Crumble feeds are coarse varieties designed to be easier for chickens to manage than pellets and produce slightly more dust than their pelleted counterparts.
Layer mash provides layer hens with essential protein and calcium. They will enjoy snacks, treats, vegetables, insects and table scraps, but too many treats could dilute their feed and lead to nutritional deficiencies in their bodies.
Contents
Protein
Diet plays an essential part in maintaining good health and egg production for chickens. Layer feed has been specifically developed to meet these requirements by providing an ideal combination of proteins, calcium and other vital vitamins and minerals designed to ensure top performance among your flock of laying hens.
Cracked grains such as corn, soybean meal, poultry mineral mix and ground calcium make this type of feed ideal for chickens of all species, with crumbles having an easier digestion than pellets while providing similar levels of nutrition.
Soybean meal is the primary protein source in most layers mash feeds with an average crude protein level of around 45%. To be digestible by laying hens, soybean meal must first be processed to remove an inhibitor known as trypsin inhibitor which interferes with their ability to digest protein efficiently. Other proteins used include fish meal, blood meal or carcass meal but these ingredients are typically not as popular as soya bean meal.
Energy
Layer mash is a complete feed designed for egg laying chickens that provides all of the nutrition they require to reach their full egg-laying potential. It features quality proteins and fat sources, essential vitamins and minerals as well as calcium for building strong eggshells.
Layer mash chicken feeds typically include soya bean meal, made by extracting oil from soya beans. Its crude protein levels may reach as high as 45%. Other sources of protein come from processed meat products like fish, blood and carcasses.
Mixing the mash with vitamin and mineral premixes ensures that each chicken gets all of the necessary vitamins and minerals from their diet, helping prevent any deficiencies which could potentially impact egg production negatively. Finally, this feed is then broken up into crumbles for easier digesting by chickens; although this process does create some feed dust it is much cheaper alternative to pelleting the feed.
Calcium
Calcium is vital to the production of hard eggshells. It can be found in laying hen feed such as calcitic limestone, grit or the exoskeletons of oyster shells and snails; alternatively it can also be purchased commercially-formulated vitamin-mineral premixes.
Sunflower seed meal is another source of protein for layer feed, with a crude protein level ranging between 22-44% depending on how the seeds are processed. Raw beans contain trypsin inhibitor which may negatively impact digestion; thus heat treatment must occur prior to its use as feed.
Supplying layers with access to oyster shell grit to provide them with additional calcium is vitally important, since too much calcium in a flock of mixed age layers could result in kidney damage. By offering both calcium and phosphorus free choice (not mixed into feed) at any given time, individual layers can take what amount they need from the dish of oyster shell grit.
Fiber
Grain ingredients used in layer mash feed are ground down into powdered form before being mixed together with protein meal and other nutritional supplements to form this basic powdered form of chicken feed, known as mash.
Layer mash provides all the same essential vitamins and minerals found in layer pellets, yet is easier to store and handle – providing more balanced diet for hens.
Crude fibre is a new topic in poultry nutrition, yet has earned itself a poor reputation due to a lack of clear nutritional value and energy dilution. However, practical trials using alternative raw materials such as lignocellulose products show that crude fibre can aid digestion by supporting non-cage housing birds to have less litter picking behaviour as well as supporting healthy and efficient egg production. Thus making this ingredient an exciting resource for layer nutritionists worldwide and possibly becoming one of the more commonly used raw materials alongside corn and soya in near future layers feed formulation.
