Chickens Every Day
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Chickens Every Day
Optimizing Chicken Nutrition: Feeding Tips with Baylor Lansden
Discover the secrets to optimizing backyard chicken health with Baylor Lansden, a seasoned livestock consultant from the Fertrell Company. Baylor's fascinating journey from political science studies in Louisiana to becoming a go-to expert on poultry nutrition in Pennsylvania offers a wealth of knowledge and practical tips. In our conversation, we tackle the challenges posed by sweltering Louisiana summers, where the heat can drastically affect feed intake and protein levels in chickens. With Baylor's guidance, learn how and why to adjust nutritional plans to improve chicken behavior and egg production, underscoring the pivotal role proper diet plays in managing poultry health.
Beyond feed adjustments, we explore the enriching benefits of free-ranging, allowing chickens to naturally diversify their diet and get ample exercise. We also delve into the decision-making process behind choosing quality chicken feed, emphasizing the importance of whole ingredients over fillers. Baylor shares insights on the positive impact of supplements like apple cider vinegar and Greek yogurt for enhancing gut health. With a balanced approach, we celebrate the joys of treating our feathered companions while avoiding the pitfalls of excessive sweets or starches, ensuring a healthy and happy flock.
Are we ready, pawpaw? Hello friends and welcome to Chicken. Every Day, a podcast for you, the backyard chicken enthusiast, and mine. Your host is my Pawpaw, gary, Gary Valerie of Senla Backyard Chickens. Here we have fun while sharing ideas and learning how to care for our foul-feathered friends. Check out our videos at Senla that's C-E-N-L-A Backyard Chickens on YouTube, tiktok and Facebook. So, without further ado, let's start today's show. How was that?
Speaker 2:Hello everybody and welcome to the show. I have a special guest with me today. I'm very excited to introduce this guy to you. His name is Baylor Lansden. He's from the Fortrell Company and these guys are livestock nutritionists. And I actually met him through my chickens and I had some issues going on with my chickens and I emailed him and he quickly responded back to me, helped me out with my birds. So then I begged him to come on the show and talk to you guys about it and we're going to talk about the health of our birds and what we can do to make them even healthier and happier. And he's going to give you a little bit of the bio. He's actually originally from Louisiana, which I find real cool to have found someone way up northeast like that. That's from Louisiana, baylor, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. Thanks for the invite.
Speaker 2:Let's start off and tell the audience.
Speaker 3:You know a little bit about you and what got you over to portrayal and some about the company. Sure, well, I just started out in the FFA as a kid. In high school I went into my undergraduate in political science. I thought I was going to go into law. I realized that was not the track for me. I went back to school for food security, which is basically like the study of the food system. Went back to school for food security, which is basically like the study of the food system. Through that realized I wanted to get back into practical agriculture. And then that's what drew me up to Pennsylvania from Louisiana.
Speaker 3:I worked on a research farm. I was a livestock manager on a research farm and then from there, fortrell hired me as a livestock consultant, trail hired me as a livestock consultant. So here, me and the other livestock consultants. We basically just consult on our products that we produce. So we produce a poultry neutral balancer, which you're aware of, and other mineral blends for livestock. So we consult on them and part of that consulting is building rations out for different animals. So the majority of our workday is constructing rations for various livestock.
Speaker 2:Someone will actually get in touch with you guys and say this is what I have on my farm and this is my conditions and what do I need to feed them, and you will build. That's exactly how it goes. Yes, well, it was almost what you guys did for me. What my issue was? It was very, very hot. We were having another Louisiana hot snap and you know we're having some hundred and seven hundred and nine degree days, and with our humidity combined with that over here in Louisiana, it just made it awful. And so I contacted Baylor and he was talking to me, said I needed a little bit more protein I remember correctly in my feed and a little bit more balance to some of the things that help them work, that protein. So what I did? I sent him the tags off of the four different feeds that are available in my area. He looked them over, he dissected them, he came back, said Gary, this is the one that you need, as far as all four of them together goes.
Speaker 2:I started with that with my birds and within about a week and a half I saw a difference, not only in their egg laying, but just in the way they were running around the yard being chicken and over here at Send Lawn Backyard Chickens, we want our birds to be chickens. My girls free range. Every day they have a blast out there. I think it's important if I can do this and it really really helped and since then we've kind of stayed in touch and went back and forth with things, especially with you being from Louisiana and knowing what we had up here for our weather. I really can't thank you enough. If my chickens could speak English they would probably say the same thing, but when they started feed them better, I'm taking all the credit for them right now but why do chickens in the heat of the summer like that, with mine especially?
Speaker 2:why did they need that extra little bit of bruce, the protein? Because usually we say 16 for laying hens and that's it yeah, sure, I think.
Speaker 3:Um, actually, when you think about it in terms of like yourself, when a person thinks about it, they can kind of see what I'm about to say. In themselves, that makes sense. Um, on a really hot day, um, even if you're looking at like a you know big steaming thing of jambalaya, if it's really hot and you've been working out all day, you may not want to I was trying to be relatable you may not want to really, like you know, go in on that. You may think, oh, I'd really prefer, you know, a cool drink of water and maybe a snack or something like that. So the heat actually just draws down the need for energy for all organisms, need for energy for all organisms. So, for humans, for chickens, whenever it's that hot, we don't need as much energy and we don't desire as much energy, because needing more energy creates more heat.
Speaker 2:So, necessarily energy, is it?
Speaker 3:No, but whenever a chicken is going after feed, it's going to be eating for its desired energy intake. So it's very hot. It wants less energy. While it's eating less energy, it's consuming less protein if your feed is, say, a 16%. So if we have a 16% feed, it gets really hot. It doesn't want as much energy, it eats less feed and then gets less protein. It doesn't want as much energy, it eats less feed and then gets less protein. So when we bump it up to a 19%, it's still eating for its energy, but it's going to eat more protein while eating that smaller amount of food. Does that?
Speaker 2:make sense. I've heard Jeff and Jeff Maddox. I don't know if Jeff is your boss or a co-worker or how all that is.
Speaker 3:Boss. Yeah, definitely boss.
Speaker 2:But I've heard him say on some other shows that birds eat more in the winter than they do the summer and it almost sounds counterintuitive because you know, you think that they're going to be more lethargic in the wintertime but it takes more energy to keep their body heat up and going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and again, I think we could probably see the same things for ourselves If we're out on cold days. You don't want a salad, you want a stew, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely I do. I've been there. Okay, well, someone's looking at the tag on a bag of chicken feet and you know they've got a mild climate or whatever the climate is. What are some of the key things that they want to look for on that food?
Speaker 3:Well, I'd say, like a typical backyard mild climate ration would be about 17% protein, could go down to 16, but 16-17% protein you do want a fair amount of fat in there just to help keep the burn healthy overall. So to help keep the plumage healthy, help keep the skin healthy, to really take in enough Go ahead.
Speaker 2:What I'm not going to know is fat. I mean, is it soybean fat, or you know?
Speaker 3:No, so on a tag it should just say fat, it should be a percentage of fat yeah, it should be a percentage of fat, and I would want it to be at least three percent and ideally five percent. That's also going to correspond to like usually a higher energy in the ration too, which is good. So we want that fat around three to five, hopefully about five, and then we want our fiber to be and this will usually say crude fiber on the tag. I would want that to be around five percent. Again, at least three, but five percent about up to six.
Speaker 3:That is one problem you'll see, especially in some conventional rations that use a lot of byproducts is you may have a really high fiber, so you may have fiber that goes up over seven percent, and we don't want that. Oh, okay, yeah, and the reason for that is again coming back to the human analogy. You know, when you're eating a bunch of fiber, you just can't consume as much food, which for us might be a good thing. Do that, though. Yeah, that might be something we should try out more often, but a lot of times you want your, your chicken, to consume more for production, um, so you don't want to limit its intake by high fiber. Makes sense, makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:I know through my own research and having chickens since I was a boy. Calcium is very, very important for legs. The relationship between calcium and vitamin D, am I correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there should be an adequate amount of vitamin D in your feed. It won't necessarily be listed on the tag because it's not required of a feed producer to put it on the tag, but there should be an adequate amount of vitamin D in a balanced feed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, and I would assume you know, if you buy, you know, from a reputable food company and you know you're going to get that in there, yeah, you should, you should, yeah, and so you know, over here in louisiana, you know soybeans are a big thing, you know, and and in this country, uh, they've raised a lot of soybeans. They raise a lot of cotton on there, so it's it's soybean. You know. I've seen soybean or soybean meal or soybean byproduct on feed bags before. Is that something good that I like for my bird?
Speaker 3:So soybeans are in there for a good reason, because they're a very digestible form of protein with a good amino acid profile. And amino acids are your listeners will know are parts to a protein, so they have a sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 2:No, I've. I found that interesting. I don't know they were like that. Okay, yeah, yeah so.
Speaker 3:So, um, the crude protein matters, but what matters more is the balance of individual amino acids that make up that protein. So in a soybean, we use soybeans because, um, there's not a lot of quote-unquote anti-nutritional factors. So if a soybean is properly roasted or the meal has been processed correctly, there's no limit to the amount we can use in a ration and you usually get a fair amount of amino acids in the correct balance that you need. There are some people that don't want soy in a ration. Those are for reasons because of phytoestrogens that are in soy, and I'll respect anybody's desire to take soy out of a ration if they want to. But I could say that it's much harder to formulate a ration without soy.
Speaker 2:I would think so. But what are some of the supplements that people can think about using Without alternatives? Or soy, it can be an alternative for soy. But I mean, I know, you know, from your, from your company, I buy nutrition supplements that I will mix into my chicken feed and it's just kind of a boost for them, and I forget the name of it. I know you could tell me.
Speaker 2:I don't do this, but I do this other supplement. Maybe there's some things that people can get locally if they want to add to their chicken speed, just to get them, you know, that extra little step.
Speaker 3:Sure. So if you want to build up the nutrition on your feed, if you want to do increase the protein, you could use something like a high protein soy meal or a fish meal. Fish meal really gets there faster because it's a high protein, like 62% protein, great amino acids so you don't need a lot of it to get the protein up. The only negative side of fish meal is that it can drive a bad taste in the egg if you use too much of it. So there's a good balance there and then other nutritional products will be like the poultry neutral balancer. Like you've been mentioning. That's our biggest seller here. That's the main driver of the company. See why?
Speaker 2:I like using it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, good. So that is actually just the basic mineral and vitamin pack to make up the ration. I tell people it's the kale and liver smoothie of the ration. You know, it's like all of the nutrients, all the things that are good for you, they don't want to eat.
Speaker 2:It's that on top of the grits and shrimp of the ration, I guess and guys out there, the nutrition ration that is that he's talking about comes in a bag and it's very, very dry. It's almost a very, very small pellet. But what I did not only I hope that this is proper to do that, because it takes a very little amount that you actually mix in the feed. I will. And when I mix it in the feed it helps it to cling to the food, to the, instead of, you know, slowly migrating itself down. Then I makes me feel better, makes it makes me think that they're getting it all through that batch of food, because I use an 80 pound two-quart feeder at a time, so I'll dump a whole sack in there, then I'll mix, mix through with with the nutribalancer.
Speaker 3:That's just slightly damp enough that I feel like it sticks to my pellet as long as it's being consumed fast enough that it doesn't mold or go off, then it's fine girls can eat okay.
Speaker 2:45 chickens out there. You think you never feed them. You know, yeah, they eat. Okay. My birds free range every day, so and I tell people all the time with either my videos or podcasts that I do that free ranging is a wonderful thing, you know, letting me the bugs and crickets in the grass and things like that. I'm assuming you guys think that as well. Now I'm not in an industrial setting where I want to just micromanage my feed to the nth degree to get the maximum weight gain or get the maximum egg layout. These are my backyard girls out here, so free ranging is still a good thing from y'all's point of view.
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah, in terms of what they're going to consume, it's going to be extra, you know, assume it's, it's going to be extra, you know, um, but it's probably going to all balance itself out because they're getting a lot of great exercise out there and they're getting a lot of nutrition.
Speaker 2:If they're eating some more calories while they're out there, it's all going to probably balance out with exercise so watching, watching chickens or at least watching my chickens is one of the funniest things that you can do sitting in the backyard. My wife will drink a glass of wine while she does it and we just can't help but laugh. You know, it's just something. Yeah, to back up a little bit to you know, whenever you and I first got acquainted with one another and I want to use that analogy between a $25 bag of feed versus a $15 bag of feed what can you tell that the audience is some of the biggest differences that those two bags are going to give you in the relationship between that and the chicken nutrition.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I don't want to always assume that the more expensive feed is better, because I'm sure that's not always true. But when we're looking at a higher quality bagged feed it's usually going to be fresher, hopefully. A lot of times that can mean it's a local feed not always, but you want a fresher feed. You don't want as many byproducts there because you want basically ingredients that haven't been processed as much so they've lost a lot of their nutritional value.
Speaker 3:So while byproducts might have a little bit of their space and by that I mean like wheat, mids, stuff like that they're a lot of time just filler, you know that have lost a lot of their nutritional value, so you don't want that to be the bulk of your feed. You don't want to pay for a bunch of fillers, basically yeah. So I would say if you could read the first few ingredients, it's almost similar. If you're looking at processed food, you want to see stuff like corn, soybean, soybean meal, wheat, flaxseed, stuff like that alfalfa. You want to see whole, recognizable ingredients for your first series on your ingredient list.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, I know if, with a food ingredient, if I picked up I don't know a bag of beans or something like that or something that's been processed food-wise, the way the FDA makes them label that and list things, the highest percentage is listed first and it goes down. Will a chicken label be the same way on animal food? If it's done properly, yes, it should be Okay. So what they see at the top is going to be the highest percentage in that mix that they have. Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep, so it'll typically be corn. If there's growing around, it'll typically be corn. After that, it should be soybean meal, soybeans and it's off from there.
Speaker 2:We all need to pay attention to the label that's on our food bag, don't we? Yeah, I think so. Two or three things that I like to do with my girls. I'll mix up some apple cider vinegar maybe one cup or so.
Speaker 2:Good for that, but I will do another podcast listening with Jeff and he talked about apple cider vinegar, but he also talked about Greek yogurt. You know, completely plain Greek yogurt, nothing added to it, no flavoring, anything like that, and how they both promote good gut bacteria by less room for the bad stuff to grow. You know they're not going in there and attacking the bad stuff, they're creating less room for the bad stuff to grow. They're not just going in there and attacking the bad stuff, they're creating less room for the bad stuff to grow. They're slightly different bacteria and helping slightly different ways to help your bird. Correct, correct, yes, I'm a good listener then. Yes, okay, let's talk about treats. Everybody loves to give their chickens treats. I will give mine a lot of worms. Our black fly larva People send me black fly larva for Christmas and shirts. I've never bought a chicken shirt. I'm wearing one today and I've probably got half a dozen of them in my closet.
Speaker 3:Chicken podcasters with chicken shirts seems to be a thing. I'm that guy.
Speaker 2:I will give my chickens apples, maybe in the summer, once a month. I take the core out of the apple because I know the seeds are not necessarily good for them and I know it's a sweet. The sweet's not the best thing for them, but I will do that once a month or so In the summer. I give them a little bit of melon as well, but I do enjoy giving them good chicken scraps from the house. We have leftover, you know greens and things like that. I don't give them rice, as much as I'm from Louisiana. There's usually no rice left in the house to give them for one thing, but I eat it all. But rice is a heavy start and why would I want to give them a heavy start when I don't want my grandkids to have that? You know it's not really not good for them. But what is it that we can feel okay about giving our birds.
Speaker 3:Yeah well, I would say something like those black, like black soldier flies mealworms, scraps of not that fatty meat or not very salty meat, all that that's completely fine and I would say you can give it in semi-liberal amounts.
Speaker 2:Wild or cooked meat, or either.
Speaker 3:I mean really, it's either I would say cooked, just because I would want to like of bringing a pathogen in, if you had some kind of.
Speaker 2:I keep a dust bath underneath my coop. It's a couple of feet off the ground and so I keep a dust bath under it, so year-round they'll have a place to do that and I move that dust bath out one day. And of course if I'm doing something in the chicken yard, chickens are all right there. I moved about three little tiny baby mice took off. They made it about five steps and you know what, although did that?
Speaker 3:you know that's about as raw as you can yeah, I think the rawest thing I've ever seen a chicken do was I saw a baby bird fall out of a nest into the chicken pen. They took the baby bird out.
Speaker 2:This summer I found the chickens all in a corner. I ran over to the corner. I didn't know what was happening. They had killed a snake. It wasn't a huge snake, I don't know, a foot and a half or something like that. They kept checking its head, they knew where to go and the snake was trying to get into a pile of bricks to get away from them. But it was like they ganged up and they that bad boy out. You know uh, it's true. You know they are descendants from dinosaurs that they are just amazing on what they do and and how. You know how tough that they they can be at the same time no, yeah.
Speaker 3:So yeah, like a little bit of meat, that's fine. Um, fresh vegetables and fruit. Honestly, you can give them quite a lot of that, because a lot of that is just water. Like so much of its water. You could, you could. Yeah, I think you can get away with more apples, for sure They'll be happy for you. I think the things exactly like what you were saying, the things that you want to limit more of, are things that are just higher energy, so things like a bunch of rice, a lot of bread, just foods that are heavy in total calories. You don't want to have as much of that just because you don't want to get them overweight, and you also don't want to give them a bunch of really high energy food that's going to take away from all the other nutrients that they're supposed to be eating.
Speaker 2:Okay, so as we start to wind down a little bit, while people out there who are looking to get into chickens, you know, I want to know what to feed my birds. Should I free range? Should I not free range? Which that you know? That's all kind of you know what you have locally going on. Why do people need to know from a from from your end? What would what you specialize in when they want to get into raising chickens?
Speaker 3:Well, honestly, it's been, I think it's now other than the fact that there's not as many people on the farm. It's easier than ever just because there's so many resources, so less people are growing up with it. But if you want to get into it, there's chicken houses everywhere. There's resources like this everywhere. There's a lot of information there. So I would say, honestly, take a little time to get some information, listen to podcasts, watch youtube videos and stuff like that, but then just jump right into it, because I mean, get a small but well-built chicken coop or build one of your own and go get a few chickens. They're pretty inexpensive. Get a good feed that again, you know. That's pretty available too. A fair feed is pretty available and then just get rocking and rolling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know I tell people relatively often. You may think a $25 bag of feed is expensive, but if all you've got is three or four chickens, that's going to last a couple of months, and especially if you've got them free range on top of that, it's going to last even longer. So it's really not an expensive thing to do. Some of the poorest people in the world raise chickens and do so successfully. It doesn't have to be this extreme adventure. One more thing I wanted to mention Recently this summer, and not from my local feed supply, but I got some feed from a big box store. I had feed mites in it.
Speaker 2:I didn't realize it until I put them in there in in my my two quarts feeder. And then, you know, a few days later I went and got me a big scoop out because I was going to ferment the feed. I like to do that about once a week and when I took that scoop out they were just running everywhere and I noticed the bottom of my feeder. It was mostly dust where these things were eating. I started researching. I cleaned out the feed and I replaced it with with different feed. But if I understood my research correctly that the feed mites weren't necessarily bad for the chicken, they would eat them, but they're also consuming the nutrition that we want to have our birds it's exactly.
Speaker 3:It's that they're going through and eating a lot of starch, a lot of protein, and just cycling it into their own grass or in food and then their own cells and then they're just dying and they're just reducing the total nutrients of the feed over time, especially if the infestation has been going for a while. If it's a fresh infestation, they really haven't done much and it's really not that bad and they'll eat the mites themselves. But yeah, if it's been in a bag and they've been working on it, yeah, I would say it's not a good deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for my birds it actually ended up being two bags that I went through, so it was probably at least a four-week process before I said, oh, at least a four-week process before I said, oh, I can't deal with this anymore. And one of the fixes for that, if you can't change who you get your feed from, I was told to put the feed in the freezer for two weeks.
Speaker 3:You know and go for it you know, yeah, if you have a bag that's just got a little infestation, put it in the freezer. That's a great way to kill them off, cool.
Speaker 2:So what would you like to kill them off, cool. So what would you like to tell the audience about the Fortrell company and how they can get their hands on some of your products and how they can learn about your product?
Speaker 3:Well, what I would say is basically, we're here. You know you can email us, so you can email livestock at Fortilcom with any questions. Yes, sir, and we have a pretty good presence on Facebook, as you know, so you could contact us there and we can answer any questions that you have about our products, but also just feed and livestock in general. If you want our products, we do have feed and livestock in general. If you want our products, we do have an online store that includes shipping. It doesn't have all of our products, but it has a fair amount of them that can be cost effective for smaller amounts, like if you're a homestead or a backyard person. If you're looking for more, then you can contact us and we'll hook you up with a dealer that could get you a bigger, larger amount of our products.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I know that your nutritional supplement, I get it at a 10 pound bag at a time it ain't like three months. Yeah, yeah, really does a great job. Well, baylor, I can't tell you enough how much I've enjoyed having you on the show today. You are a wealth of information and such a gentleman to be able to do this. The audience is going to have a great time whenever they listen to this and they're going to learn something. Thank you again, have a wonderful day and have a wonderful holiday you too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you, have a good Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1:Bye. That's all we have time for today. I really hope you enjoyed listening to the podcast. Be sure to watch our videos. So, on behalf of my Papa, gary, and me, sylvie, thanks for listening.
