Re: [CHICKENS-101] chicken nutrition

People raised chickens just fine before there was such a thing as commercial feed. Commercial feeds were developed to provide a scientifically established degree of nutrition at an economical price for chickens raised totally indoors on farms with hundreds of birds. If your birds can free range on land with lots of different kinds of grass, weeds and bugs they will probably do just fine. I would supplement their diet with some scratch grains or maybe some table scraps. If the chickens can't free range, you might have a hard time coming up with a ration for them that provides all the nutrients they need, but people have done this. It might actually be more expensive than feeding them commercial feed.

 

Kathy

 

In a message dated 8/2/2010 9:50:45 A.M. Central Daylight Time, junutas@att.net writes:

I just have a million questions, but I'll limit myself here.

Understand my benchmark is cats, because I'm most experienced with them.

Last year, my cat had kittens. I decided to keep the litter for a few 
reasons, the biggest is that my mousers had all passed on.  They were 
old enough to vote, it was time, but I had vacancies. I fed the 
kittens what I fed their mom, not kitten food. The result I saw was 
steady growth, no spurts, and now the "kittens" are bigger than their 
mom. I feed as close to a natural diet as I can, and these were the 
results.

My question to you is can you do this with chickens? My personal 
theory (you can tell me I'm fulla beans) is that we all, human and 
animal, should eat a diet closest to what we had in the wild. So 
chicks would get what the adults ate, but, being younger, they'd 
likely be eating more of it.

Can someone speak to this?

Debbie

Here's my grandfather around 1920 with some chick. I don't have any yet.



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