The question of what to feed the chickens is one of the top priorities when raising birds. It is not surprising, since it is a proper and balanced diet that helps to maintain the health and improve the vital functions of birds. Feeding chickens must comply with the basic requirements and purpose. With improper care, there is a risk of provoking the appearance of diseases and inhibition in development.
How to feed chickens at home
You can watch one of the specialized videos and read the article below about what home care and nutrition should be after the hen hatched the birds. So, let's look at the question of how to feed chickens and everything about feeding them below.
What can be food for birds
Feeding chickens at home is not particularly difficult even for novice poultry farmers. The thing is that small birds are picky, so food for them can be found in any pet store or made on your own. It is important that the preparation of the diet takes into account the age and purpose of growing the chicken. Often, the menu of each bird includes a starter feed for day old chicks and a growth feed for individuals whose age has already reached 2 months. Feeding hens from the 17th day completely represents the use of developing compound feed. In addition to PC, young animals need fermented milk and grain products.
So, what to feed your monthly chicks?
- Feeding grain is an important component of the nutrition of any breed of chickens. Cereals are included in the diet in the amount of up to 60%. It is important to clean the grains from films, crush them as finely as possible. Wet mash can be made with curdled milk or skim milk in order to increase the nutritional value of the chickens.
- Feed for laying hens should be combined with the use of dairy products (whey, skim milk, cottage cheese, yogurt) that can provide the body with calcium and the required amount of vitamins and minerals. Poultry can only eat fresh and non-sour foods in order to maintain normal intestines. Water can be replaced with small amounts of whey.
- Feeding small feathered greens is necessary every season, therefore, even in the absence of fresh greens, it must be replaced with sprouted cereals, grass flour, nettles, dried hay. Also for chickens it will not be superfluous to prepare a hanging feeder with herbs. Feeding monthly chicks is an important point, you need to monitor it.
- The chicken diet should be enriched with vitamins in the first days. You will need complexes of vitamins E, A, D in order to prevent rickets, lameness, weakening of blood vessels. The main thing is to prevent an overdose, because this or that vitamin in more than necessary quantity can lead to poisoning. For example, D2 is less active (28-30 times) than D3. The diet for chickens must be well built.
A born chicken should be fed often due to physiological characteristics. The first time after birth, newborns are fed 8-9 times a day, and you can start eating food only after 12 hours after birth. Of course, in the first hours of the baby's life, the question arises whether it is necessary to feed the chicken with a particular product. Food for small chicks should include:
- crushed cereals: millet, corn, oats;
- hard boiled egg;
- cottage cheese;
- onions and dill.
In addition to the fact that you need to feed daily chickens often, for several days you will have to devote time to this at night. After 7 days, the birds can be fed with shells, fine river sand, flour, eggshells and charcoal. The feed rate for young chickens is calculated individually, for this there is a special table.
The subtleties of growing and feeding chickens
How to feed and care for your chickens, or how to properly feed your laying hens are important questions. Chickens need to be watered and fed regularly and correctly. There should be free access to feeders and drinking bowls so that the baby can satisfy his needs at any time. Should you feed chickens heavily? To make caring for chickens not particularly difficult, the following recommendations must be followed:
- the feeder should be filled by only a third, so that the feed consumption was not too large;
- feeding from the first day should be carried out tightly and regularly: those chickens that rarely approach the feeders can eat from the owner’s hands, for which a pipette is suitable, in which you can put the crushed egg yolk and milk;
- chicken at any age should be provided with water, which should be changed regularly;
- in order to avoid diseases, chickens are fed a solution of potassium permanganate.
There is a video on how to feed chickens, designed to help all poultry farmers.
How to feed chickens in the early days of life at home 100pcs broken brown - zolotyeruki
keeping and feeding of monthly chicks
Feeding and feeding chickens in the early days of life (broilers and layers)
How to feed the chickens on the first day?
For proper care, one feeding is not enough. It is necessary to take care of the feeders from the first day, constantly cleaning and disinfecting them with a soap solution or formalin solution. In order to prevent rot, you need to carefully get rid of old feed.
How to feed broilers
First feeding your chickens - what will it be? Feed broiler chickens in a special way, so that already at the age of 2-3 months they reach a weight of more than 1.5 kg. The fattening of beef breeds at home is carried out in an intensive and extensive way. The first case involves year-round cultivation without walking, and the second - three-month or four-month with periodic walking. To make small birds in the early days grow as quickly as possible, it is better to compose their diet from developed compound feeds with a large number of proteins and vitamins in the composition.
Feeding small newborn chickens is a whole art. Chicken feed should be abundant and include gravel.
In order for broilers to gain weight more efficiently, a special scheme was developed, following which, you can grow a large chicken in a small amount of time. the normal development of birds is possible only with the right lighting and temperature in the chicken coop. At a younger age, the temperature should not go beyond 28-30 ° C, in the month or more it is recommended to reduce it to 20 ° C. In this case, you must adhere to dim lighting.
It will be elementary simple to prepare food for chickens in a cozy home environment. So, how to feed broiler chickens, depending on their age?
- One-day-old chickens are fed with wheat groats, chopped corn, mashed boiled eggs, millet. If you feed them with oats, boiled rice and buckwheat, barley, wheat, it is important to monitor the elimination of the film and the maximum grinding of the grain. You can give some cottage cheese.
- Three-day-old birds are gradually transferred to chopped greens. You can start adding dandelion, nettle. With a lack of greenery, the mouth of the young is inhibited.
- Five-day-old cockerels and chickens, in addition to everything, are fed with shabby red carrots (the norm per individual is 4-5 g per day) and grass flour (about 2-5 g). A larger amount of product will lead to an overdose due to the high fiber content.
- Ten-day-old chickens are pampered with a greater proportion of grain, porridge. You should also make sure that the chicken is provided with fish, shabby crayons, and a shell. Foods are full of calcium and are essential for bone growth and strengthening. The consumption rate should not exceed 10 g. Growing chicken also needs vegetable protein feeds: meal and meal.
- Twenty-day-old, monthly guinea fowls are fed with boiled and chopped potatoes, which should replace 5 parts of grain crops.
We must not forget that newborn chickens (a month - two lives) must also be watered. You should give the starter feed, and then decide on the further scheme. In this you can be helped by a table or a feeding scheme.
Feeding scheme
How much and how often to give the birds food will reflect the feeding pattern, according to which:
- in the first week of life, chickens need to be fed 8 times;
- in the second - up to 6;
- in the third - 4;
- a month or more - twice.
To accelerate growth, you should try to feed the chickens with chopped cabbage, pumpkin or zucchini. Vegetables are full of vitamins, sulfur and trace elements. Following the advice of experienced farmers, you can saturate the diet with fine gravel (no more than 200 g per hundred heads once every 7 days).
Purchased organic feed for your chicks can be an excellent start for their growth and weight gain in the first days of life. Basically, the recipe for the first starter feed is different in quality and the correct ratio of the necessary components in grams. It is better to choose complete, finished feeds with wheat, corn, fishmeal, meal, salt, limestone and other mineral components.
Farmers are often not satisfied with the price of the finished product, so they switch to independent production. You can buy feed mixture for any of the chicken breeds at poultry farms or in veterinary stores. The best choice for broilers for quick weight gain is Purin or Rich food (to accelerate metabolic processes), which can be given a few days after birth.
Egg chicks: feeding characteristics
Eating egg breeds at home in the early days is not difficult. The first meal should occur immediately after the chicken has dried and the movement begins. The growth in the future depends on how early you can begin to feed young growth. In general, the diet of egg chickens is not much different from feeding young meat. As in the case of broilers, it is important to observe the regimen from the first day of life and to timely fill the layers of the layers with food.
- Daytime birds must be fed with boiled and crushed eggs, treated with semolina to avoid sticking to the limbs of the bird.
- On the second day, the chicks can gradually switch to eating fresh herbs (the same products are suitable as for the meat breed). The use of yeast will not be superfluous, after which the birds are transferred to solid vegetables.
- From the first to the fifth day, the chicks must be fed with a mixture of wheat or corn, cottage cheese and boiled millet.
- Feeding hens from the 5th day at home can be represented by dry and wet handmade mash, and chopped feed, saturated with proteins. The table, according to which many poultry farmers follow, indicates that the diet should have the following composition: up to 10 g of dairy products, 2-3 g of boiled eggs, 3 g of greens, carrots, tops, 0.5 g of ground shells.
- At the age of 10 days, a young chicken should be fed with stale milk, fishmeal, cake, carrots, mineral feed, cereals, boiled rice with milk, low-fat cottage cheese. Flour can be replaced by meat waste, frogs, worms.
- On 20-29 days of life, you need to start giving the young more potatoes - up to 20 g. You need to switch to fermented milk products and give up fresh milk for better assimilation. Cereals are gradually enlarging: the fraction for feeding monthly birds should be 1 cm. The consumption of fishmeal is increased a couple of times in order to prevent rickets and harden the shell.
- At the age of 30 days or more, layers are transferred to table salt (its content may not exceed 0.1 g). Chicks feed on chopped cabbage, beets, pumpkins, green feed. On the 30th day of life, chickens must already be accustomed to greens, the use of which allows you to reduce the intake of purchased vitamin complexes. Two-month-old or three-month-old chickens need to be gradually accustomed to the use of fish oil mixed with grain, as well as wood ash, the amount of which should be 4 g per day.
Conclusion
It's all about feeding chickens that a self-respecting poultry breeder needs to know. The composition of the diet largely depends on the age of the bird. As in the case of broilers, layers need to be fed with sand. Kvochka should not consume fresh milk, so as not to provoke digestive disorders. Standard proper nutrition, starting from day 4, is saturated with mineral supplements, lime feed. For 10 days, in order to feed the birds, you need to give them food every couple of hours, after which the feeding is reduced to 5 times a day. After 60 days of age, birds are transferred to 4 meals a day. It is impossible to give large grains to chickens, whose age has not yet reached a month, because the body cannot digest such heavy food.
It is also forbidden to keep the chicks locked up: they need to be provided with walking and the sun, which can nourish them with vitamins and energy.
Proper nutrition is the key to health and good mass gain. If chickens are not provided with a balanced diet and vitamins from birth, there is a risk of death or the occurrence of squashes and diseases. It is important to remember that meat and egg breeds differ in feeding requirements, therefore they must be taken into account without fail. Now you know what to feed your birds with, and if you do it with porridge or specialized food, it is a purely personal matter.