How Many Bags Of Feed Do I Need For Poultry Farm?

This is a quick guide for answering the question: “how many bags of feed do I need for ‘X’ broilers or layers?”

This question is an important part of building up the preparation you need in order to calculate poultry farming profit.

• Photo of Maize Grain: Courtesy of Feedipedia

Poultry feed is typically regarded worldwide as the no.1 most influential factor affecting poultry prices

• (“…[poultry feed is] 70 per cent of the total production cost.” – Suguna Foods Rolls Out Feed Mill)

You might say:

Poultry feed prices determine your price for chicken meat or eggs.

Therefore when putting together your start-up poultry business on paper, it’s critical in the earliest stages to accurately estimate your feed expense.

So…

With pen and paper ready, we ask the question:

How many bags of feed do I need for my poultry farm?

The following is a step by step approach to simply calculating your feed requirement (as a number of bags) either for a layer or broiler poultry farm.

Let’s begin…

Step 1: Define the type of bird you want to feed? Layer or broiler? etc.

Why is this important?

Because each type bird:

• By function…
  • e.g. Layer or broiler;
• By breed…
  • e.g. Rhode Island Red or Leghorn;

…has it’s own feed consumption profile.

In other words…

Each type of bird will eat both differing amounts of…:

• feed volume
• & also, balance of nutritional content within the feed

For example:

Broiler birds at the stage of being chicks require a higher crude protein content (20%) than their layer counterparts…

Who by comparison require only 17% crude protein…

The reason being the greater demand broiler birds have for muscle mass gain.

This gain is primarily achieved by consuming increased dietary protein, which they convert into muscle.

Step 2: Define the age of the birds in question…

Why is this important?

Because your chickens will demand different amounts of food & nutritional composition at different ages.

For example:

• At age 1 week, layer chicks require on average: 15 g of feed per day for the first week
• At age 21 weeks, when a layer bird officially enters into the layer house their daily food demand is: 101 g of feed per day

…almost 7x times the feed demand of a week old chick.

Step 3: Rearing system and flock size of your farm…

Why is this important?

The overall size of your farm dictates the magnitude of the feed demand.

The larger your flock, the greater demand your farm will have for food.

Simple enough.

But let’s dig a little deeper…

Understand that your rearing system also makes a difference.

How the birds are reared reflects the total number of batches of birds raised at one time.

Also, as explained in the previous step, we see that coupled with this, the age of each batch of birds matters.

This is where the rearing systems have importance, because they dictate how the birds are grouped.

Typically, it’s by age.

Why?

Because birds of the same breed, bought at the same time, of the same age should have almost identical growth patterns…

And thus feed requirement.

Now this enables you to plan your feed budgeting accurately.

But do birds of the same batch always grow at similar rates?

Not always.

Thy should express what is called uniformity, but it’s not guaranteed.

What is uniformity?

“… percent of individual weights which occur within 10% of the current flock average” – Hyline Layer Guide

Why is this important?

In order to keep your handling & feeding routine as consistent and error-free as possible with layer birds…

Where there is ‘significant’ disparity of weight (low uniformity) between layers of one batch, for example…

It is advised that you further segment the batch into cohorts based on relative weight, for continued rearing.

Factors affecting uniformity of weight among layers are typically:

• disease,
• crowding,
• lack of perches etc…

Where your house management is on par, your uniformity will be excellent and the feed demand will remain consistent and predictable.

For example:

• In a layer farm, with a batch size of 1000 chicks purchased at a time…
• And a rearing system of 1+1+5, we have:
  • a mature layer community of 5000 birds (5)
  • a grower community of 1000 birds (1)
  • a brooder community of 1000 birds (1)
• Aside from quantity of birds…
  • …ages of birds in each batch will also dictate the feed demand

…to get accurate figures you can rely on, you’ll have to tally up the feed requirement of each batch based on batch size & age.

Let’s run through some exercises…

So…

Are you ready to take the plunge and calculate how many bags of feed you require for your poultry project?

Remember to take note of the industry benchmarks for feed consumption available in the PDF links (in the examples above).

Any problems or queries, simply “Ask A Question”

Happy poultry farming!

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