Permaculture - Feeding chicks and hens (lesson 43) | club75

Chick feeding can raise many questions because surely everyone who has chickens knows that newborn chicks cannot get the same food as adult chickens right away. So how do you go about feeding chicks to take care of their growth and health? You will learn about this in today's lesson.

For the first two days, the chicks do not require any meal, only after this time, they can be given sweet milk or possibly soured milk (remember, however, that the milk cannot be sour because it's spoiled). The saucer with poured milk and a cup in the center, preventing the chicks from entering the milk, should be placed for a few minutes, and then taken to be replaced a second time after two hours. We do this because the chicks tend to overeat and may vomit if we do not dose the meals.

Over time, you can add a boiled egg mixed with milk, a little breadcrumbs, or rice cooked in milk. Then, after two weeks, you can add fine grains (buckwheat, linseed, millet, quinoa).

In the first week, we feed the chicks six times a day, every 2 hours, giving them small amounts of food. From the second to the fifth week, we reduce the number of meals to five, and in the fourth week to four, and slowly start introducing the dry food.

The ideal dry food for chicks should include:

• 3 parts of finely ground wheat
• 3 parts of ground barley
• 4 parts of ground oats without hulls
• 3 parts of wheat bran
• 2 parts fish meal, meat meal or milk.

From the first week, food can also be enriched with fish oil, which has beneficial health properties. Initially, we put one drop for each chick, then gradually increase it up to 5 drops per chick in the fourth week. In addition, from the very beginning, the chicks should have access to greens, fine gravel, and optionally ground eggshells.

Adult chicken feeding

Feeding the chicks with the special feed should be finished in the fourth month when they are completely converted to feed for adult hens.

The most beneficial feeds for adult hens in terms of the amount of protein are soybean meal, peanut meal, hemp seed, sunflower seeds. Dairy products, meat meals, and blood meals are also good. If we only feed chickens with a mixture of fodder, it is worth providing for drinking only milk (perfect partially skimmed milk). It's good to give curdled ones, then we know that it will not hang in a drinker on a warm day.

Feed for adult chickens:

• two or three servings a day
• 50 grams of grain per day
• greens as much as the hen can eat
• as a drink, milk or water

---

---

TABLE OF CONTENT - ALL THE PREVIOUS LESSONS

---

---