coyote creek

I'm about to run out of chicken feed and have been researching the best sources near Austin. Our first round of feed came from Jeremiah Cunningham's place in Elgin. His feed is absolutely the best, milled locally, with pro-biotics, totally organic. But you can only buy it at Buck Moore in town! Arghhh! Check out the Coyote Creek Farm website here. The second round of feed came from Tractor Supply and was that ACCO paymore crap. I don't want to feed them that anymore, but it is convenient, cheap, and easy to come by.

SOOOO--I'm thinking about experimenting with making my own feed, and here is what a super-smart fella has to say about that:
http://www.backyardpoultrymag.com/issues/1/1-4/Harvey_Ussery.html

Here are two other nice little tips on making your own layer ration (laying poultry feed):

5) MAKE FEED WITH WILD BIRD SEED AND SCRATCH GRAINS
From http://www.upc-online.org/home.html
Providing a Good Home for Chickens

foraging areas should be free of applied chemicals and their food must be fresh. Store their food in clean, dry, rodent-proof metal containers. Moldy food poisons chickens and should never be fed to them. Premixed nutritionally-balanced food is available in bulk (e.g. 50 lbs), or you can make your own by mixing together chicken scratch (whole wheat & cracked corn sold in bulk at feed stores) and a good selection of wild bird food. (Premixed poultry rations often contain antibiotics and typically include rendered dead and diseased birds, offal and other slaughterhouse refuse.) Mix roughly: 65% grains including barley, corn, milo (sorghum), millet, oats, wheat, brown rice; 10% alfalfa meal or ground hay; 16-20% sunflower or oil seeds, dried peas, cooked soybeans or soybean meal--don't feed chickens raw soybeans, which have toxins [See the Protein Section for a simple way to prepare soybeans; however, some farmers have reported feeding their chickens raw soybeans for years!]; 7% hydrated lime for extra calcium for eggshell formation; 1% trace mineral salt. Chickens have gizzards instead of teeth to grind food. To grind, gizzards employ grit--pebbles and other hard indigestible objects chickens pick up while foraging. An indoor chicken should always have some grit available. Chickens love fresh treats. (Contrary to what you may have heard, chickens do not like garbage.) Offer them cooked spaghetti with tomato sauce, steamed brown rice, grapes, fresh greens, chopped cooked potatoes, whole grain bread, raw tomatoes, and their own eggs hard-boiled including the shells (eggshells have calcium and other minerals for chickens).

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6) MAKE FEED USING RABBIT PELLETS
From http://brill.acomp.usf.edu/~jvanhorn/care.html
FEED THEM WELL!
My chickens eat a basic diet of scratch grains and rabbit pellets. I feed rabbit pellets because lay ration contains dead ground up chickens and often lots of weird chemicals and stuff they don't need. In addition, my chickens get bread, all sorts of veggies and fruits, and pasta. Their favorites are leftover corn cobs, apple cores, squishy tomatoes and lettuce. I'm trying to start up a cricket growing enterprise too, because they just love juicy bugs. Don't give them roaches and things that may have been poisoned, though. Chickens that live outdoors pick up little rocks that they store in their gizzards and use as teeth to grind up food. You can buy grit to give to them if you think there are not enough rocks on the ground for them. Oyster shell, which is a good source of calcium, is also a good supplement to give chickens.