What to feed the chickens
What to feed laying hens with regard to their digestive system and nutrient requirements?
The dominance of appropriate cereals and fodder guarantees healthy hens
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What to feed the hens? Root vegetables, dried greens are welcome…
Feeding periods of laying hens
What to feed laying hens during the laying period
What to feed laying hens with regard to their digestive system and nutrient requirements?
Chickens, like quails and turkeys, are burrowing birds. The feeding method of this poultry depends on their specific digestive system. Chickens – like all birds – due to the lack of teeth, are unable to process the food they eat. So nature has endowed them with a goiter, which is a diverticulum of the esophagus. It is used to pre-soak the food, which is then transported to the stomach. Their stomach contains two chambers: glandular and muscular. The former secretes the hydrochloric acid necessary for digestion, while the latter grinds the food. The main difference between the digestive system of birds and other animals is the presence of two so-called cecum. What to feed the hens?
The dominance of appropriate cereals and fodder guarantees healthy hens
Knowing the anatomy of breeding birds, we base their feeding on this knowledge. If you have a laying hen farm, make sure that their diet is dominated by cereals, which contain a lot of energy in the form of starch and a small amount of protein. In addition, the advantage of a cereal diet is easy digestibility. We should bear in mind that we would like to diversify the diet of hens with protein, then we must reach for specially prepared industrial feeds. Manufacturers of these feeds enrich them with appropriate amino acids, such as lysine, methionine, leucine, tryptophan and others. Certain species of cereals contain few amino acids, so they may not be enough for our breeding for fully healthy development. In order for certain amino acids to be well absorbed by hens, food rich in them should be properly processed. We mean grinding and crushing, thanks to which these amino acids are well absorbed by the digestive enzymes responsible for digestion.
Also chemical treatment is not without significance. The appropriate energy value of the feed means that the process of incorporating protein into the digestive system of our hens can actually take place. We should bear in mind that some grains, when mixed with feed, are harmful to chickens for some reasons. Rye and barley, for example, make the hens’ digestion more difficult by reacting with important feed components. Hens are then unable to assimilate essential feed ingredients in terms of nutritional properties. It is recommended to feed laying hens with triticale much more often, due to the greater amount of the amino acid lysine than wheat. Triticale also contains significantly less ingredients that hinder the absorption of these valuable substances than rye.
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Cereals, apart from corn and oats, have little fat in their composition. If we would like to get a nice, natural yellow color of the egg yolk from a hen, it is worth enriching their daily diet with a small amount of corn grains. Why not much? First of all, corn is very energetic and contains a lot of fat. For this reason, even with small doses of this grain, we can have problems with obesity in our hens. Fiber and fibers contained in oats have a positive effect on the digestion and metabolism of hens. This type of grain also supplements hens with deficiencies of B vitamins.
Manufacturers of feed for laying hens are also willing to diversify them with wheat bran, which they offer in the form of easily digestible granules. Bran contains a lot of mineral salts. We can also reasonably extend the diet of our hens with post-extraction meal. They are produced from oilseeds. Most often, we give chickens soybean meal, but we should be careful with rapeseed meal. An overdose of it may result in laying small eggs with an unpleasant smell and blood in the yolk. Let’s also make sure that rapeseed meal is only of good quality.
Sunflower meal is also welcome in the daily diet of laying hens, but we should not add too much of it, given the fact that it contains quite a large amount of fiber. This fiber would result in a significant reduction in protein absorption. Manufacturers recommend a 20% share of the meal in the feed.
What to feed the hens? Root vegetables, dried greens are welcome…
Rarely, but it happens that some breeders of chickens give them, apart from grain and grist feed, also some root crops. These include, for example, potatoes, usually served in their shells and partially shredded, and in the same form, beetroot or grated carrots. Added yeast to the feed enriches the diet of hens with a large amount of vitamins and minerals. In the nutrition of hens, the supply of dried leaves of grass and some weeds (clover, nettle) and alfalfa is also of great importance. Drought has a good effect on the color of the egg yolk. Let’s not avoid adding skimmed milk and whey in the form of powder to feed for laying hens. Fishmeal is also a good addition, but remember not to add too much. These can contribute to the foul smell of eggs.
Feeding periods of laying hens
when breeding laying hens, we must know that there are two feeding periods during their life.
time from birth to about 16 weeks of age,
maturity period, i.e. after 17 weeks of age.
In the first phase of life, laying hens – like any other chick – have an increased need for protein. However, we must remember not to provide laying hens with too much protein. Thus, we can cause too rapid development of the hen and premature laying of small eggs. Deficiencies of valuable nutrients and an excess of carbohydrates could cause growth retardation, susceptibility of animals to diseases, and thus – low egg-laying efficiency. For chicks, we recommend the supply of industrial mixtures, because their producers took care of the appropriate proportions of all nutrients needed by chickens.
Feed in the first period of life of laying hens is given in crumbled form, and from the fifth week we recommend the supply of loose feed. Loose feeds are usually eaten by poultry more slowly, which makes them better digested and provides the hen with a sense of satiety. If we decided to breed the so-called farmyard, we should feed our chickens with corn grits, finely chopped green fodder and oat flakes in the first phase. It is also worth adding crushed egg shells to the feed. Around the fourth week of growth, we can safely give them cereals in the form of grains or meal. Let’s not forget to add vitamins and minerals to our mixtures, because laying hens during the growing period should not have any deficiencies.
What to feed laying hens during the laying period
How to feed hens depends primarily on their body weight. Layers of the so-called The “light type” is characterized by a fast metabolism. Therefore, we should provide such hens with a higher supply of carbohydrates. In order to lay good quality eggs, the bark needs a significant supply of calcium and phosphorus, and the supply of feed should be increased in the first stage of egg production and during moulting. We can distinguish the so-called intensive and extensive. The first type is for large-scale farming, while the second type is for small-scale farming. It is worth distinguishing the basic difference between the above types of farming. The intensive type is based primarily on the use of complete industrial mixtures, along with enzymes responsible for increasing digestibility, as well as vitamins and minerals. Extensive farming, on the other hand, consists in feeding laying hens with fodder prepared mainly on their own farm, as well as root vegetables. We allow hens from extensive breeding more freedom, moving around a much larger space, which affects the quality of the eggs they lay.
