Feeding broiler chickens

[Plowboy]

We used to raise chickens years ago when layer mash was$5 hundred and grower was a little extra. The last two years I started raising them again for my kids and because we have a diversified little hobby farm of our own now. Commercial grower feed is about 17-19 dollars for a 50lb bag here. The local feed mill says they won’t get into making grower feed because the extension service told them that you can raise them just fine on layer mash. I built a chicken tractor to put them out next week at 4wks buy still would like to reduce the input to still get a good quality meat bird. I have 26 broilers and 16 pullets so I was wondering what everyone else does to feed out their birds. Also I have 10 turkeys coming next month so any input would be appreciated. Thanks Dennis

[Brad Johnson]

Dennis-
We raise about 450 broilers in pasture pens each summer. Our feed is a crumble, 21%, that we feed straight thru for about 9-10 weeks. Our silver barred cockerals also eat plenty of grass, bugs, ticks, etc. The feed jumped this year from about $13/50 lb to more almost $16/50 lb – bad grain growing season out west last year is hurting us here. The key for us is that we don’t feed free choie; limiting the grain forces the birds to hunt for in the grass and reduces grain costs by about 10%, not to mention you get a tastier bird. Also, we opur the feed right on the grass so they eat to it.
-Brad

[dominiquer60]

I used to be part of raising 1,000 broilers a year. We used a 18% grower for the first 3-4 days, we found that the higher 21% these first few days would cause them to paste over. Then on to the 21% for the first 4 weeks free choice. We try to give them some access to grass weeks 2-4 so that they get a taste for it. If you offer a high quality pasture with red and/or white clover in it they do really well and you could raise them on a lower protein feed if they are good grazers. Also once they are out on pasture I agree with Brad, feed twice a day, we gave them enough so that most of the feed was gone within an hour with just a little to clean up during the day. Our birds were far from lean on this feeding schedule. One other thing, to encourage grazing we would move the birds first thing in the morning to fresh pasture and give them about an hour (while we did other chores) to graze hard, then we would feed them grain, this really made them hungry for the green stuff.

Turkeys can be tough for some, I have a few friends that raise them and their best advice to me is to keep them under lights longer than you would the broilers, they do well with a couple weeks of 90 degrees. They also really do better on the 22-24% turkey and game starter and then the grower, though I have one friend that feeds the same 18% (after turkey starter) to all stock both winged and four legged.

In regards to feeding layer ration to broilers to grow out, the typical 16% layer ration can be enough if you have a good pasture with legumes that they will eat, but the extra calcium in the layer ration has been known to cause growth problems in young birds both layers and broiler, so its use for broilers has been discouraged. I would guess that your mill probably just doesn’t move enough broiler feed to justify even small batches.

Best of luck and if you get some that become weak and start to die off, it could be a vitamin deficiency, our old mill didn’t always do a great job mixing the vit/min pack into the feed, so we would often used generic vit/min powder in the water to solve this problem.

Best of luck

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