Family Poultry Training Course/Scavenging Chickens Training Handbook- Feeds and Feeding
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Feeds and Feeding
If you want your chickens to produce more eggs and meat you must feed them.
- Feed is the major constraint (drawback) to raising village chickens. The scavenging area is limited and usually over-scavenged so you can not expect it to produce many eggs or chickens to grow fast
- You can also feed them crushed shells and coral collected from the beach
- Chicken should be given a variety of feedstuffs
- Already mentioned is to give chicks a boiled egg when they first hatch out
- For very young chicks you should consider buying chick broiler starter crumbles
- Although expensive, each chick will consume only about 50-100 grams in the first 10-15 days and will then get a good start to life and grow fast
- Copra meal is cheap and if you have a variety of feeds it is sometimes better to put them in separate containers such as grains, copra meal and a calcium source
- Do not over-fill the feeders or you will waste some
- Hens need a supply of calcium and phosphorous for them to lay many eggs with sound shells
- You can feed old egg shells and crushed chicken bones back to the hens but you must boil them first
- Kitchen scraps, fruits such as bananas, coconut pulp, cooked starchy roots and tubers (cassava, sweet potato, taro, yams). Fish and fish waste (cooked) are very valuable feeds
- Grains are not normally available although wheat bran and rice bran are produced from milling the grains by feed companies and may be available
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