1. Poor Knowledge of Ingredients
Yesterday, I promised to share with you certain reasons why you may not be able to formulate balanced feeds manually.
I will use the rest of this week to educate you on what you need to know about certain ingredients before you can be an expert in feeds formulation.
A. Maize in Layers & Grower mash feeds- maize is the major energy supplier when it comes to feeds formulation (3432Kcal/kg)
CAUTION: When used in high quantity in feeds such as grower mash and layer mash, the energy content of your feed will be too high. Such feeds though balanced in protein will be excess in energy content. Birds (grower & layers in particular) fed which such feed will build up much fats that will negatively affect the optimum performance of such birds. A man invited me to his farm in kaduna state sometime ago with a complaint that his birds are not laying. Oh when I got there, it was an eye opener for the man to discovered that his self formulated feed is too rich in energy. His birds are looking so big and heavy.
You need perfect knowledge of ratio combination between maize and other ingredients to bring down the energy to the expected level.
Many stayed at the elementary knowledge of balancing only protein with little or no consideration for energy and other content of feeds such as lysine, methionine, fibre, calcium.... To achieve desirable energy content in layers and grower feed use ration 3:2, or 2:1 in favour of maize and other fibre.This will likely bring down the energy to expected level. IT IS NOT MANDATORY THAT MAIZE MUST ALWAYS BE HIGHER IN FEEDS FORMULATION !!!
I can use the whole of this week lecturing on maize alone. However there are certain season that call for slight increase in energy content.
Join me tomorrow as we continue this series.
1.PLEASE PREPARE TO ATTEND LAGOS SEMINAR - expert can guides you to prepare balanced feed thereby reducing your cost of production drastically.
2. My software can accelerate your level of understanding.