Fermenting higher protein feed for meat chickens?

As our fight for freedom drags on more weeks I am once again out of chicken and having to decide whether or not to order a batch of PROPER meat chicks from a hatchery.

My question is, how many mealworms to the cup of scratch grain (the only organic I can find right now has oats, wheat, sunflower seeds and milo) should I add to bring the protein up to fit their needs?

And will fish flavor the meat of chickens? I know it will the eggs - I stopped giving my chickens catfish livers because of it - but what about the meat?

Fish ferments and the mullet run is right about now so if I got a nice big cooler full of mullet I could bake the heads dry, grind them up and ferment them with the grain.

The duck feed I was using for the quail fermented just fine and it had fish meal in it.

although I have at times grown mealworms , I have no idea how much worms you get to the lb of grain... years ago ...when I raised them- my feed cost was 10% of the gross profit. [I sold them to pet stores...] I ground winter wheat, and dent corn to a medium fine consistency, When it got too "dirty", I dumped it into the chicken feeder ,--the chickens ate it all just fine.

I wasn't properly clear in my question, I think. Sorry.

What I meant was, how many mealworms do I need to add, per cup of 12% protein scratch grain, to bring it up to the 22-25% I read meat chickens need?

This was interesting....

If we now take mealworms as an example (since they are our farm bug of choice), the protein content of fresh weight ranges from 14 to 25 grams per hundred. Now if you were to dry-roast your mealworms, the protein content jumps to a whopping 55% and you still retain a good chunk of those vitamins, minerals and polyunsaturated fats (including Omega-3 and 6). You can see what I’m getting at here… bugs are incredibly nutritious! But let’s take this a little further and look at the essential amino acid content. Amino acids are the protein building blocks of our bodies and around 500 are known to science, but as far as human nutrition is concerned, these are classified into 22 functional groups. All but nine of these can be synthesised by our bodies out of other molecules, and these nine therefore have to be taken up through our food. They are called the “essential” amino acids and are what we’ll focus on.

And might give me my answer. If I dry roast my worms it just becomes a math problem.

Yay. :roll: Perhaps if I give it to my kids to work out? Amy is driving her truck at 55 miles per hour to meet her train that is going 120 kilometers per hour - kind of thing? :lol: :lol: :lol:

My mealworm experiment has gone really well, I have a fridge on its back, half full of shavings - it was my brooder last winter, giving me a heated part in the freezer section and an unheated area in the fridge part where the water and feed were - that now has un-numbered zillions of worms in it.

If I place a carrot on the gently moving shavings, it is pulled under within 3 hours and totally consumed inside of a day. Rather frightening really and I have had no idea what to do with them all but this might do it.

:lol:

It took far too many people way too long but we finally came up with a 3:1 ratio, grain to dry roasted mealworms.

That should give me a 23% protein to feed the meat chicks.

Meat chicks should be good with that percentage, I think.