Farming Knowleagde

Because some commercial chicken feed is usually highly processed and cooked, many nutrients are sacrificed that will keep your girls healthy and provide you with delicious eggs every morning. This means they have to eat more feed to stay satisfied.

The idea of making your own chicken feed is gaining popularity among many backyard chicken farmers and chicken farms. By making your own chicken feed, you can know exactly what’s in it, so you can easily change it to suit your chicken’s dietary needs, and for those with larger flocks, it can save you money.

Ingredients for the Main Poultry Feeds
These can include the following:

Alfalfa meal: This is high in proteinCorn: This is the mainstay for poultry dietField peas: This is a protein source and can be a substitute for those who don't want to use soybean.WheatBarley or oats: should make up less than 15% of the overall poultry diet.

Things That You Should Add in the Poultry Feed

Feeding limestone to provide calciumOyster shellsSaltGritFish meal to help boost protein or omega 3sCultured yeast to provide B vitamins, digestive enzymes and mineralsCrab meal: Can provide minerals and proteinsProbioticsBroad-spectrum mineral supplementsFlaxseed: Can be a source of omega 3s

3 Key Types of Chicken Feed
Ensuring that you choose the right chicken feed is the most important consideration for their health and well-being as well as the production of quality meat and eggs. Farmers need to have a detailed understanding of different types of chicken feed and feed supplements to ensure that chickens are getting the right amount of protein, fat and other nutrients, which are essential for the growth and health of chickens.

Pellets
Pellets are the most widely available form of chicken feed that you can find. As the name suggests, these are cylindrical, compact chicken feed that you are easily consumable and digestible by chickens. In some cases, pellets can be the only type of chicken feed available and its greatest benefit is that it does not go to waste easily. More importantly, pellets are easy to store and provide to chickens.

Mash
These are best suited for chicks, simply because they are unprocessed and are far easier to consume that pellets and crumbles. However, you can also feed mash to fully grown chickens. The best way of serving mash is to mix it with water to resemble like porridge, provided that it is served and consumed as quickly as possible as this form tends to expire a lot quicker.

Crumbles
Crumbles can be rare to find, but if you do manage to do so, it can be a lot convenient to store and serve than mash, owing to its semi-processed form. Due to its oatmeal-like appearance, crumbles lie somewhere between mash and pellets in terms of being easy to eat and gather. However, in terms of nutrition, it is no different to other types of chicken feed.

Raw Materials for Chicken Feed Pellets
The raw materials of chicken feed can be soybean, cottonseed cake, corn, brown rice, rice, sorghum, soybean meal, fish meal, bone meal, etc.

Feed Grinding
Feed grinder is suitable for grinding raw material ingredients to the size required for granulation. Hammer mill is suitable for small and medium-sized feed pelleting plants. Water drop hammer mill are usually used in large and medium-sized feed pelleting plants.

Mixing
Mixing is considered to be one of the essential operations in feed pellet processing. The ingredients can be fully blended in our feed mixer to ensure a balanced nutrition for each of the finished feed pellets.

Pelletizing
Pelleting is the core process of the whole chicken feed pellet production. We provide two kinds of pellet machine: ring die feed pellet machine and flat die feed pellet machine. Ring die feed pellet machine is very suitable for chicken feed pellet production in large farms or feed pellet factories. In the conditioner of the ring die feed pellet machine, the materials can be fully and evenly mixed and cooked to meet special needs and ensure the high quality of the final chicken feed pellet.

Pellet Cooling
The feed from the feed pelletizer is soft, moist and can be shaken without cooling. Counterflow pellet cooler is used here to remove the heat and moisture of the pellet to ensure the quality and shelf life of the pellets.

Feed Pellet Crushing
Feed pellets with different sizes for chicken in different stages. The double roller crusher is designed to break large-sized pellets into small ones as required by the customer. Crushed pellet has a length range of 0.6-1.5mm or 1-2.5mm.

Feed Pellet screening & Grading
The crushed feed particles vary in size and may have some powder. Rotating screen is used to screen granular feed. After processing, you can obtain no fine powder qualified feed.

Feed Pellet Packaging
The final chicken feed pellets should be packaged before transportation, storage or sale. Automatic weighing and packaging machine plays an indispensable role in improving the pelleting efficiency of chicken feed.