Chicken dietary taboos

There are four categories of dietary minefields that must not be touched in daily chicken raising - high-salt foods with a salt content of more than 0.3%, sprouted potatoes/raw green beans and other fresh foods containing natural toxins, undetoxified cottonseed and rapeseed meal and other feed ingredients, and live animal offal/carcasses of diseased livestock and poultry carrying pathogens. The remaining controversial ingredients can be flexibly adjusted according to the scale and mode of farming, and do not need to be completely one-size-fits-all.

I have been raising free-range native chickens in the mountainous area of ​​southern Anhui for more than 7 years. The feeding pits I stepped into in the past two years added up to a loss of nearly 30,000 yuan. These are all solid lessons. In the spring of last year, Mr. Li, a farmer from a neighboring town, made me cry. He said that after three days of feeding 32 old hens that laid eggs with pickled fish and bacon soup leftover from a banquet at home, seven of them were fine the first day and died the next day. When they were cut open, their kidneys were swollen like soaked soybeans. The ureters were full of white urate, a typical case of salt poisoning. Many friends who raise a small number of free-range chickens also say, is it okay if my chickens are often fed leftovers? In fact, this depends on the amount and the metabolic capacity of the chicken. The daily exercise of free-range chickens is more than five times that of caged chickens. A small amount of salt can be metabolized. However, as long as the salt concentration exceeds 0.3% for three consecutive days, even the most solid-skinned chickens will experience feather pecking, diarrhea, and a sudden increase in water intake. Not to mention caged chickens, which have a small metabolism and high salt content, which is basically equivalent to feeding poison.

When it comes to random nutritional supplements, many novice farmers have done it by feeding raw offal and raw eggs directly, and I am no exception. In 2019, I wanted my chickens to lay more eggs, so I asked my friend at the slaughterhouse to buy half a sack of raw chicken offal, chop it into pieces, and mix it with the chaff directly. However, within half a month, the chickens were infected with coccidia and salmonella, and nearly 200 of them died. It cost 18,000 yuan just to buy medicines and vaccinations. Nowadays, many ecological breeding bloggers on the Internet say that raw feeding is good and nutrients are retained. As long as they are regularly dewormed, there will be no problem. I specifically asked the animal husbandry at the Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences. They said that if it is a completely free-range and extremely low-density environment, occasional feeding is not a big problem, but as long as the breeding density is More than 2 chickens per square meter, bacteria and parasite eggs in raw internal organs can easily spread quickly. It is best to boil them for 10 minutes to kill the bacteria before feeding them. As for the corpses of dead livestock and poultry, they must not be touched. If viruses such as avian influenza are introduced, the entire chicken farm will suffer.

Some people think that as long as they are plants, they are not poisonous. They throw away the sprouted potatoes, old raw green beans, and rotten sweet potatoes at home and feed them to chickens. In the end, they lose even more. Last year, Aunt Wang from the next village picked out half-rotten sweet potatoes from the cellar and fed them to 20 chickens. Within 3 hours of eating, the chickens began to foam at the mouth, collapsed on the ground and convulsed. They were taken to the veterinary station but could not be rescued. Many people say that for sprouted potatoes, just dig out the buds and green areas. In fact, solanine has already seeped into the entire potato piece. Even if you dig it cleanly, the solanine content is more than three times the safe value. If you feed it too little, the chicken will be depressed and lay less eggs. If you feed it too much, it will lead to poisoning and death. There is really no need to save that little money.

If you are engaged in large-scale breeding, you should be careful when buying ingredients from scratch. Many cheap ingredients are added with cottonseed meal and rapeseed meal that are not detoxified. The gossypol content exceeds the standard. After two or three months of feeding, the eggs laid by the laying hens will have a strange smell and cannot be sold. The livers of broiler chickens will directly become necrotic after being fed for a long time. There are also different opinions here. Many old farmers say that it is fine to add within 5%. My own habit is to never add it to the native chickens I raise for my family. If I raise commercial chickens, I only buy chickens that have been detoxified by regular manufacturers. The added amount is controlled within 3%, otherwise it is easy to cause problems when tested.

People often ask me if they can feed coffee grounds and chocolate? Last summer, I tried mixing dried coffee grounds into the feed at a ratio of 1%. It can indeed reduce mosquito bites on chickens. The effect is not bad, but chocolate cannot be fed. Chickens cannot metabolize the theobromine in it. Adult chickens will be poisoned if fed about 10 grams. Do not throw leftover chocolate into the chicken coop.

In fact, after all, there are not so many strict dietary taboos about raising chickens. If you raise three or five at home to lay eggs for your children, you can feed them any leftover white rice and clean green vegetable leaves. They are very sturdy. But if you rely on this to make a living and raise dozens or hundreds of animals, you still have to avoid pitfalls. After all, the two yuan you save may end up costing dozens or hundreds of times more to make up for it, which is not worth it.