Quality Proteins
Getting quality protein into feed is essential, but challenging. Our mill relies on wild fish meal, insects, legumes and more. We do not use pork or chicken meal. Here’s the back story on the trick to getting protein into animal feed….
The meat-and-bone meal made from the leftovers of processing all kinds of animals used to be the primary source of protein for animal feeds. All types of butcher scraps and dead animals of every sort went into meat and bone meal, and mills used it in truckloads or train car loads. We have old feed recipes going back a hundred years, and they nearly all call for meat and bone meal. The proteins in animal products are perfect for omnivores like birds.
Fast forward to the 1990s, when Mad Cow Disease began to strike cows that ate feeds that were contaminated with the remains of cattle that had Mad Cow disease. A variant of it could even spread to humans if they ate the beef. If a cow had Mad Cow, her carcass might easily end up in meat and bone meal. When the USDA and others figured out the source of the epidemic in the 1990s they aggressively removed meat and bone meal from the list of approved ingredients and made it a criminal offense to use it in any feed mill that makes feed for ruminants like cows and sheep.
That’s when soy meal really took off as an ingredient. Mills could still use meat and bone meal if they did not make ruminant feed, but it is illegal to use in most mills. That’s good. Mad Cow disease stopped.
Mills can still use pork meal and chicken meal, and some larger feed companies have mills that make no ruminant feed who do use meat and bone meal. Obviously, Union Point does not use it. We don’t like the “factory farmed” aspect of pork or chicken meals, so we don’t use them either. But big commercial mills find them much cheaper than fish meal, so they often do use them.
(It’s relatively easy to make a homemade chicken feed using meat and bone meal because birds like it and they will eat it. But now that you can’t get it, fish meal is the most available protein meal if you don’t want to use soy meal, and chickens just plain don’t like it. More than anything else, they don’t like the texture of it, so if you use it you probably will need to dampen the mash. There’s no point feeding birds something they will leave in the bottom of the trough.)
We like to use wild fish meal from the leftovers of the fishing industry, and we disguise it in pellets, so the amimals happily eat it. But if you use too much, it can flavor meat and eggs. Keeping it under 10% is an easy decision anyway, because it is so expensive. The amounts we use are fine.
Some fish meals are preserved with chemicals like ethoxyquin, but the one we use is preserved with organic oils like rosemary. We get it from here, which gets most of ours from here. (Yes, we are committed to knowing our sources.)
Insects are great protein, too, and we carry sustainably farmed bugs. They are absolutely the birds’ favorite treats. Black soldier fly larvae from British Columbia is our pick. We pass on the Chinese-farmed mealworms.
Dairy has good protein in it, but also has a lot of water, so bear that in mind.
Legumes like beans, soybeans, lentils, and lima beans work great, but you absolutely must cook them. They have a natural substance in them called a trypsin inhibitor. It inactivates the enzymes that allow the animal to digest proteins. So not only do the proteins in uncooked beans not benefit your animal, they also prevent him from digesting other proteins that might be in the food. Some beans are even toxic when they are raw.
Soymeal has already been heat-treated, so if you like soymeal, it is available as a protein source. It’s a complete protein, and if it not modified with toxins to repel bugs, so it has its place.
There’s certainly a lot to consider, but we can help you identify the best protein source for your feed based on your feed objectives.