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Raising and Keeping Chickens – Part 2 of 3
| By pinoyfarmer | July 10, 2007 |  |
Source: Better Farming Series 13 – Keeping Chickens (FAO – INADES, 1977, 48 p.)
How to feed poultry
To feed poultry well is important and difficult
35. In modern poultry raising you must take a lot of care in feeding the birds.
You want to have birds that grow quickly and yield a lot of meat and eggs.
For that you have to work more and provide most of the feed yourself.
Often you have to buy part of this feed.
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36. Poultry are difficult to teed. They need a lot of different types of teed.
For instance, a hen is not like a goat, and cannot feed only on grass.
Poultry need rich feed.
For instance, to produce eggs a hen needs to get in its feed plenty of proteins and calcium.
Poultry need a certain quantity of each type of teed.
For example, if, to build your house, you have 10 kilogrammes too much cement and not enough sheet iron, you cannot use the cement instead of the iron. If, to build its body, a hen has too much protein and not enough calcium, the protein cannot replace the calcium.
It is useless.
You must give poultry the exact quantity of each feed that is needed.
Poultry need good feed
7. To build up their bodies
The muscles
It is the muscles of poultry that yield meat. Poultry are good if they yield a lot of meat in a short time, if the meat is not hard, and is white. The local breeds of hens that are not well fed are thin and their meat is hard.
The hens of improved breeds have well- developed breast and thigh muscles.
If poultry eat plenty of protein feeds, they develop good muscles.
The protein feeds are also part of body- building feeds.
The bones
If poultry have well- formed bones, they can walk well. Poultry bones are long and thin. They are light, but hard.
In order to have strong hard bones, poultry must eat mineral salts; if they lack mineral salts their bones are badly formed. Mineral salts are part of the body- building foods.
38. To make big eggs
A hen has only one ovary. The ovary produces ovules. The ovule consists of a germ and reserves. It is these reserves which make the egg yolk. The ovule passes into the oviduct where the white and the shell of the egg are formed. The egg passes into the cloaca and out of the hen.
39. A hen begins to lay from the age of five months, and can produce an egg nearly every day from the age of seven months.
40. The egg shell is made of mineral salts, especially calcium.
The egg white contains a lot of water, protein substances and mineral salts.
The egg yolk contains a little water, a lot of protein substances, fat and vitamins.
41. To reproduce themselves and have fine chicks
If you want to have chicks the hen must be fertilized by a cock. You will then have fertilized eggs which will produce chicks. To improve the quality of the chicks you will want to take part in a cock distribution scheme. (See paragraph 25.) The cock makes a lot of sperm. So it also needs to be well fed. A cock eats more than a hen.
One cock can fertilize ten hens
On the other hand, you should not keep cocks if you do not want chicks, but only eggs.
42. To be always In good health
In order to grow and produce eggs, poultry need foods that we call body- building foods.
Poultry also need feeds that give strength (energy feeds).
They need them to live, eat, digest, walk, and to resist cold, heat, and diseases.
How poultry make use of food and water
43. The digestive system of poultry begins with the beak and ends with the cloak and anus. A hen has no teeth to grind its feed; it swallows down its food at once.
44. The food swallowed passes into the oesophagus and then into three different organs:
· the crop where the food is moistened,
· the stomach where the food begins to be digested,
· the gizzard where the food is ground up.
45. You often see hens swallow little stones. These stones stay in the gizzard; when the feed arrives in the gizzard, it is ground up by the stones.
46. After this the feed is digested. The digested part goes into the blood and feeds the whole body. The remainder passes out through the cloaca; this is the excrement
Energy feeds
47. Poultry feed must contain above all energy feeds. Often the farmer can himself produce these feeds. The main energy feeds are:
· Maize, sorghum, millet, rice
You can give these in the form of grain or of meal. Poultry like maize; they can eat a lot of it without harm.
· Cassava
You can give it in the form of meal, or boiled. You must not give too much. In 10 kilogrammes of feed there should not be more than 2 kilogrammes of cassava.
· Rice bran
In 10 kilogrammes of feed, there should not be more than 1 kilogramme of rice bran.
· Palm- kemel oil cake
This is both an energy feed which can replace maize, and a body- building feed which can replace groundnut oil cake. In 10 kilogrammes of feed there should not be more than 1.5 kilogrammes of palm- kernel oil cake.
Body- building feeds: proteins
48. Body- building feeds are rich in proteins.
Poultry need proteins that come from animals and also proteins that come from plants.
For instance, if you give poultry 2 kilogrammes of feed containing proteins, there should be:
1.5 kilogrammes of vegetable proteins, 0.5 kilogramme of animal proteins.
49. Proteins that come from plants
Oil cake contains a lot of proteins.
Oil cake is the name for what is left when the oil has been taken from groundnuts, cotton, palm kernels, coconuts.
Groundnut oil cake
Poultry digest it well.
In 10 kilogrammes of feed, 1.5 kilogrammes can be groundnut oil cake.
Cotton oil cake
Poultry cannot digest a big amount of this.
In 10 kilogrammes of feed, not more than 0.5 kilogramme should be cotton oil cake.
Palm- kemel oil cake
This can take the place of maize and groundnut oil cake, but you should not give more than 1.5 kilogrammes of it in 10 kilogrammes of feed.
50. Proteins that come from animals
Boiled blood, meat meal, milk powder or fish meal. You should not give poultry too much protein.
It costs a lot and, if you give too much, it may make the poultry ill.
51. Energy feeds and body- building feeds are not well used by poultry unless you give at the same time:
· mineral salts, vitamins and clean water.
Mineral salts
52. In 10 kilogrammes of feed, there should be 200 grammes of mineral salts.
Bones, oyster and snail shells, and egg shells are rich in mineral salts.
If you do not give mineral salts, poultry cannot grow well; their bones will be small and badly formed.
Vitamins
53. You should mix vitamins in poultry feed if the birds are kept in a yard.
Otherwise the birds get vitamins by eating grass. Vitamins are given in very small quantities.
The farmer cannot produce them.
You have to buy them.
Vitamins can be bought in shops or from the animal husbandry centres.
Clean water
54. It is very important to give poultry plenty of clean water.
Poultry do not make good use of their food if they do not drink enough water.
One hen can drink a quarter of a litre of water a day.
For 20 hens, you need about 5 litres of water a day. If the weather is very hot, the birds will drink more. Each hen will drink about half a litre of water every day.
Put the water in fairly big drinking troughs so that several hens can drink at the same time.
Put the drinking troughs in the shade, near the feeding troughs.
Never let drinking troughs be empty. The water must always be clean. II It is dirty, it must be changed. Dirty water gives poultry a lot of diseases.
To make good use of feed poultry must drink a lot.
Special needs of chicks, laying hens, and table poultry
55. In domestic poultry keeping, the farmer produces and prepares most of the poultry feed himself.
In this way he does not spend much money; he uses up what is left over from the family’s food and from his harvest.
But he must take care.
He has to give all the birds their complete feed, and this means different feed to birds of different ages.
56. From birth to 8 weeks
Chicks need above all body- building foods.
You should give them water and a feed containing, for instance: in every 10 kg of meal:
7 kg of crushed maize and/or other grains, 2 kg of groundnut oil cake,
1 kg of a mixture consisting of remains of meat, fish or blood, of oil or vegetables, of bones and crushed shells, of termites.
57. From 8 to 14 weeks
The feed should be more plentiful. There should be in every 10 kg of meal:
8 kg of crushed maize and/or other grains, 1.5 kg of groundnut oil cake,
0.5 kg of a mixture consisting of remains of meat, fish, blood, grass, termites, vegetables.
58. After 14 weeks
Give only maize grain or a mixture of maize with other grains.
Remember!
If the poultry are in a yard, you must also give them feeds that are rich in vitamins: grass vegetables; and rich in proteins: termites meat scraps fish scraps.
59. Laying hens
To make the shells of their eggs, laying hens need plenty of mineral salts.
To make the reserves in the egg, laying hens need plenty of proteins.
For instance, give in every 10 kg of feed:
8 kg of crushed grains (maize, sorghum), 1.5 kg of groundnut oil cake,
0.5 kg of a mixture consisting of meat or fish, boiled blood, grass and vegetables, and especially 300- 500 grammes of crushed bones, oyster or snail shells or egg shells.
60. During the first three months of life a bird eats about 5 kilogrammes of feed.
61. The food must be well mixed.
You must not make the mixture too long before giving it to the poultry, otherwise the food may go bad.
Feeding and drinking troughs and the drinking founts must always be very clean.
62. If a farmer buys poultry feed
· Either he buys all the teed
That is, a meal containing all the foods that poultry need to live and grow. He should not give any other food. This meal is costly. He must follow the seller’s instructions and only give the necessary quantities.
· Or he buys only part of the feed – the concentrates
These are the kinds of meal that contain chiefly proteins, mineral salts and vitamins. If the farmer buys concentrates, he must also give crushed grain oil cake.
63. If you buy poultry feed, you have less work to do, but you may lose a lot of money.
Follow the advice of the animal husbandry centres.
Related Posts:
Raising & Keeping Chickens – Part I
Raising & Keeping Chickens – Part III
Topics: Poultry | 2 Comments »
September 3rd, 2011 at 2:36 pm
it is very helpul to us all the contents of this books makes us more iterested in poultry business
to help our society even in this humble WAY
September 3rd, 2011 at 2:38 pm
it is very helpful to us all the contents of this books makes us more interested in poultry business
to help our society even in this humble WAY