Chicken Mash
Answered by: Kerry Hackett
Question from: Jack and Nancy Cutting
Posted on: February 16, 2006

We have 8 laying hens that we have been giving organic laying mash, cracked oats and hen scratch. The last bag of laying mash we got has the following ingredients: low fluorine ground rock phosphate, menadione nicotinamide bi-sulfite. The feed we bought before this last bag didn’t have that stuff in it and this last bag the feed was a different color. We would like to make our own feed so we were wondering if you had a recipe for laying mash.

Chickens are not my area of expertise but I believe that they, like any other living entity, do best when on a diet of organic, unprocessed food. Having said that, I did a bit of searching for you; therefore what follows were the best choices I could find. A search on the internet brought up an organic supplier of farm animal feeds whose mash for laying hens contains corn, roasted soybeans, barley, wheat, flax meal, oats, minerals and alfalfa with a total of 16.5% protein. Juliette de Bairacli Levy’s book, "The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable" also has quite an extensive recipe for laying hens that includes various types of grain, dried berries, nuts, herbs and other greens. One other resource mentions the inclusion of fresh ground flax, and fresh greens once a day with with kelp once a week. Please also see the entry "Laying Hens and Nutrition" on this website (www.Richters.com).

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