Martha - Sometimes it is not productive to fill in the blanks without
checking the facts. Besides the outright expense of organic grains at
this point in time, your organic feeds are more expensive because
they are (if milled by a reputable source) more nutritionally dense
than your commercial factory feeds. Why? Because companies like
Purina fill the bag with BY_PRODUCTS. When you hear that, you
probably think that they are talking about dried and ground dead
horse, or something. That may be in there, and that's probably a
bonus (in chicken feed), but there are a lot of dead nutrients that
show up on your content label but are meaningless to your poultry.
These are things like bakery wastes. Empty calories that bulk up the
bags.
Organic feed, on the other hand, should be nothing but milled whole
grains. (Break my heart, someone.) This means that you should be
getting 3x the nutrition for your birds from a bag of organic chicken
feed from a reputable source.
Most serious natural bird farmers in this area also use Fertrell's
Poultry Balancer. I don't know Fertrell sells on your side of the
Mississippi, though.
-Allan
