the chicken themselves sort out what they want to eat.
Some towns way back in the day would allow pigs to roam free one day a week to clean out everyone's trash of organic material. Kind of a shame to see so much organic waste ending up in a landfill instead of getting cycled back into the carbon cycle.
There are plenty of things that chickens will eat that will kill them.
Up to you though.
To be fair I once chucked out some old-ish spagbol with a little bit of mold on it and lo and behold there was a dead chicken the next day.. I didn’t say anything to the ol lady, just told her the chook must have been getting old lol soo not sure it should be absolutely anything. Could have been a coincidence 🤷♂️
after only one day and the only one, she musta been already on the way out@@feelincrispy7053
Best eggs I've had were from chickens raised on compost piles. They chose whatever food scraps they wanted, but also spent most of the day picking bugs out. When they have a lot of insects in their diet the shells get about 10x harder than store-bought eggs and the yolks look way more orange. The orange color comes from the carotenoids - bonus antioxidants. The yolks also feel way creamier.
I’m experiencing the same thing. We are swimming in eggs with less chicken feed. My mom was asking what is different. I have baskets of eggs too! I have a chicken bucket by the sink and my friends bring scraps. Happy girls.
In UK it is ILLEGAL to feed your hens kitchen scraps even if your household is vegan. Really.
@@cliveb9771 that's pathetic, but I believe you. Here and I thought the US of A was nigh on lost!😢
@@cliveb9771 Here's the odd thing though, if you peel your vegetables outside, you can feed them to your hens/pigs, but you can't feed your peelings to them if you do it in the kitchen. That being said our hens and pigs used to get kitchen waste anyway, it's an almost impossible law to police in domestic settings.
@@cliveb9771who's checking...?
Just saying.
In Europe eggs that are farmed for sale must come from hens that have been inoculated for Salmonella, and that have been kept segregated from wild birds to avoid avian flu (generally using large overhead nets for "freeranging" chickens). This means that eggs sold in supermarkets are not bleached, and will keep for months if you store them in the fridge. I assume that the matter of them getting fed human food scraps is to avoid transmission of other potential diseases from partly eaten food, stuff like epathitis and similar. But I bet that these restrictions only apply for eggs that are for sale. Kitchen scraps that are a byproduct of cooking and never reached someone's mouth should be perfectly safe.
We moved ours to better feed, and the eggs increased. They always get people food scraps, and all of the chicken food they want, but the high protein feed still made a difference. I find that table scraps make more quality difference than quantity difference.
Not a bad problem to have, you're just in time for egg nog season!
Get with a brewer (all grain) and get some of the grains after a batch has been brewed. Feed that to your chickens and enjoy the harvest. A woman down the street from me used to take the spent grain when I was brewing. Chickens would go completely APE when they ate it. Produced more, and larger, eggs for those days. I've put brewing on 'pause' for now. Once I get into a place of my own I'll look at doing it again. Maybe I'll luck out and another neighbor will also have chickens so that I can get truely fresh eggs to eat.
Do an experiment pick 6 as equally matched health wise hens feed 2 nothing but feed, 2 nothing but table scraps, and 2 a mixture. That would be an interesting video.
Science!
We had an issue with Tractor Supply feed last year when our egg production came to a halt. We changed their feed to a different brand and within a couple of weeks we were back in business. We have relatively young hens producing 8-10/day over the summer but now that winter is here and the days are shorter we're down to 2-3/day. We spoil our chickens with good quality feed and lots of scraps, but egg production seems to be dependent upon the amount of light they get each day not what they eat.
I work with folks on how to set up a backyard chicken pens and feeding habits. After speaking with a few people from around my area, I went and looked at TS feeds. Although I did not send a sample to check for aflatoxin/black mold, I use a simpler storage method rule of thumb. If the relative humidity plus the temperature °f added together is above 100, mold starts through oxidation. This mold threshold occurs when the humidity of the product reaches 19%. Sometimes when bagged feed is trucked when it's warm for days then set inside the air-conditioned TS store, there can be condensation on the inside surface of the bag. It only takes a tiny bit of mold to form to contaminate the whole bag. It doesn't need to be clumpy or black to be present but if you do notice clumps, nix it.
The TS folks say there were no issues found with their feeds but did they test it at the most likey point in the supply chain? They couldn't tell me.
Scanning through the comments, I don't see much support for this theory.
I have a friend that this happened to, he was telling me his egg production was extremely low, almost nonexistent. I asked him if he had heard about the TS feed issue, and he had no clue about it. He looked into it, changed up his feed, and his hens started laying back to normal wintertime levels.
If that's what the food for the chickens does, imagine what the food for the people does.
I toss a single 60watt bulb in the coup and have it turn on around 4am. Eggs keep coming.
We have 20 chickens, and the feed I was giving them since I started raising chickens dropped my production down to 1-2 per day. I switched to a local farm that makes their own feed and in 1 week my production went back to 10-12 per day, as the days were already getting shorter. Never looked back. We are back to normal production of 12-15 a day.
The off-grid home steaders were saying the same thing here in the states about the store bought chicken feed. They said stop using store bought chicken feed and watch your hens produce 5 times more eggs!
They have been saying that they are pretty sure that there additives in it so they lay less.
@@johnscott2849 The grain in the chicken feed is soaked in Glyphosate right before harvest. Glyphosate is a known reproduction disruptor and eggs are part of the reproductive system. This is a relatively new process but farmers have really doubled down on the Roundup in the past 3-4 years.
Back when I kept chickens I barely fed them store bought feed during the green months. Kept them a pile of calcium. They got table scraps and I would run the maggot bucket on offal from the other livestock. They also got to roam the entire property. Side by side my eggs were bigger, the yolks were almost orange and there was a noticeable flavor difference. During the cold months I supplemented with hydro fodder (mostly winter wheat with a bit of sunflower sprouted in). There was still a noticeable difference in the eggs.
I work at a small Co-op and we legally can’t give leftovers away to anyone but staff. When the hot bar closes sometimes I grab about half or more of a 5 gallon bucket of scraps for them! Only issue I have with them is that they are now picky about their scraps since they had the good stuff!
We fed our hens a mixture of leftovers, home-kill beef carcass leftovers (maggot farm) and standard feed. Best eggs I've ever eaten.
I think the difference may be that the hens enjoy diversity in their diet, just like we do. Variance in texture, flavour and smell. They like extra snacks rather than the big-food-pile-once-a-day thing. They like their food to be found in multiple places around their run. All of this probably promotes extra egg-laying because it gives the impression of plenty of food to go around.
These things come from the jungle. Give them a really diverse jungle diet.
That was great feedback and also makes sense through the evolutionary lens.
Cheers
I do not think birds have taste buds.....thats what I have been told....
Scent receptors provide a lot of information on how things taste for humans anyways. Maybe birds don't need taste receptors.@@mark6205
"You want some farm fresh eggs?"
"Maybe, how are they?"
"They're pretty good."
When I was a child I wanted to plant a few trees on our land. Dad agreed and sourced a few from the nursery. One was an oak. I wanted two oaks. I saw no reason why not to nab a sapling from the forest. We planted those oaks about 50 feet apart, all other things being equal. The nursery oak did fine. Slow growing as you would expect. The one I got from the treeline shot up straight and proud, and branched into a majestic shade tree beautifully proportioned over a decade and a half. In just 5 years the difference was glaring. I did not know oaks could grow that fast.
Interesting, but how does this relate to the original topic re chicken feed & chicken egg production?
@@__WJK__ The question was, "What's going on?" It's not irrelevant. The answer is we are hamstringing everything and calling it better. Just because more calories are coming out of the ground does not mean we are flourishing. They want us to eat soybeans and insects because supposedly that's living in equilibrium with nature. There's a reason my body loves meat and sugar.
In this similar situation, the trees play the role of store bought vs home harvested eggs. Hope that helps.@@__WJK__
30 years ago I used to raise my own chickens. Rock x Cornish for meat and Rhode Island reds for eggs. The Roadies were fed blue seal layer mash and we had very good luck with them, never had any weird shells or anything strange about them we ate them for years . The strange thing with Sears would mail you the chicks wish you had to put in an incubator for a few weeks. Addition of the mash they were allowed to roam around the yard and eat anything they wanted mostly bugs. Got about one egg per chicken per day.
Grey seal mash is also good, at a pinch whale will suffice...😮
People were noticing this issue last year here in the States. I remember seeing one post about a guy hydrating new feed and some old feed he had lying around. New stuff wasn't expanding and hydrating. Some were concluding they were filling the feed with some sort of filler that the chickens were just crapping out. Good chance they had a supply shortage and need to make up the lost mass.
YES! Feed suppliers are either cutting major corners (which is similar to what we see with pet food) and/or someone's trying to totally sabotage people trying to homestead/live sustainably off their own land.
The ISS needs a chicken coop
The jolly rancher, sweet, sticky and hard 😂
My mate had the same experience here in the UK earlier this year. We came to the same conclusion - Feed NFG.
Fellow farmer and farm rescue here. Ferment your feed, especially the store stuff. They'll eat less and be more hydrated. Really helps with ducks and vitamin b.
Can you explain this a little further? I’m gona look it up too.
@@longsleevethong1457 mix feed with water in a bucket, let it get bubbly, ready after three days. Stinks but my birds love it
Something changed in the big name feed a few years ago; my ducks just stopped laying. I tried a couple different feeds from smaller brands and found one that got them laying again.
Yup, had the same problem with feed from town. I don't know why but I have my suspicions
We had a farm for a few years in Southwestern Onterrible, near Owen Sound. Until that is, the RBC loved our farm so much they took it away from us. Anyhoo, we had about 30 hens who had free run of the barnyard spring till fall, and avwhole corner of the barn in the winter. When we fed them straight grain, plus all our table scraps and garden waste, the egfs were huge, beautiful, golden yolks... I mean heaven. When we bought feed from a Purina mill as I remember, the shells were thin and the eggs tasted storebought. The real trick was to give the hens chickengrits - twofold purpose, grinding food in the gizzard and supplying extra calcium. A bag in the back of the pickup was also good on ice :)
I have had luck with the banks, basically, pay off the mortgage monthly and they usually leave you alone. Bay Streeters are not looking for hobbies
>the RBC loved our farm so much they took it away from us
I'd hear more if ya wanna tell more. Sounds awful.
@@MetalAsFork thanks for your interest. Nothing really special. My family immigrated to Canaderp in the early '80s, and bought a house 3 years later. Itself a feat, I mean just try doing that today. Anyhoo, they decided that they were going to have a farm, like their grandparents in the old country. So they sold their house, mortgaged the farm property so that they could use equity from the house to get the farm going. Got into a few shitty lines of farming and loat most of that cash. At 18% interest to the RBC, the payments on the farm got ahead of them. Their day jobs didn't cover the shortfall, and the RBC didn't want to negotiate (despite the fact that they were mortgaging for 9% by then). So it all went tits up, and they foreclosed. As I say, a story like thousands of others in the early '90s. Needless to say, I won't do any business with those RBC c***s.
We have only 21 chickens and 5 ducks. We are up to our navels in eggs, in the late fall. I credit/blame it on the dried soldier fly larvae we feed them with good commercial feed and vegetable scraps.
my orpington hens one of them at least layed her first egg today and i found it and put it in the fridge, gonna eat it later, i'm so excited.
They lay some monsters. Next might be a double yolker, poor hen.
It's a communicative vibration psyching the chicks cause you've been holding out and they are digging on your groove, getting hot and laying for ya - eh!
All protein is not digestible by all animals. Back in the nineteen hundreds ,my father was raising feeder pigs and, a crafty feed salesmen sold him some revolutionary new pelletized pig feed for an amazingly cheap price. When asked about the protein content the salesman assured him that it had been scientifically tested and was guaranteed to have plenty of protein for the young swine. After a few days on their new ration Pop took a shovelful of the critters leavings and scooped it into a bucket. He then ran the garden hose into the bucket until he spied something very interesting, it was all that protein the salesman had talked about. It was chicken feathers. Technically protein but indigestible to hogs. I had a similar experience during the pandemic pause. The big box store layer feed was being mixed with a new formula and the girls quit laying. After a couple weeks of this I surmised that a crafty feed salesman was at it again. I bought a bag of 22% protein meat bird food and used it to supplement the 16% layer crumbles. Within a week we had more eggs than we could eat. Two different spices, two different salesmen, forty years between the two story’s but the same old scam. I suppose the moral of the story is either “follow the money” or “there is nothing new under the sun”.
AvE, like a flash it occurred to me that you haven't made a video in months. I feared some tragedy had befallen you! I logged on and checked, and sure as shit this damn RUclips unsubscribed me from your channel! I'd heard of that happening, but it was a first for me. Glad to see you're still living the life!
Thats quite the variety of eggs there!
Enjoy the harvest. What you can't sell, boil and refrigerate after cooling...reasonable amounts though!
I wouldn't be surprised that the feed isn't up to par...probably got more calcium in it so the shells of the Battery Farmed eggs are tougher for mass handling.. As the pinned comment says, "Real Protein begets Real Protein"...like the Fuel Economy Game...You can't win, you will never draw even, you will always lose...something! All the best Mountain Rancher, to you and all with you. Cheers!
In the winter my chickens don't find as many bugs or weeds to eat and rely a lot on bag feed, but summers (Florida) their yolks are amber to golden color, they produce MUCH more and even the shells are harder and the eggs are larger. The bag stuff is avail to them year round, but they simply don't eat much in the summer.
Yup, had the same problem. Changed feed supplier and got more eggs. Never used Purina or any other brands. Just farm store ground feeds. Also let them roam and give them the kitchen scraps. They love pumpkin , squash and anything red like tomatoes or strawberries
You need some French Marans, huge chocolate coloured eggs. We have limousin greys, old local breed, huge yolks, bright rich colour, beautiful, taste like butter! Let them destroy the veg patch at the end of the season, rest their usual ground and next year's veg will be well nourished. Bugs, lizards, snakes (if you have the coq for it!) they love meat, anything. Too much veg gives them the shits, plenty of space, they know whats good and thrive on finding it themselves. Mine especially adore the log pile/splitting area, lots of treats to be had.
Edited for general crommulance.
north of you , in quesnel..... i have noticed the same thing ..... less feed , more scraps = more and bigger eggs
you the man uncle Bumble
My grandparents and some aunts / uncles, back in the old country (Greece), kept chickens in their yards. They would feed them table scraps and left overs. When I was a wee lad of 10 years I freaked out when my grandmother tossed a roasted chicken carcas into the coup. The chickens just devoured it. The would eat anything. I had a pet crab that I brought home from the beach one day, and I thought it would like to play with the chickens ... but it was a horror show man. Burned into my genetic memory so much so that my kids will remember it.
Great eggs though. The best eggs I have ever eaten. Definitely a different flavour to North American eggs. They were just soooooo good.
Omfg that poor crab. And you! 🤣
Don't think I've ever actually laid eyes on a chicken & yet the visuals hit me instantly. 🤣
Dear God!! That's hilarious!!
🦀🐓 😆😂🤣
Its the Round ⬆
Thought we got a candid of ya at first.
We switched from a large name feed to a feed thats produced at a local feed mill. We do get more eggs and the birds eat less feed.
I'm on the same quest to create the perfect egg. I'm playing with black copper marans, Blue copper marans, blue splash cochins, white leghorns, RIR, Barred Plymoth Rock, and Amaruacana.
I'm also drowning in eggs. We feed our 3 dozen chickens high quality feed that is locally grown, none of this national super farmed grain that is soaked in Roundup.
I believe why so many people are having egg problems is because the grain is soaked in Roundup right before harvest. Farmers have used Roundup for decades, but more recently, they have started the practice of using Roundup to force ripen the grains. They spray it a few days before harvest. What it does is dries out the grains and in the plant's final dieing action, it forces all it's energy into the seeds.
The major problem with this is the Roundup never gets washed off the grain. That grain later gets feed to livestock and chickens where it then contaminates the chicken's reproductive system causing a rather steep decrees in egg production.
The feed label won't reflect the added Glyphosate content in the feed, the feed mill (as far as they know) hasn't changed any ingredient.
If you are having egg problems not related to simple molting, look at where you get your chicken feed, investigate where they get the grains that they use to mix the feed, then ask if they use Roundup (Glyphosate) to cure the grains before harvest. This will likely be the issue.
Just a clarification, the Gregorian calendar is what we use, and the Gregorian date is just today’s date.
The code on the box is likely to be the Julian date. The actual Julian date is the number of days since the Julian calendar was introduced in 45 BCE by Julius Caesar.
But more commonly in manufacturing the term “Julian Date” refers to what day number it is In the year.
In the food plant I work we use the best before based on the date at the start of a product run and will use that date for the whole run even if it goes over multiple days. We will print the Julian date and time on the bottle for traceability of the actual day it was made.
E.g. today 30th November is 2470278 Julian, or in the simpler usage day of the year 334. I’ve also seen the year included 23334.
Imagine dialing back on all store bought feed , ehh chickens on chalk lines tho .
I don't have any chickens now. I have a buddy that grinds his own feed and when the rumor was going around that the leading chicken feed producer changed the formulation to cut down on egg production he saw no drop in production.
ive heard people complaining this year in particular its been bad or less productive anecdotally
Store bought chicken feed is less caloric per volume and contains a lot of material that chickens cannot digest as well as oils that speed up their digestion. The eggs are one difference, but seeing the difference in the chicken poop is even bigger.
Layer pellets n the states have been associated reduced egg production for two years now.
Considering OSB was $40 a sheet when I built my coop, I'm so far in the hole I'm more miner than poor, poor farmer. That said, telling the ladies and their stud that I love them and hope the sleep well every night makes their eggs taste better.
I have a conspiracy on this, regular feed is laced with something so as you need to buy their special "laying" feed to produce eggs.
"There's a date on the side of the carton"
Sometimes there's a date on the side of the egg!
I mean how many eggs would you be laying if your breakfast lunch and dinner was the same exact thing that came in a bag from halfway across the world?
Happiness? Food tastes good, gals in good mood, pop pop pop egg-delight!
Old man Cook down the road sticks some chopped apples and lettuce in his feed. He's been raising chickens for I think about 150 years. Best eggs I've ever had.
Our girls are on pasture, cracked corn, kitchen scraps and 3 cups of pellets. Egg production is spot on even my old hens are keeping up and they're 4 years old.
a LOT of homesteaders have been noticing this for the last year. if you buy the cheapest feed from tractor supply the chickens fully stop laying and the people who add water and ferment the feed have noticed it doesn't ferment properly anymore.
We've definitely had the same experience. Our chickens are fed with extra stuff from the garden, have scraps, occasionally a locally made feed that's primarily a grain mix, and every spring after harvest a super sack of the clean out from the local co-op. The mixed grains and whatnot that fall through the elevators
the 'okayish' feed I get in Australia, I get 6 eggs a week from each chicken, unlimited feed (self feeders). I give 1 small handfull of sunflower seeds per 3 chickens as a daily treat. If I give them more sunflower or any other treats they don't eat enough of the layer pellets and stop laying as much.
Pellets are 100% better than mixed grain because the only eat the yummy bits of the mix and not what they need. Pellets force them to eat a balanced diet.
I wanna somehow get our chickens to lay eggs with GPs location tags in them so I can track where they're laying. Being free range with 600m2 of gardens to roam around in, they're hiding them really good.
A finely tuned Fit Bit, with some open source software would discern the difference between a raptor step and a "standing ovation", and coyld subsequently communicate GPS to an access point of your choosing. But if you're not so tech savvy, maybe the iYolk is what your brood needs.
Certainly perked up my almonds
Absolutely the universal experience. Feed from a bag is just above feeding them dirt. Cheap and plentiful, but barely food. Plus you have to worry about things like a year or two ago, whenever it was, that everyone that used those feeds suddenly stopped getting eggs. Ours stopped laying entirely for months. We stopped giving them bag feed and gave them scraps and foraged greens and whatnot and they started laying again.
Since my chickens started eating our spilled rabbit food, kitchen scraps, and whatever is in the compost bin they've kept laying even though its supposed to be thier off season for laying. They practically reject the high quality bag feed altogether.
This has been reported on homesteading channels on RUclips with the store bought bagged chook feed,the manufacturers are doing something to the feed that’s slowing chickens down on laying,even stopping them laying completely !
Feed suppliers are either cutting major corners (which is similar to what we see with pet food) and/or someone's trying to sabotage people trying to homestead/live sustainably off their own land.
Hi from the uk
That store bought feed is highly processed rubbish just like the dog or cat food in the supermarket, animals need quality food to flourish.
Back in the 70s people made a living out of collecting waste food from restaurants and takeaways in the mid to late 80s that stopped all waste food had to be scrapped it was deemed to be unfit for animal consumption, a bad day for farming
Dem lil raptors are OMNIVORES!
And vicious killers to boot.. watch em gobble down baby mice like jelly beans!
Let her EAT
Top tip : the fresher the egg is the harder it is to peel after you boil it. If you get one that peels beautiful, then it's been around for a while.
I find the opposite to be true.
@@OnGuard3S - Real world experiance shows older eggs will peel better after boiling, though I wouldn't be the least surprised if breed "maybe" plays a part in certain (fresh) eggs being easier to peel (after boiling) than others(?) It was, and still is, common in practice our family to buy 6 dozen eggs 2-3 weeks before the Easter holiday, so all the Easter Eggs peel super-easy during our family's Easter brunch and dinner.
Yup, same thing happened with our last flock that were fed various large brand feeds. Since then we switched to a smaller/local no corn/no soy feed (plus all the kitchen/garden/yard scraps as usual) and we're back to getting plenty of healthy eggs. I'd expect similar results for anyone eating major brands of peoplechow. They want us unhealthy and/or dead.
For sure & let us make no mistake "sick care" (vs preventitive care) is a disturbing multi-trillion dollar industry.
We feed our layer ducks and meat turkeys a mix of some commercial feed, fermented grains from grain screenings out of a local grain elevator, garden scraps, table/kitchen scraps, buckets of apples when the local yard trees start dropping them and let them free range on pasture. Now they are also getting milled grain from field spills that we ran though our feed mill and are doing better than they ever did on commercial layer feed and the same for my sister in law's laying hens. We definitely can tell the difference the less commercial feed they get.
Look at the size of them grapes!
I also run an Old Folks home for chickens.
My guess is that it's the vegetables. My father grew up on a farm and he said they fed the chickens alfalfa in the winter and that helped with egg production.
Best stuff you can buy? The best stuff is usually the stuff you can't buy. When we had chickens they got kitchen scraps and whole grain And the old shells after we used the egg inside, you've gotta give them some form of grit or you'll get soft shelled eggs.
it's not gonna be something like seed oil or soy, but vitamins, minerals, and amino acid ratios. minerals in particular are very sensitive to high quality sources and make your absorption of all other nutrients more efficient and adds a great deal of resistance to the immune system which means more energy can be spent on processes like egg foramation
I’d guess it’s just digestibility. The dry hard pellets take more to break down in the gut than fresh greens and scraps, so the birds are able to derive more nutrients from the fresh food than the commercial pellets.
And this is chicken feed... Now think of what they're doing to us...
People noticed a big drop in egg production per hen about 3 years or so. I do not have chickens so just going off of what I saw others mention. Switching to goat feed apparently caused some chickens to double their egg production. Something in the feed changed. Maybe manufacturers switching to lower quality ingredients because of supply change issues? The theory that made the most sense I read was too little protein in the altered mixes.
It's not possible for chickens to double their egg production. They already lay 300 eggs a year. They can't start producing an egg every 14 hours. It's just not possible.
@littlejackalo5326 I think you are misunderstanding the post. The chickens saw a big drop in egg production prior to switching the feed. As in their production prior to the doubling was significantly lower than it should have been. It was not a doubling of the normal amount.
Been feeding mine deer organs since hunting season started. I've gotta say I'm surprise at how much they love it.
Makes a man think, what are they putting into them and us.
I've had all kinda of birds, turkeys,ducks and chickens, because of the great number of predators they were completely fenced in. Top, bottom all around. They would get store feed as well as any veg we could get our hands on. The church up the road had an apple tree and we would get the windfall off the ground, even the lawn cuttings(the ducks loved those) even raised a batch of worms for them. they were all one egg a day. So much better/ yummy than store bought.
Currently I have quail. The eggs are small but consistent. I get a dozen every day. I'm thinking about pickling sum for Christmas gifts.
Yes or even better... make some homemade eggnog!!
Ah, quail eggs, I used to drink a dozen or more every morning when we kept quails. Now we keep chickens only, about 15 of them for the family. I think I'll get some quail again. I heard somewhere that quail eggs are a healthier choice when comparing eggs. However, that claim could be a bunch of BS.
I've seen a huge increase in egg production since I've gave the birds more scraps also..chicken feed has gone way up in price too. We get a lot of eggs! Way too many I basically give em away, most ppl insist on paying me for them anyway. I thank God
Currently raising 3 Killer B's at our house nowhere near the Prairie.
Betty,a Buff Brahma and Bea&Belle, New Hampshire Reds.
Fed 'em people grade food as close to organic and "the source" as possible. This includes grass and worms which I gladly help them look for. They started egging at approximately 5 months,when the convention internet wise-dumb said 8.
Yes,it's the feed. Commercial scratch is laced with synthetic vitamins and minerals-even the Fancy Feasting Brand.
Nothing comes close to a True Free Range method for producing quality eggs which will be gooder for ya!
I have had chooks before, they can only lay so many eggs per day no matter what they are feed, I have used very cheep pellet feed and with others natural scrap feed which included free range style grasses, flowers, and even spiders and cocroches, I never noted any real difference in the amount they lay, although the quality of the egg was noted.
Nestlé produced chicken feed that restricted egg production. I believe the brand was Purina. They claim RNA sequenced feed doesn’t reduce egg production. How about they leave the feed TF alone.
I dont know what is in chicken feed but judging by the way the government is hurting farmers, I'm guessing it is designed to give lower yield.
Got 12 young Cream Legbar, they’ve bested our garden fence this year….so they’re eaten pretty well. All olive an light blue. Lots of double yolks. 🤷🏼♂️
We need a couple black Marans to get our rainbow going.
Also want to ad a couple Indian Runners this spring.
Love your farming content.
😊👍
Our more experienced and neighbor mentioned something about weird egg feed this summer, he’s using Walmart pellets with scratch grain as well. Said he threw in Goat feed an saw an increase in production.
Said something about the “layer feed being off” 🤷🏼♂️
Here the States, a couple of years ago, egg producers were noticing the same issue. It was funny how when a fuss was raised, the trend changed, all of a sudden. Wonder if someone’s trying to unload that grain on you folks?
I think water content is big. Real food digests quicker also. That pellet requires a ton of water and breaks down slower.
Raising chickens for twenty years……this year for the first time ever we are getting 2 to 4 eggs per day. In the past with the same amount of chickens (25 - 30) we would see about 10 - 12 eggs per day. We use store bought layer pellets.
I buy bags of feed and scratch from a local granary, quality feed from local farmers. Also all the table scraps a wife and toddler produce
As a Dutchman, who now gets his fresh eggs from a farm some 10 kilometers away; farmer feeds his chickens on rejects from the greenhouse farmer next door, and on whatever other farmers would throw away (grains, tomatoes, corn, the works)
The guy next door to our chicken farmer grows (some extremely spicy) Peppers and Avocados, and whenever the little feathered bastards get Avocados mixed with Peppers, they lay eggs like the Devil were egging (hurr hurr) them on, as it were.
Last week I got a box of eggs the feathered buggers produced while being fed Carolina Reapers; some of the best eggs I've ever had.
Only during winter they get (some) storebought chicken feed, and it shows.
WEF food reduction program. You eat z bugs, not for the Greenhouse gas producing Chickens. 🐓💨
My guess, the protein in worms and bugs is better than feed. Which use preservatives
My Mother's aunt, many many years ago cooked the grain that she gave to her chickens and in turn the chickens we're healthier and grew faster than anyone else's according to my Mother.
Yes, same experience. 2 year old hens producing 0 eggs a day. I get maybe 2 eggs a week out of 4 hens. 2 years old should still be producing at 80% capacity.
"Chickens are evil creatures," to quote the former owner of my ranch. But eggs are delicious and healthy food. When I finally get chickens, it'll be a complicated relationship.
Thanks for posting - thumbs up as always.
Nature is absolutely rutheless on so many levels.
chickens are chickens. they don't have a concept of good or evil. they have one diety, the flock. the flock above all. roosters don't attack people because they're evil. roosters attack people because stay the fuck away from the flock. fight or flight - the problem with flight is that they're jungle animals. they don't fly because they evolved to jump and hide between dense undergrowth. a farm doesn't have undergrowth to hide the flock in, hence fight.
Not a clue about the feed, all I know is that my birds stopped eating it when they found out that bugs live in the leaves. I'd throw them a handful when I let them out in the morning as an easy snack, they'd only eat half, so I stopped, and they didn't seem to notice. Egg production was pretty much unchanged.
I had 50 chickens at one point and it didn't matter what I fed them, I still had so many eggs. We couldn't give them away fast enough
Like elderly humans really just revert back into horny teenagers, maybe chickens are having a second wind there
yes, have experienced the same..... people food = better eggs... approach the restaurant, give them free eggs for free people food scraps = free chicken feed
It's the light. Turn it off to tune down your flock for the winter. Let them rest for a while.