 chickens aren't grazers. They are seed eaters, but ma'am you're not providing this full enough nutrient level. They're not, they'll eat, but they don't get all they need. Yes ma'am, and you use the grain, but I'm seeing some of these people say you turn them out on grass and they're going to balance their ration. When our birds go out on grass we don't cut back the feed. They get the same amount every day in the same levels. Anything they get out there is a plus. Primarily what they're getting is a little bit of chlorophyll to brighten those yolks. They're getting sun on their backs and here's the thing a lot of people want and they're getting an awful lot of animal protein. A chicken is an omnivore. You go out there tonight and you lift that feeder and that bunch of baby mice run out from under that feeder. Don't you get caught between your old hens and those little mice? Because they need that meat and they will eat it. In the wild state the chickens we work with are descended from the red jungle fowl. Essentially that bird in its environment lived on whatever it could find from roughly three inches below the ground to two feet above the ground. Baby birds, eggs, and that sort of thing. And that's where the old timers came in and they played these games. They had dairy waste. And they had eggs that didn't hatch out of the incubators. And I'll pass one on to you real fast. You yield to the temptation to buy those baby chicks down the tractor supply store. And the one time they don't have any chick starter. We'll go home and feed them what they've been eating for the first 21 days of their existence. Boil your eggs, chop them up, put them in the brooder. No more than they consume can consume in a 15 minute interval and do it four to six times a day. That's soy free but you're feeding animal protein. Milk and dairy product. A lot of chickens and hogs were raised on skim milk and open pollinated corn. But you've got to watch those protein levels and you've got to keep checking on them, especially what we're coming through right now. We've got aflatoxin in this corn. We've got some pretty shabby corn coming in. And it's never been in my lifetime where it really should be. So I'm giving you the arguments and these Amish boys. I saw a hand go up. Okay. I think you're taking me down a road here and I'm kind of glad to get at it. If I say Harvey Usery, do you know what I'm talking about? Okay. Yes. Okay. All right. Insect protein. It's animal protein. And we're not really sure what all they are getting. For example, when they eat a grasshopper, they're getting a lot out of that exoskeleton. And I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think we still, we yet know what all the vitamins are out there. But we know that's an essential. There's keratin in there and there's other products. Harvey Usery and you're seeing a lot of this right now about feeding maggots to cut feed costs. Well, the next time you hear one of these maggot talkers, you ask him one question, one question only. How does he keep the E. Coli out of the birds and the eggs? Because maggots are a primary harbor of E. Coli and Salmonella. They are filth born filth eaters. And I know if my grandmother went to the house and she kicked over a little pile of chicken manure and there was a three maggots, I knew what I was going to be doing the rest of the afternoon. And we can talk about soldier flies or whatever flies you want to. But folks, when you're scooping roadkill and putting it into pots to grow maggots, I think you better say to yourself, I'm not doing the job. My chickens need they should be out there harvesting their own. And we're not growing them. I have the same qualms about growing earthworms. If you have an environment conducive to earthworm growth, you've got some shakiness. You've got some dampness and you've got some feed stuff that aren't totally being used up. You've got the potential to harbor as many good things bad things as you do good. So let mother nature do it as much as you can and realize that depending on where you're at, they're going to have to come inside for a good long time. In Missouri, it burned up this time. They weren't grass to eat. These Canadian boys were getting their birds outside two and a half months a year. And that was the importance of what they were doing was they were trying to bring as much into the ration as they could because of what the birds would encounter on range. And that makes a very hard ration to build. Now, I've got a friend out on the West Coast that's working real hard right now. And they're doing things with peanuts. And they're doing things with cottonseed cake. And they're trying all kinds of things. But what you have to remember is with most of these substitution products, they're going to have to go through some kind of processing to release all of the nutrients they have. A ration is pelleted, not just for your convenience. Pelleting increases the nutrients in a feed stuff by three to 5% because of the heat and the compression. And if you make these rations too vague and too dished jointed, you're going to find out what my Canadian friends did. They were feeding cracked grains and three kinds of beans pouring out into the troughs. And the chickens were playing picking and choosing. And grain to chickens is like candy to children. Maybe even more so. A lot of people and I'll make a statement now and I'll make I'm sure I'll get some of you. Best thing you could do today is go home and say I'm never going to feed scratch grain again. Because we use it wrong. You put it in there half and half. The chickens will stay in fairly good shape. Egg production will go down because they're not eating the nutrient dense nutrient rich feeds. This is the other challenge. We're so used to thinking about rations by putting tons together. Good laying hen of the light breed bleep four ounces of feed a day. A heavy breed six ounces. A baby chick a fraction of an ounce. They have to be nutrient dense bite after bite of the same consistency. And that's the challenge grinding and mixing. Now the economics of on farm processing can kind of go against you. To maintain a tractor and an old standby grinder mixer right now the minimum rule of thumb is you've got to turn a hundred ton of feet a year to make it profitable. Now I'm sure very few of you are feeding a hundred ton. But you're talking about a two thousand dollar grinder mixer bought used and hooked to a ten thousand dollar tractor. And I've got a car that leaks oil. And my mechanic says well Kelly it'll be five hundred dollars to fix it. Five hundred dollars will buy a lot of oil before that. And you you won't need that before the car war is out. Fifteen hundred two thousand dollars pay for a lot of trips to town. Let your local people do the grinding mixing. I believe in this plug in and make your local elevators work for you. Rostin Purina is putting some nutritional specialists back in the field for poultry. And they're working on some plans. They're using a lot of vegetable protein. Matter of fact they're even playing merry gold in their rations right now to get the yellow color up. But the point is is when you do this you're going to have to realize it's going to be a slow transition. And you're going to have to be back checking on the quality of these inputs right along. My Canadian friends were using as their third grain wheat. And all of the feeding instructions in the United States are for red hard or soft wheat. And we learned low and behold in Canada there's a lot of white wheat. Now white wheat is processing wheat. They were getting a lot of it as a byproduct. But what we did when we went to studying white wheat is bred for specific roles in the baking in the pasta industry. And some of that is only meant to test about 10% crude protein. So they were going with the different varieties and they were going with a richer grain. They were using a lot of wheat. Wheat has to be handled carefully. The same way barley will get you a break on it. Barley will come into a ration pretty well. Barley has to be cracked oats another good poultry ration that you're going to have to force them on to eating. They don't like oats. And yet 60 years ago, one of your basic baby chick feeds was roll oats. You're going to have to kind of induce it in there gradually. Now a key to this, I think, is like I said, everyone is going to have to find your own path to Jerusalem on this one. And you're going to have to make these changes slowly. I see too much of this. But we make a sudden flip overnight in livestock rations. We'll change brands. We'll go with a different brace grain. We'll make a different addition. If you're going to make a change of any consequence at all, allow at least two weeks of time to do it and start out replacing no more than a fourth of your basic ration and then gradually build up over that time. Otherwise you'll start cause gastric distress and uncertainty. And the animals will not respond in kind. And one last point now, and I think this is kind of important. Most of us are working with what are called industrial poultry genetics. If you're using Cornish cross birds, they're coming out of a commercial hatchery. If you're buying factory run buff Orpington's or anything, they are bred to an industrial standard. They have generations of development behind them for a certain type of ration. And when we ask them to do something different, they're not going to respond. I was told that Joel Salatin lost 700 Cornish cross broilers in that heat wave this summer. They did not come out and forage. They're not bred to do that. These you get your Strombergs, your Murray McMurray catalog, and you order out those red sex link or those red bullets performance red bullets, they're bred to a factory standard. They were bred to go into a factory sex farming situation. The challenge is on I honestly believe this, if you're going to naturally naturalize and simplify your rations, you're going to have start breeding the birds that'll work on