We STOPPED Making HOMEMADE CHICKEN…(you should too)

we have an unhappy rooster here all right guys I guess I have something to admit about our chickens today and does it make me a liar does it make me a hypocrite I guess that's up to you guys to decide we're gonna talk about our most watched video on our Channel as of today and that is our homemade chicken feed video which if you haven't go seen it after this video if you want to go watch it I'll put a link in the description below we've had a few comments and this has happened since we've made it this video is about one year old now on our page from when we posted it as of today are we still making that homemade chicken feed for our chickens well we are not so in the video today what I'm going to do is break down why we don't feed the chickens that anymore what we are currently feeding our chickens and then what our plans are in the future for feeding our 15 chickens that we have and I think you guys are gonna like that one and if you want to be mad at me for not feeding the chicken feed anymore go ahead and do it but let me tell you why when we first started getting into chickens this was our feed that we made them before they started laying even and we wanted to get them some kind of feed that we felt more comfortable about than commercial feed because we just figured if it was homemade it's better in most cases that is a true statement when we first started giving them that chicken feed our 10 chickens that we had at the time loved it they all laid it really good they loved it they were laying eggs with having that in their diet so it wasn't something that was stopping them from laying it wasn't something that they didn't enjoy I guess all my chickens left me I don't know where they went all right I found them all I don't know why they left me I had food next to me still it looks like we have some chickens scratching around in our compost bin which is definitely a plus this is a great way to feed your chickens is having a compost been in there and then whatever compost and foods and scraps that you throw in here they scratch it all around and they eat at it and get the bugs this is a good way to feed your chickens so let's break it down there was actually actually three main reasons to why we stopped doing our homemade chicken feed the first main reason is that when we added five new chickens to our 10 chicken Flack our five new chickens we're on a chick starter feed and then when we tried to switch them over to this homemade feed they were not eating it and there was plenty of ways for us to go about this we could keep letting them just try to eat it and see how they do we could wait it out a week wait two weeks but how long was so long before their nutrients and everything was going to start going way down and that was something that just made it really hard for us to choose what we were going to do and that brings me to our second reason of getting away from this feed which was the price and everyone this is something that should be very clear to most people at this point we made this feed about one year ago today and every single food item corn oats seeds the black sunflower seeds all that stuff has been at least tripled in price at this point chicken feed for that matter has not been triple that price so it's kind of hard when you have your budgets and everything that you need to do do as much as we'd love to give them the benefit to have the best diet they can have at the cost of us not having a good diet for ourselves and paying for better feed for them than we would for ourselves something that we just couldn't justify triple the price to make this feed compared to when we did it one year ago it makes me wish we would have bought everything in super bulk at that time but we didn't so to make it again it was going to cost us a lot of money and that was something unfortunately we just couldn't afford to do scratch up that compost okay we're gonna put it in our garden you guys are going to help us grow some good food Gotta Love chickens there's so much you can do with them our third and final reason for stop feeding them this kind of feed it was pretty simple when me and Chelsea kind of sat down and talked about it for our chickens is that instead of buying commercial bag feed for our chickens that we wanted to shy away from what we actually ended up doing was buying like five different types of commercial bag feeds and then put them together to make a few bagged oats bagged corn bag black oil sunflower seeds bag peas bag flaxseed so what we ended up doing is instead of buying one commercial bag feed and feeding it to our chickens we bought like five of them put them all together and although it looked nice to see whole pieces of food I can almost guarantee that was still better for them than buying bad commercial feed that we were feeding them but was it really doing us what we wanted to do our main goal for them which was to give them the healthiest diet they could possibly have I don't think so so unfortunately for all those three things we had to get away from our homemade chicken feed that doesn't mean we don't have a plan and we want to tell you guys about that but first I'm sure you guys are interested in what we're feeding our chickens today and if you didn't see our previous video where we kind of talked about it we'll talk about it right now yes we switched back to some commercial feed luckily our commercial feed I know that's been a big thing in the topics right now is that they're feeding commercial feed and their chickens are not laying so a lot of people are looking into homemade mix and like I said the one that we made our chickens ate it they were laying eggs so if you want to go to that I'm not telling you to shy away from it I'm just telling you the reason why we stopped for right now so what we do during the winter time is we'll feed them I think it's callback the meat bird feed which is 22 protein because they need a little bit more protein to keep them warmer during the winter time especially when you live in Michigan and although the snow is off the ground because we finally had some Sundays last few days it is cold and then what we'll do is we'll feed them it's called Hen House reserved and we mix those two together and as you can see it has a lot of the big pieces is and it has a lot of things that our homemade feed had it has the split peas it has black sunflower seeds it has some cracked corn so a lot of the ingredients that we were putting in our homemade chicken feed actually was in this one so we thought it was kind of cool so that's called Hen House Reserve if you're looking for that kind of feed we really do like it and our chickens have absolutely loved it and we're getting great egg supply do you want to see [Music] let me show you just how much they like this feed foreign and of course that's just like that's their main part of their diet but we supplement a lot of things in for our chickens so that doesn't have to be like the only thing we rely on so right here you can see we have some like tops of some peppers we have some old fruit that was starting to go bad cucumber pieces and we're just gonna throw that into our compost bin and the chickens will scratch around it's something that they'll be able to eat at the compost plus get some food scraps which kitchen scraps are one of the best things that you want to feed your chickens oh chickens you're good you can just throw it they'll start running foreign the last thing that we want to supplement into their diet that we love to give them and we've talked about this one before but we love giving them grubs and ours are from grubterra which if you guys haven't looked into the company they have many great things and great options that you can find our chickens absolutely love these it's another thing that we'll just throw into the compost bin so they can scratch around at that and anytime that we're ever going to feed them kind of scraps or whatever we love putting it into the compost form oh my God all right now that you guys have kind of seen our whole chicken diet and what we feed them and hopefully it's been really good for their bellies and I mean we're getting good eggs so I guess you can't complain about that one but we're really hoping the future of our chicken's diet is going to look very different yes we're still gonna give them kitchen scraps yes we're still planning on giving them the grubs so they have a little extra calcium and protein commercial bag feed we want to grab a bag of commercial feed and we want to throw that thing as far away from us as possible because we would love to just cut that out of their diet we're still on that same boat that we were a year ago on how we can get there and we've gotten a lot of great tips from people and I think we're gonna get it so what we're hoping to do is I've been contacting some breweries and no it's not so that we can pour beer for the chickens and they can have a little extra fun in their coop at night we want to contact these breweries though because what we want to do is we want to get their spent grain so that after they're done brewing the beer there's a lot of grains that don't get used that are left leftovered that they'll sometimes just throw away or there's already other Farmers already using it so we're hoping that we can find a few local ones around the area where I work that we can get all these grains and then we can put that into their diet so that's going to cut out a lot of commercial feed we're going to put the kitchen scraps that we're already giving them on top of all those spent grains and we're still going to be sprinkling in some D into their food that'll help with any kind of internal parasites that they might have any kind of bugs or anything going on with them and then during our next Garden season we plan on growing a lot of different kind of herbs for them and also things that we were already putting in that homemade mix that we made in the video so we're going to grow our own sunflowers so that we have sunflower seeds to feed to them and these are these things that you can kind of do and as soon as we kind of get more into that we will do a video so you guys can see how our new diet's looking for them but that is the future is to get rid of the commercial feed save money and just feed them better than what I think commercial feed is for them I don't know if you consider us a hypocrite or or we lied to you guys because now that we don't use that chicken feed anymore even though we have a video that's explaining our homemade chicken feed mix that we've made I would never hold anyone accountable for something that they did a year ago that now you have to do that forever we're changing and learning new things all the time here while we deal with our animal chickens that we've been raising here for about a year and a half now we have pigs that we've had about for five six months and there's always new things that we're learning new things we're trying to improve and we would hope the same for everyone else is that although you said one thing we would never hold someone accountable but if you switched from doing that we'd just be curious of why did you switch and that's what we wanted to do here with this video today is just kind of explain to you the reasons why we switched what we plan on doing in the future what we're doing now and I hope this has kind of been a little informational for any of you guys but if you want to go ahead and make that chicken feed go ahead and do it it's definitely some I'm saying don't shy away from it's something that you can do still I think your chickens are gonna love it and I think they're gonna lay a lot of eggs because of it but you guys have a great day and a better tomorrow keep thinking keep changing and don't be afraid to admit when you might not be doing something that you used to do look at me

Channel: Acres Of Adventure Homestead

Views: 199,835

Keywords: acres of adventure, homestead, homesteading, homesteaders, chickens, backyard chickens, backyard chicken, chicken feed, chicken feeds, feed, homemade feed, homemade chicken feed, backyard farm, farm, farming

Id: qP_PopGp_6s

Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023