History of chicken feed

Did you ever wonder what poultry keepers fed their flocks before the modern feed mixtures came on the scene?  Feeding Poultry was published in 1955 by G.F. Heuser, who had spent the last forty years researching poultry nutrition, and his book is a fascinating peek into the era during which commercial feeds were being developed (but while poultry keepers still remembered the old ways).

Heuser began his book by looking at chicken care from a hundred years prior.  In the middle of the nineteenth century, chickens were being kept in small flocks on diversified farms, so they mostly fed themselves, with a bit of corn or other grain tossed in once or twice a day.  Some farmers would let the hens into the garden for an hour or so of monitored bug control, and they generally had free rein of the barnyard, where the chickens happily pecked apart manure from horses and cows.  A slightly later nineteenth century text mentioned feeding chopped and scalded clover hay.  Heuser reminds us that this laissez-faire method of chicken-keeping worked at the time, but that the hens didn't lay terribly well, concentrating most of their efforts on the spring months.

As we entered the twentieth century, chickens began to be bred for high production and were crammed into small spaces in large numbers.  We also started to stress the birds by raising chicks unseasonably (such as in late winter to ensure the pullets would lay their first fall).  The changes in poultry setups necessitated a similar change in chicken feeding.

Commercial chicken feed mixtures began to be used in the 1910s, and scientists continued to perfect their formulas over the next several decades.  We were just learning about the differences between animal and vegetable proteins and were discovering many vitamins and minerals, so it became clear that chickens thrived on milk because of riboflavin and needed cod liver oil when kept in confinement because they couldn't make their own vitamin D.

I'll be regaling you with more highlights of Feeding Poultry this fall and winter, whenever a rainy day tempts me to dip back into this thick but easy-to-read book.  Stay tuned, or pick up your own copy and read along.

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Chicken feed

I don't remember my grandparents (also in SW Va.) ever offering anything other than feed corn and oyster shells. Otherwise, the chickens grazed all day. Plenty of eggs.

Comment by Elizabeth — early Friday morning, September 28th, 2012

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Living on little feed

Elizabeth --- I think that systems like that work best with diversified farms. If you've got horses and cows and so forth, the chickens have scads of insects to go after! So I guess the moral of the story is to make a homestead more diverse if you want to feed chickens less.

Comment by anna — at noon on Monday, October 1st, 2012

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