Chickens need a diet rich in carbohydrates, proteins, fats and essential vitamins and minerals in order to flourish and produce eggs. Commercial feed offers these components.
Grain feed for poultry accounts for most of their needs worldwide, with corn, sorghum and wheat being particularly popular choices in various regions. Other ingredients used to supplement their protein needs may include soybean or canola meal (a byproduct of oil extraction), lupins or black oil sunflower seeds.
Contents
Protein
Chickens require protein for daily metabolic processes, egg production and feather development. Commercial layer feed contains various sources of proteins to promote healthful development of chicks.
Chicken feed typically provides most of its protein from cereal grains, providing them with energy sources for maximum energy needs. Corn, sorghum and barley are popular poultry formulations due to being easily produced in many regions around the globe.
Vegetable and animal proteins provide additional sources of protein for poultry feed formulation. Vegetable proteins come as meal or oilcake from oilseed processing, with soybeans, rapeseed/canola, peanuts and sunflower seeds being the major oilseed crops used. Often combined together for nutritional diversity purposes and adequate amino acid levels within poultry feed formulation.
Fat
Chicken feed is a combination of various ingredients designed to provide your flock with all of the nutrition it requires for growth and egg production. This typically includes cereal grains (like cracked corn, wheat and barley) as an energy source; fats and oils; minerals/vitamins/proteins etc.
Lipids provide the primary energy source in poultry diets, providing double the energy per kilogram that proteins or carbohydrates do. Lipids also carry fat-soluble vitamins and provide essential fatty acids like linoleic acid. Lipids may come from animal or vegetable origin (tallow, lard or fish oil), feed grade plant oils like canola/rapeseed/sunflower/soybean and linseed oils can all serve as sources for their energy content while improving digestibility of protein rich diets.
Fiber
Commercial chicken feed contains an ideal mix of fats, proteins, carbohydrates and essential vitamins and minerals designed to meet all the dietary needs of your flock for growth, flourishing and producing eggs. Manufacturers carefully formulate this feed based on decades of research.
Cereals provide most of the energy in poultry feed. Corn is the main ingredient, although other grains like sorghum and barley may be preferred in certain regions.
Protein supplements are essential in all stages of growth for poultry, with soybean meal as the go-to protein source. Produced from oil extracted from soybeans or canola seeds, it offers an amino acid profile that works well alongside corn – the main energy component typically included in most poultry diets.
A poultry diet’s fibre content consists of non-starch polysaccharides (NSPs) and lignin. By increasing viscosity of digesta, NSPs increase viscosity of digesta production and thus slowing nutrient absorption rates.
Minerals
Commercial chicken feed is designed to meet the specific nutritional needs of birds. This food includes proteins, vitamins, and minerals necessary for growth as well as essential ingredients like flax seed for egg production. In addition, many other ingredients may be included for additional benefits.
Grains provide energy for poultry diets, but don’t provide all of the proteins necessary to support egg production. Supplemental sources for these proteins include vegetable sources like oilseed meals, soybean meal and black soldier fly grubs.
These sources contain essential amino acids like methionine and lysine, as well as calcium, phosphorus, salt, vitamins, and trace minerals. Many poultry feeds also include limestone or oyster shell calcium as a source for their calcium intake; dicalcium phosphate for its phosphate; prebiotics or probiotics may even help foster healthier microbes in their digestive tract and decrease ammonia emissions from its waste products.
Vitamins
Many poultry feeds include a vitamin pre-mix that can be added to major ingredients like grains and animal proteins to provide essential vitamins and minerals that chickens might otherwise lack, including A, D3 and E which help ensure healthy feather growth and egg shell strength as well as calcium, phosphorous and salt for balanced bone mineralization and eggshell integrity.
Grains naturally contain moderate quantities of these nutrients, but don’t provide essential amino acids such as methionine and lysine that poultry require. Instead, these amino acids come from plant products or insects and grubs such as black soldier fly grubs. Lipids also play an essential role in poultry feed because they help birds absorb fat-soluble vitamins A, D and E from sources like soybean oil, sunflower oil or canola oil derived from natural sources.
