Your ducklings are a week old - what should you feed them?
It requires special efforts, because for the young you need to create optimal living conditions that allow the bird to grow and develop. That is why, before acquiring or incubating young animals, you need to figure out what to feed weekly ducklings, since it is at this age that the birds are still too weak, and improperly selected food that does not meet the basic requirements can seriously harm them.
It is necessary to approach the issue of drawing up a diet for weekly ducklings with all responsibility. A bird at this age is not yet able to independently receive full-fledged amounts of food, as, for example, adults do it during free grazing or on water bodies. That is why the right decision would be to turn to the advice of professional poultry farmers who have raised more than one generation of ducklings.
So, after the first week of life, the duck's diet should consist of boiled and crushed eggs, skimmed cottage cheese, skimmed milk, crushed grain and bran, ground cake, boiled meat waste, bone meal, baker's yeast, herbs, shells and chalk. The amount of each of the above-mentioned products in the total feed mixture for a weekly duckling directly depends on the purpose of breeding the poultry - for breeding or for meat; accordingly, in each of the areas there are the most important indicators of productivity, which will have to be relied on in the process of selecting the ideal nutrition for babies.
Track the amount of feed the bird is consuming every day and refill the feeders on time. Delayed feeding can have a negative impact on the future development of the bird. In addition, chicks from hunger can begin to swallow parts of the litter, and this will negatively affect the functioning of their respiratory tract, organs of the gastrointestinal tract, and can lead to the development of serious diseases and even death of chicks.
It is very important to make sure that the young at the same time start to feed, otherwise lagging individuals will appear in the herd, which is not very beneficial for the poultry breeder.
The uniform development of the herd will contribute to the fact that the sale of chicks of one brood will be carried out at the same time, or, if they are planned to be reared, slaughter with a uniform increase will also be carried out simultaneously, which will save a huge amount of time and effort for the farmer.
An excellent mixture is oatmeal or other kupa with finely ground corn fleece. Then you can mix fresh cottage cheese and finely chopped young greens, for example, nettle or alfalfa, to this mixture.
Nutrition for two week old ducklings
The answer to the question of what to feed a two-week-old duckling is quite simple, since changes in the bird's diet are insignificant. The most important innovation that the poultry farmer should know about is the beginning of the process of reducing the frequency of feeding the birds from eight to five times a day.
During this period of time, root crops, boiled potatoes, as well as table salt and small gravel appear in the diet of ducklings. You can also start using thickened fresh waste, the main thing is to make sure not to feed the bird sour foods, which can lead to disruption of the digestive tract. This problem is often encountered in the summer on household poultry farms where poultry is raised for meat. In such cases, the feeders should always be filled, but under prolonged exposure to sunlight, the food begins to deteriorate, so it is worth keeping track of how much food has been in the feeder and whether it is time to replace it.
If we touch on the topic of summer feeding of young animals in more detail, it is necessary to clarify the moment that the bird eats very poorly in the heat, its appetite wakes up in the late afternoon, when the desired coolness sets in. To save feed and maintain the right amount of nutrients for the ducklings, it is recommended to reduce the daily portions and increase the evening portion.
It is not enough just to feed the ducklings, you need to help in every possible way to improve the processes of digestion and assimilation of nutrients in their bodies, because the intensity of the growth of the bird and its future productivity depend on this. For this, additional feeders with gravel and charcoal are installed in the poultry houses, which help to improve the functioning of the digestive tract of ducklings.
Video "Raising ducklings"
The video talks about how to raise ducklings, how to feed them, so that the bird is healthy.