Feeding chickens in winter. Feeding chickens Harvesting nettles for feed

Hello, dear readers! Every poultry farmer understands the importance of a balanced diet for chickens. Today we will talk about feeding chickens with nettles. There are a huge number of products that can be useful for the feathered family. Therefore, it is worth using all the available wealth of nature to make the chickens’ diet as balanced as possible.

We will talk about one of these useful products that black lice love very much in today’s article. Consider feeding laying hens with nettles in winter and summer.

Nettle is an excellent product for feeding birds. Firstly, it costs nothing, and secondly, it is rich in nutrients that chickens need for good health.

Let's look at what this weed contains.

1. Carbohydrates and protein. Moreover, 75% are carbohydrates, and the remaining 25% are protein. This combination is very successful, because protein helps maintain and gain muscle mass, and carbohydrates provide the necessary energy.
2. Among the macroelements that this tasty herb contains are potassium in large quantities, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and sodium. This is all that every laying hen needs to form testicles.
3. Among the microelements present, the most beneficial are iodine and iron. These are the components that are responsible for the proper functioning of the immune system and promote growth.
4. And of course, this plant contains. Most of all it contains vitamins A, C, PP, as well as several from group B.

Feeding an adult herd

Adult flocks are fed fresh during the “green” season. If the chickens have the opportunity to graze in green thickets. But, it is much more effective to give the black-billed plant a plucked plant, or rather its leaves. Here are the basic feeding rules.

1. As for the quantity, you can feed nettles to chickens in such quantities as your flock can eat. There are no restrictions. In some farms, birds are kept on almost nothing but green food in warm weather, and they are healthy.
2. It is important to understand that the bird only eats the leaves of the plant - it is not interested in the stems. But, picking leaves separately, especially if you need a lot of them, is not very convenient. Therefore, a practical solution can be applied - tying the plants in bunches. In this form, the black choughs will peck off the green part, and it will be easier for you to dispose of the stems.
3. You can make a vitamin cocktail - grind fresh leaves and add to a wet mash. But it is important to understand that during heat treatment most of the beneficial substances are destroyed.

Feeding nettles to chickens

Grass in the diet of chickens. It is not only nutritious, but also versatile. It can be used with equal success in the diet of both adult flocks and chickens. This is one of the few types of greens that they are allowed to eat.

But, it is necessary to give greens to children only in washed form. Considering that babies still have weak beaks, all their food is served crushed to make it easier to eat.

How to prepare nettles for chickens for the winter

How to prepare nettles for the winter? Feeding chickens with nettles is a very profitable and convenient way, because such a product can be used all year round. It is necessary to prepare for the most difficult season in the life of birds in warm weather. In winter, the feathered flock requires increased attention, which, unfortunately, is much more difficult to achieve in our climatic conditions.
But if you try, it is possible. Experienced poultry farmers prepare vitamin feed throughout the summer. How to prepare greens for future use?

• The first method is the most convenient, but it will require special equipment. Fresh and juicy nettle bushes are picked in advance, thoroughly dried, crushed and sent to the granulator. After this, ready-made granules are obtained from dried grass, which must be stored in a dry and cool place. Moisture is unacceptable, because it can cause all the food to become moldy and become unsuitable for food. In winter, the finished granules are steamed with hot broth, and a moist mash is prepared with them, which laying hens eat with great pleasure.

• The second method is a little simpler, and it is the most popular in poultry circles. At the height of the season, the plant is mowed in large quantities, allowed to dry completely and ground into a fine powder, resulting in grass meal - rich in vitamins and minerals. Studies have shown that during the harvesting process through natural drying, raw materials lose only 5% of nutrients, so they remain just as healthy throughout the year. But such flour can also lose its properties and even become dangerous if storage conditions are violated and the humidity in the room where it is located increases.

Product benefits

1. Firstly, it is worth noting that such food goes to poultry farmers absolutely free. Thanks to this, you can significantly reduce the costs associated with maintaining a feathered flock.
2. Thanks to this vitamin supplement, chickens can show the highest levels of productivity. It is especially good to feed laying hens in winter so that they lay eggs more actively.
3. Nettle helps chickens grow and develop faster, and also promotes the formation of the immune system.
4. And the most important advantage is that it can be used all year round, both fresh, dried or concentrated. It perfectly retains all its properties, so it brings maximum benefits to birds.

Adding the product in question to the diet of the winged family has many advantages and not a single contraindication or disadvantage. Irreplaceable greens are available to every poultry farmer, and do not cost anything, and besides this, they can be prepared for future use. That's all that can be said about this wonderful herb!

Various local feeds must be prepared for poultry. This is not difficult to do, because poultry (especially chickens) can easily and quickly adapt to different foods, and geese are primarily herbivorous birds.

The birds are fed: a) grain waste and grain - oats, millet, wheat, rye, barley, corn, peas, lentils; b) residues from technical production - wheat bran, mill waste, brewer's grains, dried beet pulp, cakes, meal; c) animal feed - skim milk, buttermilk, meat and meat-and-bone meal, wheat flour, blood of healthy animals, frog meat and caviar, beetles, caterpillars and other agricultural pests, earthworms, ant eggs; d) vitamin and succulent feed - fresh nettle, clover, alfalfa, vetch-oat mixture, fodder cabbage, red carrots, silage, hay and hay dust, baker's or brewer's yeast, duckweed, beets, turnips, turnips, rutabaga, potatoes, cabbage leaves, lettuce, spinach, spruce and pine needles, rowan, leaves of alder, aspen, hazel, yellow acacia, poplar, ash, maple, willow, birch, dandelion, etc.; e) mineral feed - slaked lime, chalk, eggshells, shells, bone meal, gravel, charcoal, table salt.

Young poultry farmers can prepare a significant amount of feed on their own during the spring, summer and autumn. For chickens, you should prepare for the winter (per head): 10 kilograms of potatoes, 10 kilograms of root vegetables (including preferably 4 kilograms of carrots), for ducks - 15 kilograms of succulent feed, and for goose and turkey - 20 kilograms each.

Hay is made from young grass or waste; The grass should be mowed before flowering or at the beginning of flowering. To retain more vitamins and nutrients in the hay, the grass should be dried in the shade quickly, preserving the leaves. To do this, the cut grass must be immediately removed under a shed, in the attic, in a barn, and dried here in the shade.

When turning hay, you should be careful not to lose the most valuable parts of the plants - the leaves, which contain more proteins and vitamins than the stems.

For the winter, you need hay per head: 3 kilograms for chickens, 5 kilograms for ducks, 10-15 kilograms for turkeys and geese. For poultry, it is good to prepare silage from clover and alfalfa leaves, young grass, cabbage leaves and other plants. During the winter, you can feed silage per head: 6 kilograms for chickens, 9 kilograms for ducks, 15 kilograms for geese and turkeys.

Birds readily eat quinoa mixed with other foods. Harvesting tree brooms for poultry should be done in June-July. Brooms should be dried in the shade and stored in a well-ventilated area at low temperatures. Frogs are fed fresh in summer and dried in winter. Various insects (chafer bugs, turtles, locusts and others) can be fed either fresh or dried.

May beetles appear en masse on trees as soon as they become covered with leaves. This is the time to collect beetles. For this purpose, on a lazy sunny day, spread out a burlap sack, a sheet, a tarpaulin under a tree, climb onto the tree and shake it; beetles fall from the tree. Beetles can be dried in an oven at a low temperature; dried beetles will be good animal food for winter feeding of poultry. To breed worms, you can set up worm hutches: make beds or ditches on well-manured soil and cover them with boards; Under these boards, worms will crawl onto the surface of the bed. The beds should be watered.

In wooded areas, you should definitely feed ant eggs to poultry, especially young birds. It's very easy to prepare them. The ant heap along with the ants is placed in a bag and the contents of the bag are scattered on a smooth area cleared of grass under the rays of the sun. Branches of fir trees, burdock, etc. are placed around this area. To protect the eggs from the hot rays of the sun, the ants will drag the eggs under the only shelter - a spruce forest, burdock, etc. After all the ant eggs have been transferred, the shelter should be removed and collected ant eggs.

Duckweed sometimes covers the surface of ponds with weak flowing water like a solid green carpet. It is convenient to collect it with a mesh bucket through which water flows out. Ducks eat duckweed in large quantities, and other birds also readily eat it. It can be dried in the shade or in an oven at a temperature of 50-60° C. Dried duckweed can be added to the birds’ water in winter.

It is also easy to prepare rowan berries, which provide valuable vitamin food.
Good animal food for poultry can be obtained from shells, which can be collected in large quantities in ponds, lakes, and rivers. The collected shells are thrown into boiling water and boiled for about an hour. The shells of the shells open, and the “meat” can be easily removed and fed to the bird or dried for free. The shell shells are crushed and fed to the birds as a mineral supplement instead of chalk and slaked lime.

Feed is fed to chickens in the form of dry or wet mash. Animal, green, succulent and mineral feeds are added to crushed and uncrushed grains, ground and floured grains. All feed must be mixed very well beforehand. Juicy and vitamin-rich food should be finely chopped. Carrots, beets, cabbage can be pricked on nails, not high from the floor, and the bird will willingly peck them.

What is the price for European firewood? Here is a link to the catalog with prices. What is known about

Hello to all DIY lovers!

Owners who keep various poultry (chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, etc.) in their yard know that winter is a very harsh time for poultry.

Moreover, poultry needs vitamins especially acutely in winter. At the same time, there is a very simple (and absolutely free) way to provide the bird with vitamins by feeding it dried herbal brooms prepared over the summer.

And, perhaps, the most valuable in terms of vitamin content are dried nettle brooms. For example, our chickens peck nettle brooms with great pleasure in winter.

However, you need quite a lot of such brooms. I must say that about a dozen chickens (like ours) easily peck a broom of 15-20 nettles in two days. Considering that our winter lasts almost five months (since November and March can actually be considered winter months), then for the above number of chickens for the winter it is necessary to prepare approximately 70-80 nettle brooms.

This is quite a large number. Although there is usually nothing complicated in preparing brooms, and there are no problems with raw materials, due to the fact that nettle grows everywhere in large quantities.

However, since the amount of work is quite large, since you have to cut nettles throughout the summer and early autumn, tie them in brooms and dry them, and then put them in the shed in the attic, I am constantly trying to simplify and make this process easier.

As a result, in previous years, I tried to come up with some devices for the convenience of attaching brooms, but in the end I settled on the simplest method, namely tying bunches of nettles with rope ties and hanging them on nails from the ceiling of the barn for drying.

However, this method has a significant drawback, which is that during the drying process, the nettle stems dry out very much and decrease in volume, as a result of which even a very tightly tightened knot weakens, and the nettle broom can simply slip out of the knot, fall and crumble.

That's why this year I decided to try using rubber bands like these instead of ropes.

Such rubber bands (they are also called rubber bands for banknotes) are sold in almost all office supply stores and are quite inexpensive. They are good because they can be used in everyday life for many purposes, for example, they are very well suited for closing jars of jam with paper lids.

So I decided to try using these elastic bands to bind the nettle brooms before drying, because due to their elasticity and resilience, they should shrink as the nettle stems dry out and thus hold the nettle bunch firmly.

However, another problem arose: how to hang nettle bundles?
Therefore, I decided to make special wire hooks for this purpose.

To make the hooks, I needed pieces of aluminum wire with a diameter of 2 mm and a length of about 20 cm, as well as a hammer, pliers and an anvil.

First, we align the wire pieces on the anvil.

Then you need to make hooks from these segments. I decided to do this operation not with pliers, but by securing a small steel conical rod in a vice and using it as a mandrel for making hooks.

This method is better because in the process of making hooks on a mandrel using a hammer, cold hardening occurs, that is, surface hardening of the material and the hooks become stronger and more elastic.
The top of the hook can be bent into a ring for easy hanging.

On the other side you can form a hook.

And this is how I got the hook.

But, I have already made several such hooks.

You can make one and a half to two dozen such hooks.
Well, now it’s time to try this method of hanging nettle brooms.

We collect the pre-cut nettles into a bunch and put an elastic band on it, folded into three or four rings.

Then we insert a hook and hang it.

And now there are several brooms hung in this way.

It turned out that this method is really simple and quite convenient. However, practice has revealed one drawback of this method. It turned out that it was very inconvenient to fold the elastic band into three rings and put it on the nettle stems while wearing thick rubber gloves. However, this operation cannot be done without gloves, since all hands may be stained.

Therefore, I decided to make a special device - a mandrel, which would make it easier and simpler to put an elastic band on a bunch of nettle stems.

I made this setting from a small plastic garlic sauce bottle by cutting off part of the neck with the stopper, for which I needed scissors, a utility knife and sandpaper.

I cut the neck cut evenly with scissors and carefully sanded it with fine sandpaper.

This mandrel works as follows.
First we put an elastic band on it, folding it into three rings.

We move the elastic band we put on to the very edge of the edge.

Then we put a few more elastic bands on our mandrel, also moving them towards the first elastic band. Thus, you can fit five to seven rubber bands on the mandrel.

Then, using the thumb and forefinger of the other hand (without gloves), push the elastic band closest to the edge of the mandrel. She jumps off and ends up on a bunch of nettle stems.

Now we remove the mandrel from the broom stems and our elastic band ends up right in the right place so that it doesn’t even need to be adjusted.

Everything is very fast and simple. All that remains is to stick a hook into this broom and hang it on a nail for drying.
Similarly, they are put on nettle brooms and other elastic bands from a mandrel. Only in this case you need to move the remaining rubber bands on the mandrel closer to the edge each time. After the rubber bands on the mandrel run out, you can “charge” it again with new rubber bands.

In general, it turned out that thanks to such a frame, putting elastic bands on nettle brooms is quite simple, easy and quick.

So if anyone has a need to prepare dried nettle brooms for poultry, you can use this method.

And that's all for now and have a nice summer!

In the summer, you can get for your birds seeds of wild plants that weed, choke out cultivated crops, trees, shrubs: elderberry, ash, hawthorn, horse chestnut, oak, beech, linden, yellow acacia, elm, rowan, viburnum, birch catkins. This is an excellent winter food for poultry.

Aquatic vegetation for feeding poultry. We have a lot of fresh water bodies, distinguished by a wealth of soft aquatic vegetation: salvinia, elodea, pondweed, duckweed. This vegetation is also allowed to be used as food for poultry, even in a dried state. Aquatic vegetation contains a lot of protein, various vitamins, minerals, and microelements. For a small number of poultry, greens from reservoirs can be removed from boats and rafts with a pitchfork. Before feeding, algae, not counting duckweed, are crushed and added to the mash in approximately the same quantity as the greens of the sown herbs.

Tree leaves for feeding poultry. Leaves of trees and bushes will also be excellent food for birds. They are collected in central Russia in June and July in thickets, swamps, ditches and other waste areas.

The leaves are dried directly on the branches, which should be tied into small brooms, in the shade under a canopy, in the wind or draft, and subsequently stacked in a dry room at a height of 20-25 centimeters from the floor on poles. In winter, brooms are hung from the walls of the poultry shed or ground into flour and placed in mash.

Shells for feeding birds. It is also possible to collect shells for domestic poultry, but before feeding they must be boiled: added to a bag, immersed in boiling water for 0.5 hours, then finely chopped or minced, fed in a wet mash for 15-20 grams per chicken. Chickens are given shells instead of a tenth of the grain feed. It is not recommended to give the water in which shells are boiled to birds. After cooking, the meat is dried in the sun or in an oven and stored in a dry place.

Silage for feeding poultry at home. Silage is also prepared from grasses and washed garden tops. Excellent silage comes from corn stalks with cobs of milky-waxy maturity together with clover, alfalfa, fava beans, carrot tops, cereal grasses, and fodder cabbage. This combined silage is very suitable for poultry. You just need to consume the non-coarsened parts of the plants. To speed up the maturity of the feed, add 5% sugar beets and 10-15% red carrots. The mass for silage is crushed to particles 0.5-1 centimeter in size. Poultry feed can be siloed in large tubs or pits.

Spruce and pine needles in feeding birds. In winter, when domestic poultry suffers from a lack of vitamins, spruce and pine needles will do. They stock it in November and December. In the spring and summer, the needles contain an order of magnitude more essential oils, resins and tannins, for this reason the positive qualities of the feed decrease. When harvesting needles, shoots (foots) are used, which are well preserved under snow cover. To do this, they are spread out on compacted snow in a layer, a layer of 40-50 centimeters, a layer of snow of 20 centimeters is poured on top, then again a layer, a layer of pine needles, etc. The entire prepared mass is covered with half a meter of snow crust and covered with straw.

Silage is a valuable component of the winter diet of turkeys. It is rich in vitamins, has a beneficial effect on digestion, and increases the digestibility of feed nutrients. Silage is prepared from grass, root vegetables, potatoes, melons, corn cobs, grass flour, sugar beet tops and carrots, using all the greens from the garden plot obtained during harvesting (cabbage leaves, beet and carrot tops), as well as rutabaga, turnips, pumpkins, zucchini, overgrown cucumbers, watermelons, melons, etc. Good silage is obtained from annual and perennial legumes, cereals, and grain crops. Corn cobs at the stage of milky-waxy ripeness are also highly nutritious. Don’t neglect garden waste: apples and pears that are not suitable for food can be placed in silos mixed with other ingredients. The technique for preparing it is simple.

In a wooden trough, greens and everything else are chopped with a cleaver or a sharp shovel so that the size of the particles does not exceed 0.5 cm for chickens and ducks and 1 cm for turkeys and geese.

The resulting mass is placed in a silo or in a barrel, poured with sour milk (1-2 l) on top and compacted well. A circle of plastic film is placed on top of the silage, then a circle of wood and a bend weighing 20-25 kg. When the juice stops secreting, the cracks between the barrel wall and the wooden circle are coated with a clay solution. After this, the barrel is stored in a cool place. When they start using the silo, the barrel is carefully closed again each time.

I used 40 liter plastic milk flasks. To chop grass and prepare silage, I purchased a KR-01 root crop and grass chopper. Ordered from the manufacturer Uralspetsmash, delivery by transport companies. It makes making silage very easy.

You can also use rowan in winter. Its ripe berries are an excellent vitamin food. They contain twice as much carotene as carrots. They are fed to chickens in the autumn-winter period at a rate of 5-7g per head per day.

It is very good to feed birds with vitamin hay. It must be prepared in sufficient quantity and always of good quality. Moldy hay can cause poultry poisoning. The best hay is obtained from leguminous grasses (clover, alfalfa, vetch, sainfoin, etc.) mowed during the budding period. At this time, plant stems contain the greatest amount of nutrients and relatively little fiber, which is poorly absorbed by the bird’s body. Slightly inferior to bean hay is well-dried nettle, the leaves of which contain carotene (provitamin A), B vitamins and many others necessary for poultry. The grass intended for drying is mowed and on the same day it is tied into small loose bunches and hung under a canopy or in a well-ventilated attic. You can dry the grass by scattering it in a thin layer on the floor. In all cases, care must be taken to ensure that it does not become warm and moldy. Properly dried vitamin hay is usually dark green in color, has a pleasant smell, without signs of soreness. Store it in bags in a dry, dark place. In the light, the vitamins contained in dried grass are quickly destroyed and lose their nutritional value.

For the winter, it is advisable to prepare brooms from trees and shrubs. Good quality brooms are obtained when they are harvested before leaf fall, when the leaves, in addition to carotene, contain proteins, starch and other nutrients and useful substances. For brooms, choose branches up to 1 cm thick that are not affected by mushrooms, aphids, etc. Cut branches are collected in bunches and hung freely in the attic or in some other room with natural ventilation. In winter, they are hung in the poultry house at such a height that the bird can freely reach and peck the leaves. First, the brooms are dipped in warm water. This makes the leaves soft, and the bird is especially willing to eat the greens.