The Great Feed Experiment
In this episode, Jennifer Bryant and Carey Blackmon revisit Bryant’s Roost’s 2022 side-by-side feeding trial using three widely available poultry feeds. The trial used Coturnix quail, but the conversation shows every poultry keeper how to compare feed labels, watch bird performance, and separate marketing claims from useful nutrition information.
INSIDE THIS EPISODE
What the feed trial revealed
- What three widely available feeds revealed side by side
- Why crude protein is only one part of the label
- Which nutrients and ingredients deserve a closer look
- What quail performance can teach every poultry keeper
-
Carey: 0:00
Hi, and welcome to the Poultry Nerds Podcast. I'm Carey Blackmon, and I'm here with my co host for the show, Jennifer Bryant, and we're here to help you figure out how to raise the healthiest, happiest, and highest quality birds possible.
Jennifer: 0:24
Well, Carey, have you and I ever really discussed our feed, my feed experiment? Because I don't think we were friends when I did it.
Carey: 0:30
We started ain't going to say we, I started asking you lots of questions about quail shortly after you did your feed experiment and seeing the level of detail that you put into that was one of the things that told me, Hey, this lady knows her crap. She's broke it down to. The top three feeds that she has available, then how much it is, how much it costs, how much it takes, she weighed it all, weighed the birds and everything else. This lady knows her birds and that's what started it.
Jennifer: 1:10
I wanted to know the birds, so I wanted to make sure that I was doing the right thing and the only way to do that. Is science.
Carey: 1:21
That's right.
Jennifer: 1:23
Can you believe that was in 22 when I did that? Golly, I'm looking at the date on it and gosh, that was a long time ago.
Carey: 1:30
It doesn't really seem like it seems like it's been longer than 2 years. But the dates are there.
Jennifer: 1:38
Yeah, they are. So for our listeners back in 22, I, if you haven't seen my setup, you can go to my Facebook page. I've been posting pictures of my setup the last few weeks and I have the ability and the space to really dial it in, to be consistent. To have that laboratory type atmosphere should I so desire and these eight weeks that I set aside in July of 22, I desire to have that laboratory type atmosphere in the barn. I did do this experiment on quail just because they grow so much quicker, but very easy to translate. The information over to any species, because it really wasn't about the bird is so much as the quality of the feed, which is what I was looking at.
Carey: 2:40
Yeah, and, this actually also started me on my rabbit hole of studying poultry nutrition. And you doing it with quail lets you hit all aspects of their life in a short, shorter time span than it does with chickens or turkeys, which to be honest, the science behind that is what got me interested in quail is because I've spent a lot of time breeding chickens in my life. And I've wondered, you take this and pair it with that and this trade offsets that trade. Where, what trade is more dominant in the hen or the rooster and people assume stuff, but there's really no, not a lot of reputable people behind giving those answers and for science, you can use quail to answer a lot of your poultry questions. Quicker,
Jennifer: 3:37
so they're behind a lot of laboratory studies, and we're not going to get into 10 full hat territory here. But, it is what it is. There is people and companies that sponsor studies. And that's going to influence because you've got to have a paycheck to make a mortgage payment. I did not have any influence was not paid to do the experiment. This was just me just getting my nerd on wanting to have the information for my Myself and when I set out to I had no idea that people would still be talking about it. I still see people on Coturnix Corner or other pages saying, Oh, I read about this experiment. I can't remember who did it. And then 40 people will come up and say, Brontrus did it. Brontrus did it.
Carey: 4:32
And you're like, I just wanted to know what, how my coil reacted and how I could make my bar not smell so bad.
Jennifer: 4:40
Exactly. So all I did was take. At the time I was using Tucker Milling, which if you don't live in the Southeast, you might not have ever heard of Tucker Milling. It's a company out of Alabama. Not far from you. I don't think.
Carey: 4:58
Yeah, they're about an hour and a half north of me.
Jennifer: 5:01
And I like Tucker Milling. It's a quality food. I have no issues to this day. Still use it. Still in my barn. Buy it by the pallet. I put them against Kambach. Which is a national brand out of Ohio, right? Okay. Quality feed that a lot of show breeders use on their show birds. It's carried by Chewy. Pretty much anybody can get it in the United States. Maybe further out. I don't know, but for sure anywhere Chewy FedEx delivers, you can get it. And then the old standby at Tractor Supply, which is Purina.
Carey: 5:42
Yeah. You know this, you got two majors. And one, semi regional local type deal.
Jennifer: 5:51
And there's a lot of people in different areas of the country that have those regional companies, their version of Tucker, essentially, that I can't get. So this, like I said, just started out as something. For me, I had no idea it was going to turn into what it did turn into so I had in my barn, I had 3 hatching time brooders set up on 1 stack. So that they got the exact same water. The heaters in their brooders were set exactly the same and they were no matter where I set them in my barn. Obviously, they had the same environment because they were in the same stack. I call them stacks. I don't know if that's the right word, but
Carey: 6:42
that's what I call mine.
Jennifer: 6:43
Yeah because I wanted it to be as uniform as possible. I didn't want anybody to say you withheld water on this one and didn't on that one. And I want it to be as uniform as possible. And it started with the eggs. These all came out of my farrow cages. I took without rereading everything, I want to say I took two eggs out of each breeder. Set for each brooder, they were all, everything was exact, is exactly the same as I could possibly make it. And then from the get go, I just fed them separately. That's all I did. One got set, fed the Purina, one got fed the quail starter from Tucker. And one got fed the turkey starter from Combok, cause they don't really make a quail starter. It's their turkey starter. Yeah, they got
Carey: 7:32
a, their game bird starter.
Jennifer: 7:34
Everything was non medicated. And then I just let them grow and kept, I did weigh what I fed them every day when I filled up those, the troughs on the outside of those breeders, I weighed it. Kept track of it and kept track of how much how much the feed actually cost at the store, broke that down by ounces and divided it up and then figured out how much, how many died. In each brooder and how much each bird cost me when it hit I think it was 56 days. Yeah,
Carey: 8:13
I see where you have like at 38 days, you weighed them and let's see, you did the mortality at age six weeks in your study and
Jennifer: 8:27
you only had
Carey: 8:27
one or two
Jennifer: 8:29
Somebody actually asked me to go forward again. So I took those birds and made breeders out of and checked the fertility rate of those breeders. How did their eggs fare their offspring fare? And so that is, I know you've got the thing in front of you is let's see. Second page, it's on there. The fertility rate is on there and it's pretty telling. I think but before we get into those numbers, I'm going to tell you something that I'd never thought that I would learn while I was doing this feed experiment. So we all know that manure stinks as a general rule, right? Yeah.
Carey: 9:14
Crap smells like crap.
Jennifer: 9:15
The Purina. brooder was horrible in a way that it's hard for me to explain on a podcast. The smell that just came out of that one brooder the moisture content of the manure was runny, almost, not like syrup, but But definitely wetter than anything else and it didn't fall through the holes, and so the birds were stepping in it, and I have never had bumblefoot on this property, ever, until I fed Purina.
Carey: 9:53
Wait, you had quail on wire? And you had Bumblefoot?
Jennifer: 9:57
I did.
Carey: 9:59
I didn't think that was possible.
Jennifer: 10:00
It is.
Carey: 10:02
But I will say that if you look at the feed tags, and that's something that I'll tell our listeners, if they want to email their feed tag to poultrynerds at gmail. com, we will check their feed tag out and explain to them what some of the stuff is, but Purina uses a lot of byproducts. And when you're dealing with a pellet, you have to have some. Prop products in there because that's how the pellet stays hard and close like compacts together But when you use excessive ones to keep your prices low that It gives you smelly manure.
Jennifer: 10:43
Okay. It doesn't it keeps your cost low. It may not keep your prices low. So that's another thing.
Carey: 10:49
It's the upfront cost.
Jennifer: 10:51
Yeah. So the, here's something else that I learned and when I ended up publishing it, I didn't realize. Also here in middle Tennessee, our Purina bags are 40 pounds. That is not necessarily the case everywhere, because some people said that in their location, that they were actually getting 50 pound bags. But so if you are shopping for feed. Then you need to pay attention to that. Make sure somebody is not trying to swindle you with a 40 pound bag because I honestly did not pay attention when I went to tractor supply and bought them. It wasn't until I was moving them. In the barn and was actually paying attention to what I was doing that I realized, this bag feels different and that was the point where I realized it was only 40.
Carey: 11:45
So I'm not going to name the brand name because I ain't like that. But I was talking with someone in a Facebook group about a particular type of feed. And it was, I've done a thing where I've been collecting feed tags and I have an Excel spreadsheet that has all the data in it and how it compares and this, that and the other. And I was like this particular feed is this, it's this level of protein. It's this level of vitamins dah. And this guy was like, I don't. Think you're right. And I said, buddy, I love you, but I'm looking at the feed tag. And so we got on into Facebook messenger and I sent him what I was looking at. And it happened to be a picture that I had taken at tractor supply. So he goes out into his barn, takes a picture of the bag. It takes a picture of the feed tag and it's the exact same feed like that company's name. And it's this and this formula, if you will, but the protein level was different. The vitamin level was different and the pounds was different. My feed tag came from a box store in Bessemer, Alabama. His came from, ironically, the same box store. Out closer to Washington state. So that was really weird because I would think that this company's name and this would be the same everywhere. But I have found out while studying nutrition that companies will adjust recipes geographically. Because the nutritional requirements are different based on climate. So that was a little awkward tidbit that I found out that day. So that's 1 of the reasons why when we say we're in the Southeast where I'm in Alabama, she's in Tennessee. That's the stuff that we see here. If you see something different where you are, that's why.
Jennifer: 13:58
I can see that.
Carey: 13:59
Yeah.
Jennifer: 14:00
In preparation for talking about the experiment here tonight, and considering that I did it in 22, I went on director supplies website to get an updated pricing because of inflation and everything else. And something interesting here. So the Purina in 22. Was 2499 for 40 pounds. Today. It's 2599 for the same 40 pounds. Now, my feed store loves me. They're fantastic. But I did ask her to give me market rate and she said I'm just going to tell you what we sell it for. And the Tucker milling has not changed 1 penny and the is actually 3 less per 50 pounds than it was in 22.
Carey: 14:53
it's probably because you buy so much
Jennifer: 14:55
I guess that's possible.
Carey: 14:57
A lot of that, they have their profit margins, every company does, but. If I open a store selling goods and services, I'm not going to get the same price as Walmart does. So the more product you move, the better price you're going to get.
Jennifer: 15:13
So the turkey starter, to my knowledge, you still cannot buy it on Chewy. Now you can buy their layer and all of their other popular ones, but I don't think the turkey starter is as popular. So yeah, the flush
Carey: 15:25
is, I think it's like game bird flush.
Jennifer: 15:28
Yeah.
Carey: 15:29
And the game birds, they don't have that on Chewy. I've looked in the last couple of months.
Jennifer: 15:34
Yeah. Um, you're going to have to call your local, if you wanted to price this out locally, you're going to have to call your local dealer and you can find a dealer locator on com box website, and I know people are asking me like, I can hear it in there while they're driving in their cars. What is she saying? It's KAMBACH, K A L M B A C H. Yep. And then Tucker Milling is 1825 today. She, I don't buy it. So that's not my special price. That's just her board price. 1825, and that's a 50 pound bag. So the reason why I'm telling you this is because people assume They see 99 at Tractor Supply and they get their points and whatnot. They think they're getting a good deal. It's actually 0. 63 per pound. And Tucker Milling is 0. 37. Almost half is Tucker Milling. Yeah, and then the combat came out to 52 cents back then. So it would even be less today. It would probably be closer to 4849 cents,
Carey: 16:45
but, if I'm looking at it, I see that your average weight. Your, the Combock was a little lower than the Purina and the Tucker, but at let's see, that would be eight weeks. I believe the Tucker birds were at a hundred and twenty four.
Jennifer: 17:07
Go down one graph. That one was it just,
Carey: 17:10
okay, here we go. Thirty eight days.
Jennifer: 17:12
Yeah.
Carey: 17:13
You got all of them way, all the females weighed except for the Tucker milling was 262, but the other ones were in the two seventies on the size, the males, about the same. They were in the two forties with the com Bakken and Purina and high two thirties with the Tucker. So, they're really close. I would say within. Less than 20 grams. So within an ounce of each other. So now
Jennifer: 17:48
go down to the next graph. And that's the cost per bird to get it.
Carey: 17:54
It was to get it to 8 weeks, right? 6 weeks. Ok, 6 weeks. With this, a lot of people, they say, Oh, that combat, that stuff's so expensive, but you're looking at on, on this study, a dollar five to get a bird eight weeks old, and that's painstakingly counting every gram you fed that bird, for science, you got to do what you got to do.
Jennifer: 18:18
And so the Purina bird. Back in 22 was a buck 56.
Carey: 18:23
So
Jennifer: 18:24
let's just be generous and say a buck 60 right now.
Carey: 18:27
Yeah. Cause it did go up a little bit in the Tucker milling there. 87 cents.
Jennifer: 18:32
Yeah, exactly.
Carey: 18:34
So if you're trying to lower your costs, it's not a bad feed and is less than a buck.
Jennifer: 18:39
Exactly.
Carey: 18:40
And on the Tucker milling, you had to die one due to an injury. You had 2 that died on the Purina and you had 1 death with Combox. So they're all right, neck and neck with mortality.
Jennifer: 18:54
And you know what I have to tell you on a side note, I remember that injury. And to this day, I've never seen it again and have still no idea how he did it.
Carey: 19:04
That's funny.
Jennifer: 19:05
I know you have the hatching time brooder. And you know how the feed trough clips up on the front and it has the cage that goes over the top to keep them from escaping. Yeah, okay, somehow and I'm laughing because of the absurdity of the situation, but it killed him. I don't know how somehow he got his leg through the hole where their head is supposed to go down between the trough in the front of the brooder. And then twisted himself. So his leg came back up on the other side of the clip, up on top of the feet. And I saw that and I was like,
Carey: 19:51
that's crazy. Like, how did, I don't even know that only in poultry. Can you come on crap like that?
Jennifer: 20:01
This would have been probably a four week old bird. This wasn't a
Carey: 20:07
baby. Apparently it still didn't have any sense by then.
Jennifer: 20:11
I don't know that we can blame that on Tucker, which is why I made a note of it, because that was just a dee kind of thing. Yeah,
Carey: 20:18
that was one, that was definitely one of those moments.
Jennifer: 20:22
Yeah all right, so that was just a side note. Now, if you will scroll down, I think this is the biggest telling Of the entire experiment, yes, it was more expensive to put them on Purina and they had Bumblefoot and they were just in poor feather quality and it was just stinky and wet and and until you put them side by side, it's hard to explain, but the manure off of is dry, like sand. And Purina is more like mud and then the Tucker's just somewhere in the middle.
Carey: 20:57
That's, and that's where the that's where the smell comes from.
Jennifer: 21:00
Exactly. That's
Carey: 21:01
what attracts the flies and all that stuff.
Jennifer: 21:03
And but this next graph down here at the bottom of the next page, That's the fertility of the, those birds that grew up and then I hatched off of them.
Carey: 21:18
And this is crazy because with the kombach and the tuckermelon, you're at 90, 91%. That, that's a great fertility rate. For a bird period
Jennifer: 21:31
remember these were young birds.
Carey: 21:33
Yeah. What, when did you start hatching 10 weeks old?
Jennifer: 21:36
Yeah, probably. Cause give or take, I'm tired, got to figure at this point, I'm tired of weighing feed and everything else at this point, yeah. But
Carey: 21:45
like the Purina feed, which by far was like 50 cents higher per bird. So practically a lot more than the others. The fertility rate in those is 59 percent according to your data.
Jennifer: 22:03
And if you look at the top row there, I set twice as many eggs.
Carey: 22:09
I saw that.
Jennifer: 22:10
Try to give it a chance.
Carey: 22:13
And that's crazy. So and people, look, I know y'all are all going, what is, what are they looking at? Where's the document at?
Jennifer: 22:23
It's on my website.
Carey: 22:25
If you go to, if you go to bryantsroof. com and look under her blog and you're going to have to scroll.
Jennifer: 22:31
No, it's backslash experiments.
Carey: 22:33
Okay. Brian's roost. com slash experiments. Go there. She's got the documentation posted. It even describes what the poop looks like. So you know, you're driving down the road, you're listening to this podcast. Now you're going to have to listen again. You're going to have to listen again when you're looking at this document, but it tells You know, it, it goes into the details, so the bag of feed may cost more, but ultimately at the end of the day, the bird doesn't cost you more because when the food is better, they eat less when there's less fillers, they eat less
Jennifer: 23:30
and I'm not one to really rag on a company. I'm more 1 to just okay, that 1's not for me and I'm just not going to buy it again. And just go on about my life, but the side by side of the Purina next to these other two was so telling to me that I took all of my animals off Purina, my dogs don't even do it anymore and now my cats, I tried to take them off of it, but they just had a fit. They just want. Purina Cat Chow, so I still do buy Purina Cat Chow for them, but they're barn cats and they eat all kinds of stuff.
Carey: 24:10
Yeah, they, That's a treat to them. They're chasing mice and stuff like that.
Jennifer: 24:16
Yeah, so that's the only Purina I buy. Now, I had people who wanted to buy the birds at the end of the experiment. And I wouldn't even sell the Purina ones. I culled them all. Didn't even eat them. I just culled them all.
Carey: 24:30
So Tank didn't get to enjoy them?
Jennifer: 24:32
No.
Carey: 24:33
I
Jennifer: 24:34
can't even explain to you. Their feather quality was so poor. The feathers were real brittle and they couldn't hold their wings up and dirty. They were just dirty, dingy. Their eyes were dull. If you've never fed anything besides Purina, it would be hard for you to visualize, but just get one bag and set one group to the side and feed them differently and side by side.
Carey: 25:03
What I challenge people to do when it comes to that is, after you learned a little bit about nutrition, go to the feed store, look at the feed tag and compare that to one of the others. Because one thing that I have learned is just because the feed is expensive doesn't mean that it has the amino acids and the vitamins that it should there, there's one company out there that is a national retailer that advertises. a particular type of feed, one of their lines that's specifically designed to help the feathers grow. That's mainly an amino acid called methionine that helps those feathers grow. But if you look at that formula and the same company, one of their other formulas, that other formula has higher methionine Levels in it and higher last seen too, but it's less expensive. So a lot of that when they have TV commercials and stuff like that. You're paying for a lot of marketing, too. It's best to do your homework, learn a little bit about what the numbers should be, and learn how to read a feed tag.
Jennifer: 26:20
And also keep in mind that yes, the experiment was done on quail, but for my purposes, I started quail so that I could try things on them and see the results. Much quicker than I could with the bigger birds, because the big birds, they're going to take at least a year, potentially 2 years to even see what we're talking about here and I don't want to feed a turkey for 2 years, just to find out. Gosh, that's not the best food. I should have fed him. Lord, that
Carey: 26:54
would not be good.
Jennifer: 26:55
So you can take the information given here and transfer it over to any species. And do it for yourself. I am not saying take my word for it, but I am saying, if you don't believe me, just go get a bag and just feed chicks separately and take a whiff of the brooder and look at how they're growing and stuff. Yes, these are off the shelf feeds and carry does. Custom feeds and I'm slowly moving over to more custom type stuff and I've got some chicks growing in there right now. I have some on Kambach and some on his custom feed and there's difference in, in what you pay for. So I'm not saying you have to buy expensive stuff, but sometimes the expensive stuff is cheaper in the end.
Carey: 27:42
Yeah, because like I've done feed studies where you've got large fowl chickens eating two and a half ounces a day. So the upfront cost is not less by far, few bucks. But what they're consuming every day, you do save money in the long run.
Jennifer: 28:03
And no waste feeders are extremely important when we're talking about this kind of stuff, because you sure don't want to waste, 30 worth of feed. Nah,
Carey: 28:13
nah.
Jennifer: 28:14
Is there
Carey: 28:14
anything else?
Jennifer: 28:16
I think that me and you talked about starting to do some feed tag stuff on our website. We're going to start implementing that in 2025.
Carey: 28:27
Yeah, I'm cool with that. There you're going to put it on the website where people can go and actually submit a feed tag and we'll look at it and we'll talk to some other nutritionist and get their opinion and if they'll include their area, if there is a local feed meal that we work with or that we are familiar with, that we can say, Hey, look, that's great. Or maybe not, but here's a local person that can give you exactly what your birds should be eating and save you some money.
Jennifer: 29:05
Yeah, I sent you 1 somebody. So I get this question all the time. And a lot of times I ask you, because I'm not the feed person, but a guy sent me a tag the other day, and I sent it to you and he was feeding quail with it. And what I told him that feed was good for was free ranging chickens. It was not good for something kept in a very confined space as its sole nutritional input.
Carey: 29:32
Oh, that wasn't quail.
Jennifer: 29:35
I know, he was feeding quail. Are you
Carey: 29:37
serious?
Jennifer: 29:37
Yeah, he was. It's the sole ration. I was like, no, that's good for free range chickens that can go eat bugs.
Carey: 29:49
And people don't feel bad. Because we didn't know Jennifer didn't know until she did this experiment. And it took her a few months to get the data. So that's why we're here. We're here to help you all learn and help you all grow in your poultry nerdism and have fun together.
Jennifer: 30:09
So I'm going to set up a page on the website where you guys can upload your feed tags and that way we can see all these posts on social media. What do you think of this feed? What do you think of that feed? And we can have all this information in one place. So look for that coming soon.
Carey: 30:32
Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they are released and they're released every week. Feel free to email us at poultrynerds at gmail. com to share your thoughts about the show. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning and keep it exciting. This is Carey signing off from Poultry Nerds. Feathers up, everyone.
