Feeding chickens the old-fashioned way.

I've rediscovered an old-fashioned poultry feeding method that saves money and is better for the birds. It's the old "mash and grain" method.

While you can feed birds a single commercial chicken feed, it will be easier on your pocketbook and better for the birds if you use a two-feed system. This is based on two observations:

1. Chickens are pretty good at self-feeding, which means that if you give them a high-protein feed and a high-carbohydrate feed, they will do a good job balancing the two to meet their day-to-day needs.

2. It's often much cheaper to buy grain from local producers than from feed companies.

Balanced protein

If you've been feeding your hens commercial rations with 15% or 16% protein, they have a reasonably balanced laying diet. Grain has much less protein than this, so any attempt to reduce your birds' commercial feed usage by adding grain will tend to reduce their protein intake--and birds need plenty of protein for egg production.

The hen can adjust in one of two ways: eat the same amount of the reduced-protein diet and lay fewer eggs, or eat more as a way of keeping the protein intake up, while getting fat from the unwanted calories.

Thus, a liberal use of grain needs to be balanced by the use of a higher-protein commercial feed. Essentially, the birds will eat grain for carbohydrates and commercial feed for protein. The higher the protein level, the less the birds need to eat to get their protein. So they'll eat less commercial feed and more grain with every jump in protein level.

Old-time poultrymen typically used a 22% laying ration, and expected the birds to eat about half grain and half "mash." (Commercial poultrymen tended to call all prepared feeds "mash," even when it was pellets or crumbles. Given a choice, you should use pellets. If nothing else, pellets that spill on the floor can be seen and eaten by the birds. Mash is a fine, floury powder which vanishes forever if dropped. Crumbles are in-between.)

My local feed store doesn't have a 22% ration, so I use their 20% "breeder pellets." I got an amazing change in feeding pattern by switching from 16% pellets to 20% pellets. Grain consumption skyrocketed and commercial feed consumption plummeted. Before, the hens were eating more pellets than grain. Now, they eat considerably more grain than pellets.

Use whole grains

A prejudice against feeding chickens whole grains has drifted into the literature. I can't find a reason for it. I've seen both old and new research that shows that chickens have no trouble digesting whole grains completely. Whole grains are cheaper than processed grains and last longer in storage. When whole grains get lost in the dirt, they sprout instead of rotting.

Methods of feeding

Most literature recommends that you create your grain mixture by mixing at least two grains together, and preferably three. The birds like variety and will eat more grain this way. I don't doubt that this is true (it's been demonstrated time and again), but I only get a really good deal on oats, and mixing sacks of grain together is painful. I've been doing fine on oats alone.

As for the amount to feed, you can probably find guidelines on the feedsack label of the commercial feed. High-protein feeds are intended for use with grain, and the label will recommend how much grain to use. Typically, you make the commercial feed available all the time in troughs or tube feeders, and take your choice of feeding grain once a day, twice a day, or making it available all the time. (Feeding studies have demonstrated that feeding once, twice, or continuously hardly matters. But the less often you feed, the more careful you have to be to feed in such a way that all the birds can eat at the same time.)

Ways to feed grain

You can feed grain in the litter in the chicken house, you can scatter it outside, or you can feed it in troughs or tube feeders. I've tried all of these. Whatever you do, don't mix commercial feed with the grain. The birds will throw whichever one they don't want at the moment onto the floor.

Feeding the grain in the litter helps keep the litter fluffed up and dry, and is probably a necessity if you use straw. Hunting for grain gives the birds something to do besides pick at each other. Many old-time poultrymen recommended deeper litter for older hens, on the grounds that this made them work harder at finding their grain, and the exercise reduced their tendency to fat.

If you feed grain in the litter, you should pick up a handful of litter once in a while and examine it for grain. I once overfed grain to some broilers, and ended up with litter that was about 50% oats!

Feeding grain outdoors attracts wild birds if you overfeed even a little bit, but overfeeding is easier to detect than it is indoors. Some old-time poultrymen used tractor-pulled spreaders to dispense grain to their flocks.

Feeding from troughs or tube feeders works perfectly well, though I'm finding that oats tend to spill over the lip of my larger tube feeders. Filling them only half-way full prevents this. (Get tube feeders with deep pans.)

One way to monitor feed usage is to have two identical feeders, one for grain and one for commercial feed. Fill them both at the same time, and keep an eye on which one runs out the fastest.

Example of savings

I get 50-pound sacks of whole oats from a local farm for $4.75. A 50-pound sack of breeder pellets costs $9.35. The birds are eating about half pellets, half oats. Such a mix is equivalent to $7.05 per 50-pound sack, and has about 16% protein.

Compare this to 16% layer pellets for $8.50. I save $1.45 with every fifty pounds of feed.

Other advantages

The birds will adjust their feeding according to conditions. If it's cold, they'll eat more grain for its heating value. If it's hot, they'll back off on the grain and eat the pellets instead.

Oregon State College once built a house for caged layers that had no walls at all--just a roof--to see if such a completely open house would work as well in Oregon as it did in California.

It worked better than one would expect in the winter. One group of birds had access to mash only, the other had mash and whole oats. When the temperature dropped to 18 [degrees] F, the rate of lay plummeted, but the oat-fed group produced more and returned to normal more quickly than the mashonly group once the temperature went above freezing.

In addition to helping the hens adjust to weather changes, the dual-feed system lets them accommodate changes in production. A hen that's laying an egg every day needs more protein than a hen who's taking a rest. Ordinary 15% or 16% feeds probably don't have enough protein for extremely productive hens, but this isn't a problem when the hens have access to 20% or 22% feeds.

What about broilers?

The University of Saskatchewan recently did a study in which broiler chicks were fed a mixture of pellets and whole wheat. The wheat started at 5% of the diet at one day of age, and was ramped to 30% by seven weeks. Growth rate, feed conversion, and mortality were unaffected. No grit was given. These trials used an ordinary broiler feed plus whole wheat; the protein level of the feed was not increased.

Thus, it seems that one can add cheap local grains to the feed of a broiler flock without fear, provided that the amount is ramped up slowly over a period of weeks.