In this podcast episode, we're sharing a replay of a previously recorded Poultry Keepers 360 Livestream featuring Jeff Mattocks talking about the ingredients used in manufacturing poultry feed. Get ready to feather your nest with top-tier poultry knowledge! Join Karen, Jeff, and Rip on the Poultry Keepers Podcast for exclusive insights on fiber feeds, energy grains, and more. Don't miss out on expert advice for a happy, healthy flock!
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In this podcast episode, we're sharing a replay of a previously recorded Poultry Keepers 360 Livestream featuring Jeff Mattocks talking about the ingredients used in manufacturing poultry feed. Get ready to feather your nest with top-tier poultry knowledge! Join Karen, Jeff, and Rip on the Poultry Keepers Podcast for exclusive insights on fiber feeds, energy grains, and more. Don't miss out on expert advice for a happy, healthy flock!
You can email us at - poultrykeeperspodcast@gmail.com
Join our Facebook Groups:
Poultry Keepers Podcast -
https://www.facebook.com/groups/907679597724837
Poultry Keepers 360 - - https://www.facebook.com/groups/354973752688125
Poultry Breeders Nutrition - https://www.facebook.com/groups/4908798409211973
Check out the Poultry Kepers Podcast YouTube Channel -
https://www.youtube.com/@PoultryKeepersPodcast/featured
Hi! Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. I'm Rip Stalvey, and together with Mandelyn Royal and John Gunterman, we're your co hosts for this show, and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy, and productive flock.
Jeff Mattocks:So y'all can see where wheat falls in, I like wheat comes in at about 10 percent protein, it's a little bit higher, it's got a nice fiber, it's right on track for where I want a poultry diet to be at 5% the energy's good if you have yellow leg chickens, or wheat is going to work against you, so there's no pigmenting there's no help as far as coloration in the bird gonna come from wheat. The folks living up north where wheat is very prolific and easy to find or Canada we're going to, we're going to need other help if we need to make nice bright yellow legs and bright yellow yolks and things like that.
Karen Johnston:Is that an energy grain or is that a.
Jeff Mattocks:It is, but I put it on the fiber slide.
Karen Johnston:Okay, all right. I knew I should have done it.
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah, it's on here. It's on the fiber slide. And because the fiber level is so high and the energy is so low, I didn't really feel that it qualified as an energy grain, but it is. All right, so the typical proteins that you're gonna see out here, they're in this order because I alphabetized them, not because this is how they're used or their level of importance. So the primary protein out there is gonna be soybean meal, 48%. Could be 48, could be 47, could be 46 depending on where you live and how it's processed. It really depends on the starting protein of the soybean before they remove the oil. So soybean meal. Let's say it's going to be 47, typical right now the average is 47 fat levels will be three and a half or less. I've seen fat levels down at one and a half, right? They're getting new technology, new ways to press the bean, not press, new ways to extract the oil where they're more efficient. Fiber is going to be right around that five percent. Energy level is only at a thousand twenty. And that's based on the three percent, three and a half fat of the soybean meal processors that are getting it lower that energy level is going to be lower as well. There's pretty much no energy in most of the proteins that we use. What we're using these for are the proteins, but you also, if you could compare, we're using them for the amino acids, right? So out here you're looking at like those soybean meals being at 2. 7 lysine and 0. 6 or 0. 65 Methionine. So your protein and the quality of the protein is important to achieve those right levels so that the birds can thrive. So it just depends on where you live and what you're using. Again, I'm not a big fan of the corn distillers. Also go on a label as dried distiller grains. I'm not a huge fan of flax meal. While the protein's there, the fiber's high. Levels of flax meal above 7 percent of the diet can cause gizzard erosion, and you'll also start to get some off flavoring in the meat and the eggs of the birds. So if you ever think about eating the birds, which most of you won't, but for those who choose to eat their cull birds birds fed high levels of flax are not going to be enjoyable. It's going to have kind of a paint like smell and flavor. Up north, for the folks wanting to be soy free, peas are the number one choice. They're getting really expensive, they're very low in protein, so it's hard to make peas work. Karen uses, and where I can, I like to use the roasted soybeans down at the bottom. So it's the whole soybean, it gets cooked it's got to be at a minimum of 270 degrees for 20 minutes. But the energy level's there, and the fat level is 18%. When I'm using a roasted soybean, it's really easy to get my protein, get my fat, keep my energy where it needs to be and balance a ration. But these are not available everywhere, so look, if you're not in a dairy country where they have a lot of milk cows they're not as readily available across the country as I wish they were. If you have access to them, feel yourself very fortunate, because they are an outstanding source of protein.
Karen Johnston:I'm going to give a plug, if you live in North Carolina, Mule City Feeds processes their own soybeans and you can get either the full fat roasted soybean meal, which is the bottom, or you can, they take that out for me by special order in the middle of the process, or you can get the expelled meal at the end as well. Two choices.
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah, Mule City is awesome. Everybody should live next to Mule City. I do want to explain the different processes to the soybean. Because I don't think everybody understands. You see the soybean meal where it says solvent extracted? They literally heat the bean, grind the bean, And then they add a chemical known as hexane, which is an industrial degreaser. Okay. And they add hexane to it. They roll it around and blow it around in a large chamber with forced air. But the hexane degreaser Removes the oil from the soybean flesh, and is driven off with forced air, and then it's collected where they separate the hex, they tell us that they separate the hexane from the fat or the oil of the bean, and I believe they probably get 99 percent of it, or more. I personally don't think they can get it all. That's just my belief. Okay, I could be wrong, but I wouldn't rule out about having my beans washed in hexane, so this isn't my choice. Okay, now, some of you don't have choices, and I'll make formulas with, for you, with soybean meal, solvent extracted. Soybean meal expelled, they heat the bean, they grind the bean, and they put it into a giant screw press. It's like a, it's like a giant corkscrew inside of a sieve or a screen. And they just apply an intense amount of pressure, hydraulic pressure, and they're pressing the oil out of the soybean flesh. And then when they're done, there's still about 7 percent oil remaining in the bean. But it, to me, it's a much more natural process. So all they did is heat, grind, screw, and then they take it out and they dry it, and they sell it to the feed industry. Again, we talked about the roasted soybean. That is all the bean, all the oil. It's the whole bean going into the process, it just has to be cooked. So we're going on to fiber feeds. But, I'm big on fiber I think a chicken diet needs to be between 5 to 7 percent of the diet, 5 for chicks and immatures, and closer to 7 for matures as they get older. So the ingredients that I use, or I like to see used, are, in the alfalfa meal, in the alfalfa hay, basically the same thing, 17 protein, again, I'm not putting enough in there to make a difference. With the alfalfa as far as protein goes, right? Besides, most of your show feeds, breeder feeds, grower feeds, all that are going to be 18 percent anyway, so it's not helping the total. What I'm after here is the fiber, 24 percent fiber, so I can use this to achieve those appropriate fibers. The other thing is the green in the alfalfa, it's really high in Xanthophylls are carotenoids, so it helps with egg yolk color, skin color, things like that. So the folks that want white skin birds probably want to avoid using alfalfa meal, or any type of greenery, so some of that will transpose into yellow. So the key factor here, just know that I'm using alfalfa meal for fiber. And remember I was talking about fiber and energy, so look, fiber on the alfalfa meal is 24 percent fiber and the energy level is only 672 very low. Same thing happens when I go down into like wheat middlings they do test at 15 percent protein, however, I can't tell you that all of that is available. I think this national average fiber level is a little low at eight and a half. I think it's probably closer to 10, but this is the number we have to use unless we know otherwise. Energy level at 950. I keep talking about energy. So in a starter diet, we need about 1350 kilocalories per pound and a grower diet, 1300. In a layer mature bird diet, we're looking at about 1260 to 1280. Okay. Okay. Just to put that into relationship for you. Wheat middlings really have very little nutritional value to them whatsoever. Nobody ever has told you this before. And, it annoys me that the feed industry uses these things. And I they, I don't know, it feels like they're taking advantage of people. It looks good on paper, but it really isn't. And oats, 10 percent protein, doesn't really help us out there. 4 percent fat, doesn't really help us out there. Remember, we want a 5 to 7 on the fat level. Fiber, the really, the only thing that's helping me out here is fiber. 10. 5 on the fiber it doesn't kill the energy like the alfalfa does, so I have about 1160 on the energy, but it's still lower than any of the energies I just described to you. So that's why I put it on the fiber page. It's beneficial fiber my two favorite fibers are alfalfa meal and oats. So they're a denser fiber. They're harder and when they go past through the digestive tract they're continually scraping and cleaning the intestinal wall and the gut wall so they keep the slime from building up. But when it scrapes that gut wall it's allowing the bird to absorb more nutrients out of what it's eating. It's in there for a lot of reasons, and there's some old data that shows that oat hulls, the outer skin on that oat once they break apart and once they go through the gizzard, they become like miniature swords, and they're very sharp and shard they actually irritate internal parasites, and it will knock them loose and let them be defecated out. And it will reduce internal parasite populations using the right amount of oats. Now, somebody heard me just say, oats will worm a chicken, and tomorrow they're going to choke their chicken with a half a pound of oats, and it don't work that way, okay? You want the diet to be somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the diet, okay? And that's the right level. Everything else has to balance, right? We've got to get the energy right, we've got to get the protein right, amino acids, all that. Oats are actually a wonderful chicken feed when used correctly.
Rip Stalvey:I know a lot of the old timers loved oats. They thought an awful lot of it.
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah, I mean you start feeding oats and all of a sudden you don't have to change anything else. You just start feeding a little bit of oats around that five percent of the diet and because the bird's gut wall is absorbing more, getting more nutrients, the bird's going to shine up. It's going to perk up. It's going to just, You're going to see the difference. If you could open up the, one of your chickens that hasn't ever had oats and you examine that internal, the intestinal wall and the gut wall, it would just be coated with multicolored slime, right? That's been laying there being stagnant for years. And it really doesn't get a chance to clean up or purge itself. So I'm a big fan.
Rip Stalvey:What you're describing is the results they were after, but I don't think they were using it, thinking of it in that term.
Jeff Mattocks:No, they wouldn't. They just, they fed some oats and they really liked what they saw. So they fed a little bit more and they kept feeding more until the chicken left it in the pan. And then they realized they went too far. And too much oats is just as bad. The bird will starve to death, if you feed too many oats, right? There's not enough energy. You're gonna start losing breast. You're gonna start losing, condition and tone. You're gonna all things in moderation. Some of the specialty products depending on where you live camelina meal, another oilseed good protein, limited. USDA says we can only feed 10 percent of the diet. Of camelina meal, it's only really in the Pacific Northwest, limited quantities. You've all heard me talk about fish meal. I'm a big fan of fish meal. If you look out there at the lysine and methionine, you're going to see why. It's not just about the protein. It's about the amino acids. It's about, fulfilling the cravings that a chicken has for a meat type protein. There is no vegetarian chicken. So if somebody tells you they got a vegetarian chicken, they are either crazy or lying to you. So there is absolutely never, ever going to be a vegetarian chicken.
Karen Johnston:What if it's in a cage and you can make sure that it's never eaten an insect?
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah. Even then, did it eat a feather? Did it get a bug flying by? Who knows? There's just not. They're not meant to be vegetarians. They do need a little bit of meat protein in their diet. Oil, any type of cooking oil, it says vegetable because that's a generic term, but pretty much any oil if you have to use the soybean meal or your diet is low in fat. Oil is great, really high energy. That's really all it's bringing to the diet is energy and oil. We're getting a little bit of sesame meal in the Southeast region. There's some other small pockets after they, again, it's oil seed production, they're pressing out the oil so we can all have sesame seed oil for cooking and other things. And I put black oil sunflower seeds, and I know somebody's going to be annoyed with me by putting it here. Fiber levels are 31%, okay? Fat levels are 27%, and the new information on black oil sunflower seeds is showing 16- 17 percent protein. The energy values that I see are all over the place. My older information says 1200, I've seen some newer stuff saying closer to 2000. They're not cost effective. I put them on here so you can see. They really don't add anything to a diet, okay? I'm not saying don't feed them. I'm just saying don't get carried away with feeding them. There's not a lot of benefit to it. Yeah, they're going to get the oils out of there. If you're not feeding oils otherwise to get fat. And, you may need something like a black oil sunflower seed to get the fat levels where you want them, but just don't get carried away. Alright, I've stepped on enough of those. That's the end of my presentation.
Rip Stalvey:I just would like for you to touch on the difference between the fish meals out there that are more commonly used, the menhaden meal. and catfish meal.
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah, and where Rip lives, and in his past life, he would be most familiar with, so the catfish meal is there's catfish farms across the south, right? If you drive across Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, there's a lot of catfish farming going on down there. It's a big commercial industry, so once they take the part they want, the fillets off the side, and the fillets off the side pretty much everything that's left lips and tails and entrails, etc. All goes into a big tub, gets ground, gets turned into Now that protein's only going to be 50 55. Okay, it's not as high a protein. The protein that I used here was actually sardine meal. This is wild caught. Coming out of the Pacific Ocean, but the most common in the U. S., because it's run by two large companies, Omega Protein and Daybrook Fisheries. is menhaden also known as bunker and it is harvested for the oil again and to be turned into protein but they have a market for the oil as well so they catch it gulf of mexico eastern seaboard pretty much all the way from Maine to the tip of Florida and around the corner the reason i've shied away from the menhaden is there's no regulations or restrictions on how much they can harvest so On the years where they find the schools, they can harvest. They just, they tend to over harvest. They're going to take all that they want. Alright, there's no, nobody's saying, hey, stop, you can only have so much there's no controls and so on. I've shifted from, I have nothing against it, it's a good protein source, so if that's what you have, that's what you have, and I'm saying, I'm not saying for you not to use it, what I'm saying is, I shifted away, and I've contracted With a small fishery in Mexico and they are governed there's only so many tons of sardine that is legally allowed to be harvested and that number is actually set by Peru each year based on scientific studies and data. They got teams of marine biologists go out. They count and collect schools and they can see them now by satellite and based on six months worth out of the year of data collection, they establish a harvest limit and that's what everybody down there has to live by. They're protecting it, they're taking care of it. I've shifted to a sardine meal that's about 62 percent protein. There's others out there, there's, there's herring meals, there's all kinds of stuff.
Karen Johnston:I wanted to just put, we talked about And you said it during each time, like a value that you're aiming at, and it's going to be different for each level of growth and stage.
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah, ME poultry is the metabolized energy and it measured in kilocalories per pound. It's just abbreviations that, Nutritionists like myself use. These are the recognized. Most of them you can understand. Protein, fat, fiber, calcium, phosphorous, salt, sodium.
Karen Johnston:How high on the descending list of ingredients does alfalfa meal need to be in a feed?
Jeff Mattocks:How high? It should be at 5%, it's probably going to be item 5, 4, 5, or 6. It depends on how many other ingredients are in there, but it's going to be item 4, 5, or 6, is where I would expect to see alfalfa meal. on the list. So if they're using multiple grains, let's say they use corn, milo, wheat, and then they're going to have their protein next, hopefully, and no byproducts, then it's going to be alfalfa meal, it's going to come in. If it's just corn and soy, Alfalfa meal could come in at four, yeah, so somewhere around four or five or six. It should always be ahead of all the vitamins and the minerals, now, it won't be on a layer feed because your calcium is going to be 150 to 200 pounds per ton. So on a layer feed, your calcium is going to come in there at usually around four or five and your alfalfa meal should be right behind it.
Karen Johnston:Earlier, you said that the meals were always the least effective byproducts of something else. Is that true of alfalfa meal and like kelp meal or?
Jeff Mattocks:Oh, great question. So alfalfa meal is actually harvested for animal feed, right? It's 100 percent of the plant. Nothing's been removed. So they fresh harvest it. They take it to a large dehydrator get the moisture off of it as quick as they can. And, then they turn it into pellets, move it around the world. wherever they want to go with it and then it gets reground and turned back into meal.
Karen Johnston:So in this one case that actually is literally just describing the
Jeff Mattocks:There's others too. So kelp meal, like you talked about, there's others that are dehydrated and ground for that purpose. But when it comes to the proteins, it's always oil seeds that have had the oils removed. Cause we tend to find that the oil seeds once you remove, Most of them are out of the legume family so once you remove the oil, the protein levels get significantly higher, and they're, they figured out how to use them in animal feeds, whether they're good, bad, or otherwise.
Karen Johnston:Bonita said before you talked about black oil sunflower seeds, she feeds them with shell on. Would it be better if she fed them with shell off? But again, this was before you said that you didn't really care if people did it one way or another.
Jeff Mattocks:So yeah, so they would be a little bit better if they were sunflower seed hearts and the hull was removed.
Karen Johnston:Cause that would lower the fiber, right?
Jeff Mattocks:I just don't, it's great. It's a treat. So now your fat level is going to get crazy high, right? So you just don't want to get carried away. Yeah, the protein went up, but the fat's going to nearly double. Okay. Or it is going to double. So it's going to go from what, 27 to 55. Just like that. And too much fat is a bad thing. So remember fat, total fat levels between five and seven. Every now and then we can go to eight, but good fat levels are five to seven.
Karen Johnston:North Star Farm wants to know about how the heat affects the nutrients. I think we were talking about the soybean process at this point. But yeah,
Jeff Mattocks:probably, so actually legumes need to be heated in order for their urease or trypsin inhibitor to be broken down, which is an enzyme in there. So heat is required for most legumes to be more effectively digested. As we all know when we cook things and we overcook things, that a lot of the other nutrients are no longer available or able to be absorbed. So there's an art to roasting a soybean. Or any other grain, to hit it at just the right spot. I don't want people out back, flipping soybeans on their barbeque grill later tonight, trying to get them 270 for 20 minutes. That's, It's a whole science and an art and probably videos on YouTube because you can see anything on YouTube, but Yeah but a lot of the vitamins are lost so we don't count really any vitamins, you know in the soybeans some of the micronutrients are going to be tied up and bound after the heating process That's a true statement. But hey, we see the same thing with pelleted feeds and people keep feeding pelleted feeds.
Karen Johnston:You use loose, chopped alfalfa, like fed to rabbits, instead of meal or
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah, absolutely. I don't really care what form the alfalfa is in. Actually, If you really love your chickens you really love your chickens, you're going to build a wire cage with 2 inch by 4 inch wire, so it holds a flake of alfalfa, and you're going to go buy baled, alfalfa hay, put it in there, and let them harvest it out of that hanger or out of that homemade basket and they're just going to be the happiest chickens ever. They get to destroy something, they get to tear it apart with their beaks, and they get something green all at the same time.
Karen Johnston:So if you're making your own feed, how do you choose the right ingredients to hit all the way?
Jeff Mattocks:Easy answer to that. Really, you just start out with what every what is available. What can we get? Okay. In your region, then we fill in the blanks and we do the best we can with what you have locally available. But I, I wish more people would make their own feed. It's amazing stuff and it definitely outperforms stuff that comes off of the shelf at any local farm supply store. It's more time, it's more energy, but. First off, you find out what can we get, right? And, there's generic feed formulas. I think there's some on the PK group. Is there some on the PK 360 group? And there's some on the poultry breeder nutrition group. There's just, rations as ideas to get you started and get you thinking and so on. And, we can work from those. We can build around them. It's not an easy question, because I've made chicken feeds with stuff you wouldn't even believe a chicken would eat. So there's a lot of possibilities and opportunities out there.
Karen Johnston:What's meant by the terms nutritionally available and essentially non available.
Jeff Mattocks:So like on the soybeans, certain nutrients are just not going to be bound up or they're going to be converted in their form, their molecular form, depending on the heat level, right? So the higher the heat goes, the more that gets bound and they're just no longer going to be digestible in a digestive tract of a chicken or a pig or something like that. So something's always lost. Anytime we cook something, we're losing something. It's always going to happen.
Karen Johnston:You talked about it too during the animal proteins. That the animal protein was easier or more nutritionally available to the chicken than a plant protein was.
Jeff Mattocks:It is. It's just the way the proteins are actually put together. With those higher lysine, higher methionine levels, the protein molecule is going to be more readily available or readily digestible.
Karen Johnston:What do you think about popcorn?
Jeff Mattocks:It's corn. It's really no different. Nutritionally it's a little bit, it's like instead of 8 percent protein, it's 9 percent protein. Instead of 1540 on energy, it's going to be like 1450, 1500. It's pretty much just corn's corn, and I don't care whether you call it popcorn, maize,
Karen Johnston:yellow corn, flowery Does it have less nutrition after you pop it?
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah it does.
Karen Johnston:Alright, and you did a little bit about peanut meal, but I think that is used in, what did you say, Texas?
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah, I mean across the southern states, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi anywhere that they grow peanuts and then they crush it to get the oil out of it there's going to be peanut meal available, and the good peanut meal that's fit for actual animal feed is getting bought up by the Perdues, the Pilgrim Prides, the Tysons, they're all buying it up, so there's not a whole lot that actually hits the market to make You know, smaller producer type feeds, but occasionally, I can get a little bit, I do some formulations in Texas. There's some out there. Mealworms, high fat, high carbohydrate good protein levels. I don't know that there is a hype around mealworms. It comes and goes. I have nothing against mealworms if you want to grow them and you want to make them as part of your, poultry diet, yeah, that's fine. And actually, I think it's a great project to grow the mealworms. Just be careful how much you give, a couple, two, three mealworms per chicken per day is plenty use them again like a treat. And, on a larger scale, it's not necessarily cost effective to raise the mealworms. Here's the thing, most people feed their mealworms chicken feed to raise the mealworm. All you're doing is pre digesting and converting chicken feed into another form of chicken feed when it's all said and done. I'm going to leave it at that.
Rip Stalvey:I will add one thing about mealworms. If you are trying to cooptrain your birds, or train them in any way, there is nothing that will get a bird's attention and get them to toe the line any faster than offering a mealworm. A fresh wiggling mealworm between your fingers. I can believe that. You'll be their best buddy.
Karen Johnston:This one just had the black soldier fly and the crickets.
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah. So those are dried, of course, and I put those over in the, I should have called them exotic proteins because of their cost. It'd be like driving a Lamborghini for some of us. Good energy levels, good protein levels. These are the dried forms now. These are not alive and wiggling. Those numbers are half, because they're about half moisture. So you cut all those numbers in half, roughly. If you want to sit down and work on your own chicken feed. On the other side you can see, like, where meat and bone meal, catfish meal, how those different meat proteins come together. Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Rip Stalvey:I think
Karen Johnston:we're hold on, we can pull this up. Jeff loves mycotoxins. All right. So they're a thing, they're getting bigger and you can test for them, right?
Jeff Mattocks:Yeah. They're, it depends on the growing season, but yeah, mycotoxins are spreading across our entire world, feed and food supply. They're out there. I blame it on our new farming techniques but that's a whole other subject. Look, it's hard, they're hard to test for, they're, it's not cheap to test for them. I would love to see people testing for them but, you're looking at, At least$25 and that's for the quick test. The more expensive tests are up in the$80 per test range, so you're only going to do that a few times. At two parts per million, you're going to start to see a little bit looser manure, a little bit less, so the birds are going to look a little bit dull not as shiny, not as thrifty, not, maybe not as energetic. At five parts per million, you're really going to start to see a change in the manure viscosity. Their appetites are going to go down. You're going to start to see feed leftover where you wouldn't have seen feed leftover before. Their bellies are going to start hurting. You're going to start seeing them eat like dirt. If your birds are out free ranging and they have access to it, they're going to start eating strange things. They'll eat bedding. They'll eat dirt. They'll eat, and that's just trying to soothe that. So think about food poisoning. Any of you that have ever had food poisoning in your life, right? You ate something you shouldn't have eaten and all of a sudden your guts just get totally disruptive. Painful diarrhea, stomach cramps, that's what your bird's going through, right? That's what mycotoxins are doing to the inside of your chicken. So the higher it gets, the worse it gets. Pretty soon they quit eating. When you start getting up above 7 to 10, they're gonna pick and choose, you'll see feed sorting if you're not feeding pellets. I've seen birds kick corn out on the ground, right there. You never see a chicken waste a piece of corn. There, there was piles and pounds of corn laying on the ground, and we tested it. And yeah, sure enough, just high, and that was at five and six. Parts per million, they started, these are the lesser intelligent Cornish crossbirds, actually, that I'm referring to. They were made to eat, and they were wasting corn yeah, you just gradually see, and it's the problem is it's gradual, it's not night and day, so you don't see a big change, that just gradually don't clean up their feeders more feed wasted, things like that they lose their shine, they lose the brightness in their eye, it's strange, This is all gradual over two, three, four weeks, so it's hard to identify, but it is definitely becoming a problem.
Rip Stalvey:Thank you for joining us this week, and before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released, and they're released every Tuesday. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at Poultry Keepers Podcast at gmail. com and share your thoughts about the show. Thank you again for joining us for this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. We'll see you next week.