Feeding Minerals and Supplements to a Organic Pastured Poultry Operation

Feeding Minerals and Supplements to a Organic Pastured Poultry Operation

Summary

“Does feeding choices such as: colloidal clay, powdered rock minerals, a mineral supplement blend, granular humates, or combinations of these minerals and humates, contribute to better grain utilization, healthier meat and less polluting manure in an organic pasture poultry farming operation?”

We are planning to introduce *Flora stim, *Azomite, *Fertrell Minerals with or without *Meneffee Humates, at suggested rates of approximately 1-1.5% of the total daily feed volume to the diet, alongside a controlled batch of chickens that receives their normal organic grain and grit ration.

By raising 12-15 batches of chickens for a period of 7 to 8 weeks from April – November with 400-700 chickens in each batch, and utilizing 14-18 chicken tractors we have the opportunity to develop test groups to research the effects of different minerals and supplements along with a control and repeat the data collection to validate our results.

Our goal is to analyze whether there is a significant difference to justify the additional expense and effort of incorporating these additives into the diet of our pastured poultry. We are looking for an improvement in feed efficiency, (better weight gain with the same amount of grain), an improvement in the manure both in the brooder where manure is handled by hand and in the field where it is applied directly to the grass, and a more enriched, valuable meat containing more nutrients, less harmful bacteria and a better flavor.

Objectives/Performance Targets

Tide Mill Organic Farm is a certified organic, diversified family farm along Maine’s eastern-most coast. The farm has been sustainable managed by the Bell family since 1765. Today the 1600 acre farm is home to members of the 7th, 8th and 9th generation Bells. Carly DelSignore and Aaron Bell (8th generation) are the husband and wife team that own and operate Tide Mill Organics, an agricultural partnership that leases land from Tide Mill Farms, Inc. and other surrounding landowners to raise and market milk, beef, chicken, turkey, pork, vegetables and seedlings. We offer educational farm tours and programs as well as run a seasonal balsam wreath business. We have been farming and building relationships with our customers and vendors for twelve years. We are full time farmers committed to revitalizing agriculture in our remote and rural area of Maine (Washington County) as well as demonstrating sustainable farming can be an economically viable and fulfilling career choice.

Currently we raise, harvest and market approximately 7,000 Cornish-Rock cross chickens a year in a Salatin-style pastured poultry operation. We have been raising pastured broilers for eleven years. In 2011, we raised 14 batches of chickens with 600 chickens per batch with a couple batches of 750. We operated 14 chicken tractors and pastured the birds from May-November. We harvest our own birds in a certified facility on our farm under the less than 20,000 bird grower/processor exemption. We have the ability to raise and monitor the birds at every stage from day old chicks up through the collection and harvest of the bird, which we do ourselves. We raise our chickens for 7 to 8 weeks and each batch contains 5 tractors worth of birds so there is the opportunity to experiment with different mineral combinations and have a control within the same batch of birds in the same fields exposed to the same conditions. We are also developing production relationships with neighboring farmers who what to add broilers to their farm operations as well as exploring the opportunity to run some chicken tractors on an old farm that needs to be brought back into production.

Accomplishments/Milestones

We postponed our project from the summer of 2011 to the spring and summer of 2012 due to unexpected family responsibilities and the loss of two key personnel unexpectedly in June. Somehow we were able to keep the basics of our farming operation going, but our farm improvements and research were delayed.

To date, we have done a lot of research of supplies and sources for those supplies. We have learned that the extra step of sourcing ingredients for our project that also meet our certification standards is tricky and time consuming, requiring an extra step we under-estimated. This work has led to valuable information that we can include in our report to help other certified organic farmers with this process if they are interested in using the same materials.

Our project coordinator did a site visit and field assessment to help us put the details in place for our project. We raised one winter batch of birds in our heated greenhouse between December and January and experimented with establishing some baselines for grain consumption and weight gains. This data gathering was not a part of our formal SARE research project, but allowed us to gain some experience in data collection procedures and helped us to answer some questions about our methods.

We also discovered the particular types of supplies that would be the most helpful to our project and have begun to purchase them. We talked about our SARE grant project during Open Farm Day in July and with the interested people we hosted in our farm tours last summer.

We still have to purchase and retrieve most of our supplies to carry out our project. We also need to carry out our experiment, collect our data, analyze the data, and make our final reports. We need to complete soil samples, grain samples and meat samples. We need to develop our consumer survey, decide our methods of random choice for the people who will participate in our survey and collect and report their responses.

We have also secured an educational session at the Farmer to Farmer to make a presentation of our SARE grant project. We have contact info and are pursuing Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont’s agricultural trade shows to see if there would be an opportunity to present our project at some of those shows.

We learned about taking grain samples of what the birds were eating and we have given a lot of thought to sample size. We have learned about random sampling and the importance of accurate data balanced with what data we are capable of collecting practically as active farmers. Mark Fulford has been an excellent resource for my project. He has helped to plan ratios, products, sources and their organic certification status. He has facilitated and advised on particular supplies needed to complete our project. He has also been a liaison between the supplier of the minerals and feed supplements we are proposing to use and MOFGA Certification Service to help us ensure the materials we use are in compliance with the organic standards our farm adheres to.

We also discovered the excellent resource of our state veterinarians and an extremely knowledgeable circle of poultry experts from the cooperative extensions throughout the Northeast.

Impacts and Contributions/Outcomes

Since we have not yet collected the data for our project, we cannot speak to the economic findings or what the results of our study are. After raising the group of chickens in our greenhouse this winter, we think that a major benefit to feeding the minerals is a decreased mortality rate. We didn’t initially assume that would be a possible result, but as we are doing our project, we will be monitoring that and because we have seen such positive results, we have decided to feed the entire brooder stage birds a mineral ration. When they go to the field, we’ll have different minerals and a control with no minerals, but we believe its important for all the brooder birds to receive a mineral/clay ration added to their diet. We may try not adding that to their feed in the last of the brooder batches, once we have gathered our SARE data to see if mortality rates increase.

We also know that the price of grain is continuing to rise, with this year’s grain prices expected to be higher than last year’s. The research SARE has funded is only becoming more and more valuable if it can provide information to help farmers better manage their poultry’s feed consumption.

Collaborators: