CHICKEN FEED:The Ideal Formula
What is the best chicken to eat? What is the best feed to feed it? Do you need an Omega-3 chicken? The Ideal Chicken for the Consumer and for the Producer
********************************************* There are many things that a commercial chicken or egg producer can do to increase the health value of the product. While the "Organic" label is a start in the right direction, it by no means assures us that that chicken is the very most healthful bird on the market.
Though not all of these items can be accomplished by the average chicken producer, in my estimation, the supremely most healthful chicken, for meat as well as for eggs, would consume the following feedstuffs in these ways:
1. Ample grass and living plants, along with insect life and subterranean flora and fauna that is found in the grasslands. It would be truly free range, or perhaps a better term needs to be sought. "Grass-ranged" is one option. Whichever term is used, it should be a legally-certified term so that the public will know that this chicken was ranging on ample living grassland that includes wild insect life and a variety of plants, and that this chicken was on this range for a large proportion of its feeding hours immediately prior to consumption by consumer.
2. Wild ocean seafood added to the diet daily, in enough quantity to raise the omega-3 content of the chicken and eggs to nearly equal with the omega-6 content.
3. Extra protein supplementation from a variety of sources such as 100% grass-fed milk and meat products, insects, worms, nuts.
4. Grain supplement only as necessary to sustain adequate growth and laying, based on a mixture of five or more whole, live, unmilled grains. All grains to be completely free-choiced for a period of time, then removed before nighfall. If corn is used, it must be cracked within no more than 24 hours of being consumed.
5. Legumes daily, to balance the protein, B vitamin, and other profiles of the grains. Boiled soybeans especially desirable. (Legumes and grains naturally occur together in all wild pasturelands, and complement each other, probably in many ways that we do not yet know. To eat the one without the other is to invite disaster, imho.)
6. Salt derived solely from dried kelp, free-choiced.
7. Calcium derived from oyster shell or grass-fed bone, free choiced.
8. Water free-flowing from living spring or stream, without chlorine or other such industrial toxins added.
And with these safety assurances:
9. Absolutely no addition of any kind of oils to the feeds, to prevent the misuse of trans-fats-laden and re-processed oils as a calorie booster or for any other reason.
10. Everything consumed by the chickens to be certified stringently 100% Organic, not certified by an organic-label certification scheme that allows 5% (or any other percent) of non-organic products to be added and still use the term "Organic."
11. The breed of chicken should not contain any "Cornish" or other unnaturally-fast-maturing variety. The chicken should mature in the normal amount of time, a little more than 5 months, not the abnormal, ceiling-less growth curve leading to harvest at two months as in the Cornish crosses. Lacking that... It will be next to impossible to raise chickens commercially in the above fashion. Why? For two reasons primarily, the first being economics. The majority of people will not pay the price that would be required to produce such a superbly-health-promoting chicken. On the contrary, so many people seek out and pay the very lowest price for any food, causing a huge and irresistible pressure on food producers to do the very cheapest tricks to bring food products to market. These cut-throat producers are thus so large a bloc that they can squeeze out any competition, making it doubly hard for a health-conscious producer to survive. People should never pay rock-bottom price for food, if at all possible.
The second reason is that, even where poultry producers wish to have the best possible product and have a ready market nearby, the flexibility and time necessary to learn new sourcing and marketing skills for this more complex arrangement is often limited.
Today, most poultry production is set up in a huge barn, with feeding troughs throughout. The feed is a pre-mixed blend of ingredients, and this single item is the sole source of food for the chickens. The troughs are filled, the chickens grow, and that's that. But, there are many things that such producers can do if they wish to produce a premium chicken or egg, without unduly increasing costs and labor.
The chickens produced in this way will not have the omega-3 content and other variables that would come from free-ranging through varied grassland, but they will have hugely-superior health value to those produced with the current feed mixes. Without much added cost or effort, today's poultry producer can do some or all of the following: 1. Add dried wild fish meal to the feed mix. Or better yet, free-choice it along with the usual mix. Then, get a test done, and let your customers know how much omega-3 you have in your chickens and eggs, and what kinds of omega-3's you have. The fish meal produces much better omega-3's than flax seed does.
2. Reduce the amount of corn, and increase other grains such as wheat, oats, millet, and others.
3. Stop using pelletized grains and begin using only whole, living grains, tumbled together. The mill cost will be greatly reduced, since grinding and pelletizing will not need to be done at all. Or you can get an old cement mixer and mix your own. Include several kinds of grains, and let the chickens pick and choose.
4. Include dried legumes (beans, peas, lentils, etc.) with the grains, to balance out the B vitamins, proteins, and other profiles.
5. For salt, only use dried kelp, which you keep tacked up inside the coop in convenient places. At first, they'll eat a lot of it, because they've been missing all the minerals in the kelp. After a few days or weeks, they'll taper off.
6. Use alfalfa pellets for much of the vitamin A, potassium, and other requirements. Use Fertrell's Nutribalancer or other Fertrell products to keep the vitamin levels the way you want them. Vitamin A is the most important vitamin to watch out for. Never use synthetic vitamin A ("irradiated"). Vitamin A in your feed can come from green things (alfalfa), liver, insects, whole small fish, or fish liver oils.
7. Stop using anything with any added oils or fats, to eliminate the health-destroying trans-fats and re-processed oils that are often added to feeds. In 2006, all trans-fats will have to be identified on all U.S. food labels, so start getting good sources now, ones that have zero trans-fats and zero re-processed fats of any kind.
8. Use only 100% organic products, getting assurance that they are classified 100% organic, not certified by allowing a small percentage of non-organic stuff included (1% can be a LOT of toxic matter). There are many different "Organic" certification agencies, with differing criteria.
These steps may not give you an omega-3 chicken or egg, but they will give you a highly healthful product nonetheless. The consumer can get omega-3's from other sources besides chicken.
We're just beginning to be aware of our omega-3 problem. Looking at the omelettes in the menu at Denny's recently, I asked the waiter if they had Omega-3 eggs. He thought a moment and said, "Sure, we can make it three eggs."
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