Why Is That In My Feed-Part 1

This episode is a replay from one of the most popular Poultry Keepers 360 Livestreams.  It features Jeff Mattocks talking about common feed ingredients and why and for what purpose they are used.  This episode is sure to educate you about the feed you're giving to your birds.  This is part one of two parts.

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Transcript

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Rip Stalvey 0:00

Hi! Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. I'm Rip Stalvey, and together with Mandelyn Royal and John Gunterman, we're your co hosts for this show, and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy, and productive flock. This episode is an audio replay from a previously recorded Poultry Keepers 360 live stream. It features Jeff Mattocks talking about feeds and the ingredients used to make them. It will help you better understand the feed you're using to feed your birds. Now, here's Jeff.

Jeff Mattocks 0:41

We're going to talk about looking at feed tags, what on a feed tag what the generic terms and so on are, and then we'll look at the different grains and what they actually are used for in, in the feed. So I give you a, the 10, 000 foot view of what feeds are about. So the why's and what for is feed. When you're looking at your feed tag, The big manufacturers, and I don't need to name names, you can go, you'll see it for yourself, right? When you're reading tags, and this is really frustrating for me, is, code names like Processed Grain Products, Processed Protein Products, Processed Grain By Products, Processed Protein By Products, right? Those are in there, the reason they do that is, today if corn is cheaper than wheat, They're going to put in more corn and tomorrow if barley is cheaper than corn, they're going to use more barley, right? So it allows them to change the ingredients every day or whenever they want to and they don't have to tell you what they changed, right? And you've been raising chickens long enough, you've opened up bags and say this don't look the same as it did, three weeks ago or a month ago or the last time I bought feed they're doing it to reduce cost, hold cost down, increase their profit, or if there's a poor lack of availability for a certain grain, it allows them to do substitutions. It's a broad term, so you don't know what's in that processed grain product. It could be corn, oat, wheat, barley, could be all of them. May only be one of them, and you don't know which one it is, and they're not going to tell you.

Rip Stalvey 2:22

Maybe I'm wrong for thinking this way, but when I see these things on the feed tag like processed grain products, or grain byproducts, or protein byproducts, to me, I view that as a red flag that's maybe not as good quality of feed as I need to be looking for. Am I wrong for thinking that way?

Jeff Mattocks 2:43

I wish everybody felt that way and here's the thing, you don't know for sure, right? Again, it's a code name, right? It's a top secret, insiders only, you don't know what they're using, right? Whether it's Neutrina by Cargill, whether it's Purina, whether it's, doesn't matter, right? They're all play the same game. And as the commodity market changes, so does those ingredients. In later slides, we'll show which ones are the by products where they fall into and things like that. So what I really like, what I hope after tonight folks are going to go look at is when you see a tag that says, corn, wheat, barley, oats, it's actually naming out, The ingredients for you. Those feed manufacturers can't change that formula without changing that tag. So they're locked into a specific formula, which is really awesome for you because. You find a feed that you like, and the label says this is what's on it, it's always going to be there. The other thing that's nice about that is feeds have to be listed by, in descending order. The largest input in that feed is always first, the second largest second, etc., right down the line. It can tell us, it can tell me what the percentage, I can figure out what the percentage of corn is in there, what the percentage of soybean meal is in there, or so on. And, eventually, if you keep listening to this show and we blab on, you're going to know how to be able to tell that too, because we're going to cover it someday. Feed tags are really important, I'm a label reader no matter where I go, whether it's the grocery store, the feed store, it doesn't matter. I'm a label reader and it's important to me and I want to know,

Rip Stalvey 4:32

Excuse me for butting in here, but I just can't help myself. When I see those terms like corn, wheat, barley, oats, soybeans, whatever in there, that tells me that I'm getting a fairly consistent feed. And I can tell if they're starting to change the formulation. It used to drive me absolutely nuts when they would change the formula on the feed. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes I could see it, I could smell it. I've even been known to taste it. Yeah, I'm that screwy, but this is something I look for every time that I'm seeing what the ingredients are.

Jeff Mattocks 5:11

Rip, you're not screwy for tasting feed. I taste feed everywhere I go. Every time I go on to a farm or a feed mill or whatever, I'm testing and tasting and, look, people, pick it up, taste it. If it doesn't taste good to you, why are you feeding it? Alright, sorry, I'm going to get off my high horse,

Rip Stalvey 5:28

that's alright, but you can also tell if the feed is fresh if you taste it.

Jeff Mattocks 5:33

And there's nothing in there that's going to hurt you, right? Absolutely we hope there's nothing in there that's going to hurt you. If you get sick from tasting your chicken feed, then we got a problem.

Rip Stalvey 5:43

I'm not talking about eating a bowl full for breakfast or anything.

Jeff Mattocks 5:47

Hey, a really good chicken feed? I wouldn't mind taking it in the house, adding a little hot water to it, make me a little chicken feed oatmeal and, that's what it should be. That's what it should be like.

Karen Johnston 5:59

I'm not eating no raw corn.

Jeff Mattocks 6:01

Why? You don't need sweet corn.

Karen Johnston 6:04

Alfalfa meal? Yes, they cook, I eat sweet corn after they cook it. I know that's weird, but, yeah.

Jeff Mattocks 6:10

All right. What's on a feed tag? You have to have so the top of the feed tag has to say, Like the company, it doesn't have to say the company's name, but usually it'll be the brand name and your title. But it has to clearly state what type of animal it's for and what class. So chick starter, chick grower, layer, etc. So that's, that has to be at the top. You've all seen that. If you see a generic term, that should be a red flag for you. If it's not there a lot of people share with me the tags that they're feeding, right? They'll message me, email me, whatever, say, what do you think of this feed, right? You see it all the time on Poultry Breeder Nutrition or Poultry Keepers 360. And, I tell them what I see, I don't hold back, I don't sugarcoat it. If you're a sensitive person, don't ask me that question, because I'm going to be blunt. Okay, so these things have to be on the tag, and then you have the guaranteed analysis comes next, right? Now, if there's a medication declaration has to be in there, supposed to be in there between what type of feed it is and the guarantee. So it should be highlighted if it's medicated. So then you go on to the guaranteed analysis, right? And the guaranteed analysis, these are the levels that are supposed to be in there. You need to read the little fine print that says minimum and maximum. But for a poultry tag in the United States, what is legal is you have to have protein minimum. You have to have the fat minimum. You have to have the fiber maximum. Okay. You gotta have the lysine minimum. You have to have the methionine minimum. You're going to have the calcium both minimum and maximum. You have to have the phosphorus minimum, salt minimum and maximum, because too much salt in a poultry diet is a bad thing, and you'll have to have sodium minimum and maximum. And I forgot to put the maximum in there, but you, the sodium has to be, these are required by law. There's a group of people out there that says you have to do this, right? This is what you have to put in on your label. And they control all of us in the feed industry. So then down below that. Is gonna be your ingredient listing. Again, there's some generic terms that can be used, but not typically like we said on the previous slide, are you gonna see processed grain products, processed grain byproducts, etc. But, we talked about that a little bit, but the ingredients are listed in descending order from largest to smallest. If the if the label was made correctly, I see a lot of labels that are not in accordance with the laws that we have to follow, and you may run into some of those too now. I would not encourage you to run up to the feed mill manager and say, this label is not right. This label is not right. They're probably going to ban you from the store. And, or, label you a heretic behind your back. So just don't do that. Just know that it's not, but if they can't label their feed correctly. What's the chances that they could make their feed correctly? So just ponder on that a little while. And at the bottom, every bag has to say who the manufacturer or the guarantor is for that feed including their address. Not a complete address. It's supposed to be a mailing address. So it'll be like post office, box town, etc. That these are the requirements for a feed label. That's, that's pretty cut and dry.

Karen Johnston 9:41

I have a question.

Jeff Mattocks 9:41

Go ahead.

Karen Johnston 9:42

So you said the United States, right? I feel like I see that there's a lot less on the Canadian feed tag. Oh, it's

Jeff Mattocks 9:48

horrible up there. Yeah, we don't even, for our Canadian friends listening, I feel sorry for you, but they don't have to list hardly anything. They have a much shorter list of guarantees. Amino acids aren't on there. They don't have to put their ingredients on there. They're supposed to make them available by request, but we've had probably a dozen, followers of PK360 and other places that have requested it, and they don't get it, right? Yeah, they just get blown off and ignored, that's a whole other, and then when you get to Mexico, it's another world, and when you get to the Philippine tags, it's a whole other world. It's every place is different, but, I can talk what is required here in the U. S. because I have to live by those laws. Here at Fertrell.

Karen Johnston 10:35

Alright, so one more question. Is there any size of an operation that gets labeled like this? Here's my example. There's been more than one person who has asked me to make feed for them and sell it to them and I've always said no. Now I have an even bigger reason to say no, right? Because I would have to have a label that has all that on it.

Jeff Mattocks 10:58

If you're a business that sells feed or animal supplements or something like that, right? Mule City feeds in your neck of the woods or something like that, and they seem to be great people, so I'm not picking on them, don't, but they're registered with the State Department of Ag and any state, and we have to register in any state that we sell into, okay every state that I sell, Any of my animal nutrition products, I have to register with that state and I have to pay what they call tonnage fees. Based on the number of tons that I sell, I have to pay them a tax. People don't know this. Now, for you as the farmer wanting to help out a friend, if you chose to do that, which I know you won't, so nobody ask her, but you can, right? There's no, you don't have to abide by that. You're not selling it. Okay. You're

Karen Johnston 11:54

mixing it.

Jeff Mattocks 11:56

And you know what? And Karen, if you came to me and said, Jeff, I want you to make this custom mineral mix for my chickens, right? So that's fine. We talk about what it is. You write a letter that I keep on file that says you requested this custom mineral mix. On a custom feed or mineral mix, I do not, you, I do not have to put a guaranteed feed. analysis on it or an ingredient list. It can say custom mix, for Apex Poultry Farm, period. It still has to have who made it down at the bottom, but at the top, when it says custom and I have a letter on file that says you requested that custom, then I no longer have to follow those guidelines. So for people who are getting a custom feed, There's not a requirement for them to put a guaranteed analysis or a list of ingredients on that, but you should have already, that's the whole purpose of the letter on file, right? You sat down and worked it out. I want these ingredients. I want it made to this specification. This is what I want, and so you already have that relationship. You already know what's in there. Yeah. And if you are getting a custom mix made by somebody, You can always request what's the analysis of it, right? What are you using? What's, you're in control with your custom mix, but not so much for over the counter feeds.

Karen Johnston 13:18

I just feel like so many people are thinking that they've found the perfect small little tiny niche producer that's making feed. You know what I mean? Don't get this information, but maybe that's okay because they're working together with them to create the diet.

Jeff Mattocks 13:33

Yeah, I got lots of people that go to the local farmer down the road who has his own grinder mixer. There's still a few of these out there and they'll take the supplements, they take the formula, and the old farmer's more than happy to help them out, makes a custom mix for them. They drive home with their feed and that's awesome when that happens, right? And everybody's happy, but it's few and far between, it's less than 1%. Everybody likes convenience, we drive down to Tractor Supply, we pick up our bag of whatever and off we go and, people don't check dates, people won't read labels, people just, oh, hey, there's four layer feeds here on the shelf. Which one's cheapest? And that's what they get and they go. Okay, and I'm not picking on anybody out there, I'm just saying this is what I hear almost every day of my life here at, talking to chicken people.

Karen Johnston 14:25

Our people would go to the store and say, which one's the most expensive? But that's not necessarily the best either.

Jeff Mattocks 14:31

If you know the ingredients and you know where it comes from and, but look, even if you don't know all those things, there's nothing wrong with taking a tongue full of chicken feed. There's nothing in there that should hurt you if it doesn't taste good and appealing or fresh and, then I don't know, why are we doing it? I find that talking with a lot of folks, and helping them with their feed a lot of folks don't understand why different ingredients are used. Okay, what are they actually in there for? Or, everybody knows the common stuff, pretty much, but they don't know, beyond that. In a commercial feed, when you see processed grain products, that could include corn, wheat, barley, oats, milo, sorghum, which is grain sorghum, rye, triticale. So those, you know Those that I just rattled off, those are all energy feeds, okay, those are all starches, or carbohydrates to get the energy level to the desired level. Your processed protein products are going to be, almost always, is going to be soybean meal, solvent extracted soybean meal, that is the most heavily traded protein source out there. Depending on where you live and what the availability is, could be corn gluten meal, which is 60 percent protein corn gluten feed, which is only 20 percent protein. Corn distillers, dried distillers grains, sometimes it's called. You're going to see that on a lot of labels. And those are coming from the ethanol plants. I'm not a big fan. Further north and west you go, you're going to see peas canola meal. You get down into Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, you're going to see cottonseed meal. Cotton is not a good chicken feed. You don't want cotton in there. Peanut meal, pretty readily used. Now, sunflower meal is showing up all over the place. There's a little bit of a shortage right now. But, proteins can be made pretty much from any of the oil seeds. Even linseed, which is flax. Anything that they're pressing the oil out of. But, when you see meal, alright, they've pressed the oil out of it. You Believe it or not, okay, people don't understand this. They don't, they can't wrap their head around it. The meal that goes into our animal feeds is the byproduct, okay? They are pressing oilseed because they want the oil. There's a higher value in oil than there is in the residual meal. For a hundred years, during the industrial revelation in the United States, and we started pressing oil seeds and doing things like this, but they've been looking for ways to use byproducts from other industries to, and they always push it off on agriculture, whether it's for fertilizer, whether it's for animal feed, whatever, right? We've been stuck with the byproducts and the leftovers. For close to 100 years, so it, the Industrial Revolution was what, 30s, 40s, somewhere in there, Rip, you were around in those days, weren't you? I'm just teasing, I'm just teasing, I'm just teasing.

Rip Stalvey 17:37

I feel like it.

Jeff Mattocks 17:39

Yeah since that time frame, they've been looking for places to go with, by-products, and they've been running the experiment, right? They feed a little bit of this, they feed a little bit of that to the animal, see if they die. See how well they perform. And see if they can figure out how to fix them so the animal can actually utilize them. Just know that going into it. When you see the word meal it's a byproduct. Where oil has been removed, or something's been removed. So like corn gluten meal is when they pull off the corn syrup. For cooking and sweeteners and so everything's every, all the meals are a byproduct. So we move on to process grain byproducts, right? So what does that word actually mean? Most of the time it's wheat middlings. So when they mill wheat for flour to make white flour, not whole wheat flour, there's outer skin layers on the wheat, the outer shell that comes off and those are known as the wheat middlings. Same thing happens with soybeans. So when they're making soybean meal, to press the oil when they do that first crack and roll the outer skin of the soybean will fly off, and they collect that, and it goes into the feed stream primarily as a filler and a fiber. Depending on where you live and if they have access to it, there's a product called bakery waste or bakery meal, and bakery meal is a waste. Unsold, mispackaged, overrun, outdated bakery products. Okay, could be little Debbie cakes, it could be loaves of bread that didn't get sold, it could be anything that falls under the category of bakery. And they'll bring that back, and they grind it up, they process it, and they turn it into a meal. They don't always remove the packaging, just so you know. If you look really close, you'll see little pieces of plastic in there and whatnot. Wheat bran the wheat middling is the outer layer, the wheat bran is like the second layer. Closer to the heart of the wheat berry some places you'll find that if it's been separated out, and there's other byproducts out there. Like I said, the most common is wheat middlings it's cheap, it's easy, it's, it's been widely used. It's a very inexpensive filler, it looks good on paper, and for all of you who are in love with pellets, it's You have to have wheat middlings to make a good hard pellet. The harder the pellet, the more wheat middlings that are in it. Again, I don't sugar coat it much. That's the bare bones truth of how you make a pellet.

Rip Stalvey 20:19

Jeff, I've got a question that's related but while we're talking about grains, this is probably coming up in some people's minds, and that's what grain can be substituted for what, and I'll explain what I'm talking about. Breeders of white skinned birds like Orpingtons, Marans, are afraid to use Corn, because they don't want to turn the skin or the legs of the shanks or anything yellow. And so there is an aversion to feeding corn in the diet. Now if they wanted to go out and make, say, a scratch feed, what could they use to replace corn in that scratch feed mix? And I'm mentioning that because it's probably the most common thing folks associate with

Jeff Mattocks 21:08

it. Wheat's fine milo, grain sorghum's fine. You're not going to get the pigmentation. There's no yellowing in that. We can make a combination of wheat, milo, and barley. Wheat, milo, and oats. Depending on where you live, if you're down in Louisiana or Texas where they grow a bunch of rice, we can use rice as part of that yeah, it it's not hard at all to make a scratch grain or to make a feed around that without the yellowing factor of corn. And I think if you keep the just for the listener's sake, and I'm going to throw this out here so you, you know too, Rip, is, I would tell you that there's, corn is probably, Forty to fifty percent of every chicken, commercial chicken diet out there. Because it's the cheapest grain to put in there. So they're going to balance that amount of corn. Then they're going to put in there at least three to 400 pounds of wheat middlings. You're probably looking at about 800 pounds of corn, 400 pounds of wheat middlings, about 400 pounds of soybean meal. And then they're going to fill it up with, fluffy, big word type stuff. Just you feel like you're getting more for your dollar, that's going to be. So it's going to be 800 900 pounds of corn, and then 400 500 pounds of wheat mandelings. Depending on what protein level you're after, then the soybean meal will be anywhere from 400 600. It's not, when you do something long enough, you can reverse engineer a feed tag and know what levels the ingredients are going to be in. Yeah. I lay awake at night thinking about wonder what kind of crap they're putting in that feed today. So I, and I shouldn't be that way, when you're passionate about something, that's what you do. Yeah.

Rip Stalvey 22:53

Could we talk about oats for a minute? Is there a desired form of oats to give to chickens? I don't know if you can get it. Whole oats, you can get clipped oats, you can get crimped oats

Jeff Mattocks 23:04

Ha. Yeah, you can get oat groats, naked oats, clipped oats, steel cut oats, you can get whole oats, you can get jockey oats, you can get Swedish oats, you can get Canadian oats. Yeah, people just get carried away. Look, I'm just looking for, in my formulas, I'm just looking for a plain old whole oat. It doesn't have to be jockey oats, it doesn't have to be, But, a lot of times, all you can get are what they call horse oats, which are a little bit more plump and they're a little bit more expensive. If you're not in a grain region where you can go find these things, you're stuck buying it at Tractor Supply or, wherever. I'm not picking on Tractor Supply.

Rip Stalvey 23:42

Horse oats is the only thing I found down here.

Jeff Mattocks 23:45

Yeah, that's fine. I don't, it don't matter. There's not a big difference. The horse oats have been screened and graded, so you're getting these big fat plump oats, and they look really pretty. A little bit easier for the horses to pick up, again, the industry is marketing to a specific species to make them feel special. And if we have horse listeners tonight, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step on your toes, but, there's the truth of it.

Rip Stalvey 24:12

And for all our breeders of white skinned birds, there are some alternatives out there you don't have to mess up your birds by feeding them corn.

Jeff Mattocks 24:22

But you're not going to get it from a commercial feed, right? Look, a commercial feed is so locked into corn, right? They don't have a choice. Corn is king. It just it's everywhere, it's easy, it's cheap.

Karen Johnston 24:35

And to be fair, there's corn in all my stuff. My holder diet is 35 percent corn. So even when you're mixing your own, you're still using a whole lot of corn unless you're instructed to not. Yeah.

Jeff Mattocks 24:46

And that's not a lot of corn. I see diets roll in front of me that are 70 percent corn, Karen. Yeah, the real bare minimum bottom of the barrel type feeds is going to be 1, 450 pounds of corn, 450 pounds of soybean meal. Then you start putting in your minerals and your vitamins and stuff like that and your little additives. That's all that's in there, corn and soybean meal, right? And there's no there's no room for anything else and yeah, now yours is, 35 percent is a wonderful number.

Karen Johnston 25:19

So a corn free feed would be healthier and easier to accomplish than a soy free feed would.

Jeff Mattocks 25:26

It's easier to accomplish. I don't feel the need to be necessarily corn free, but, people do and that's fine. I kinda, I like to work with what the region of the country grows the best. And try and utilize those grains when I can, if you want to, if you're selling eggs for table eggs and you need good yolk color, you're going to be dependent on corn and alfalfa meal, things like that. So it's, there's no real way around it.

Rip Stalvey 25:55

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to laugh there, but when you said what grows the best in your region and down here, that would have to be golf courses. Yeah.

Karen Johnston 26:05

Kudzu. Can you use kudzu?

Rip Stalvey 26:07

We don't have kudzu in Florida. Not in my part of Florida.

Jeff Mattocks 26:11

As I promised earlier, I put like all the energy grains on one slide for you so you can easily see how they compare. So look, I didn't put all the nutrients on there, look, I'm tracking somewhere close to 60 different nutrient levels when I put together a feed formula. These are the most critical, okay? So it's just for your understanding, but. Barley, for instance, is going to be anywhere from 10 to 12 protein, and it's going to be low fat, it's 1. 9, 2 percent fiber typical. These are national averages, okay? You may be in a place where this is completely different, and that's fine. These are just national average numbers that we use, they're actually international numbers that I use. Fiber level at 5, energy, this is measured in kilocalories per pound. So anybody that's gotten a ration from me, you'll see an energy calculation. So we have to add all these up based on the pounds used, etc. So you got your calcium, you got your phosphorus, I had to abbreviate phosphorus, otherwise I couldn't get all this on one slide. Lysine, methionine, for the Dedicated listeners, I've beat this horse to death there's just, I've talked about lysine and methionine forever. So you look at corn, it doesn't matter whether it's cracked or whether it starts out as whole corn that's ground national average we're looking at 8%, 3. 5 percent fat, 2. 9 percent fiber good energy, really high energy because it's got a huge amount of starch in it. And with the low fiber, so fiber comp, fiber affects the energy. cause when we look at oats later on, you'll see a way lower energy. So as the fiber goes up, the energy goes down, and you can see that in the rice down there. Rice should be a higher energy, but rice actually, with that fiber at 10% is it knocks it down again. almost no minerals 0. 01 on calcium, 0. 25 on phosphorus. These are not helping, these are actually hurting the diet, if you will. But it, pretty much every poultry diet I'm looking for a phosphorus at least. I like 0. 75. I'm lucky to see a 0. 6 or a 0. 65 in phosphorus, right? Again, looking for lysine levels at close to 1%. These are 0. 22. So you can see they're not helping the diets whatsoever. Corn doesn't have a lot of lysine, doesn't have a lot of methionine. It's only there for the energy just only there for the energy. And millet, little bit better on protein not a lot of millet grown, you got to be in that Kansas, Colorado area. It's not, we don't make a lot of millet and most of the millet that is, grown. is going into like wild bird seed or specialty feeds. So it's rare to see millet show up in a chicken feed, but it's out there. You live in the Midwest or in the South grain sorghum known as Milo. It'll run. 10 11 percent protein the higher yielding is going to be 7. 5, again, I'm using national averages. Fat level 2. 8, fiber 2 it's the best replacement for corn, actually, as far as energy goes, because it has a really good starch, so it's around 1, 500, birds really like it. Got a little bit better mineral profile, but the amino acid profile is worse. So again, everything on here is only for, it all goes into the pot as far as calculation goes, but these are the primary ingredients that we look to for our energy, to achieve the required amount of energy. That's purely what they're in here for. I've had people contact me and say, Hey, I'm going to increase my corn is that going to hurt my protein? Yeah, it's actually going to drag your protein down. But people, I've had people who think that corn will increase the protein and mess a chicken up. It's not.

Karen Johnston 30:17

But, the energy is what makes them stop eating though, right?

Jeff Mattocks 30:21

Yeah. That is according to some studies and university data, we are told that chickens eat for their energy needs. And I think this is true of probably 95 percent of all chickens. When they hit a certain calorie count, they're no longer interested in eating. I think that there's a 5 to 10 percent out there that just like to eat. They're like me. They're going to just keep eating until they're full, right? They can't help themselves, right? But the majority of chickens eat for their energy needs and they're going to stop, when they hit their calories required for the day based on temperature, living environment, all that.

Rip Stalvey 30:57

Thank you for joining us this week, and before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released, and they're released every Tuesday. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at Poultry Keepers Podcast at gmail. com and share your thoughts about the show. We'll see you next week.