Chickens on turkey feed?

[ben-lewis]

Hello,

I have been reading about raising broilers and people tend to use high protean feed (about 20%) for rapid growth for a shorter time from hatch to slaughter.

would it be ok to feed chicks turkey crumb so they grow faster and bigger?

Thanks
Ben

 

[Chuck]

Marriages chick feed is 18% protein and Haygates 19% just to give a line thriough to the turkey feed. Maybe the extra 1 or 2% would not make a lot of difference but to push too hard is to have them go off their legs even faster than most of them do already. Is it worth the risk when you don't know if there will be any gain.

 

[chrismahon]

Garvo do a high protein (20%) mix for that reason, but as Chuck says it comes at a risk. I certainly wouldn't give them anything other than regular chick crumb to start. Then at 8 weeks when they go onto pellets I would consider the high protein feed. But this all depends on your breed. If you were Pedigree dual purpose Utility breeding you would have to wait until they sexed. Then you would have to keep the young cockerels from fighting during development (because of toughening the meat) with a peacekeeper, who couldn't be fed extra high protein.