Buying Bulk Chicken Feed and Saving Money

I am pretty excited because last week I was able to figure out how to get chicken feed that not only was about 1/2 the price of buying it in bags at the feed store but also it has way less GMO ingredients in it AND it works for all our chickens (layers and broilers) and mixed with some other stuff it is the main source of feed for our rabbits too! 

  I did actually buy food in bulk once last year as well with my dad's help and that was a huge money saver but this time I did even more research so that it was healthier ingredients (without raising the price hardly at all) and it works for the rabbits. 

So... if you also raise animals and haven't looked into this I thought I should share what I did.

 Our local feed store has an option where you can buy 500 lbs or more (I think 500 is the minimum but I am not sure) of feed that they mix together for you according to how you want it. Then they bag it up for you in reusable bags that I can take back to them to use again (I love that aspect too - no waste!). My Dad usually gets his feed in 1000 lb quantities and gets them in a really big bag that he moves around with a bobcat.

I wanted around 18% protein. I think my batch ended up closer to 17% but that should be fine as we feed them a lot of other scraps too and often soak their grain in whey or extra old milk so they will get protein in other ways as well.

Here is my recipe which is just over 500 lbs. I based it off of my dad's recipe and then a lot of research online and a lot of talking with the feed store and finding out what they had available and the price and then figuring out the protein content of each addition.

150 lbs. Barley
50 lbs Corn (I may cut this out completely next time or see if I can get it organic to avoid GMO)
100 lbs Hard Red Winter Wheat
100 lbs Oats
50 lbs Black Seeded Sunflower Seeds
30 lbs 41 Poultry Concentrate (a mixture of many things but high in Soy so I will work to find a substitute for this in the future. I used way less than most mixes however so at least it was a big improvement in my opinion.)
25 lbs Flax Seed
10 lbs Calcium
2.5 lbs Trace Mineral Salt
2 lbs Vitamins A, D and E
1.5 lbs Molasses

My total cost was $95.39

It should last for many months. We are currently feeding 32 broilers but they will be butchered soon, we also have 23 layers and 4 (with 2 more coming on Sunday) Rabbits. We do try to also give them a lot of weeds and scraps. With the rabbits we mixed the feed with rabbit pellets for now but will be added hay and things like that in the future.

I would love to hear what you feed to your chickens and rabbits and why.

 Our broiler pen was getting stinky so I have been added sawdust and other wood shavings to it. It makes it so much nicer! I got sawdust from my dad's sawmill.