Benefits of feeding chickens soy-free feed

Soy is a standard ingredient in conventional chicken feed - even for organic chickens.

The reason farmers feed soy to chickens is because it’s cheap. In fact, it’s basically the cheapest form of protein you can feed an animal.

However, if you put chickens in a field of soy, they wouldn’t touch the plants. It’s just not something that would be in their natural diet. 

Humans have to process and cook soy in order for chickens to eat it. 

For commercial chickens, the soy in chicken feed is just the soy fiber. Farmers grow soybeans, and then they’re processed into oil. What’s left is the soy fiber, which is toasted and then mixed in a feed.

For a small farmer, the soy would be roasted and then mixed in feed.

Feeding soy to chickens has negative effects on their health. 

It leads to deficiencies in vital vitamins and minerals like manganese, iron, Vitamin E, zinc, and calcium. And, these deficiencies can lead to health issues like abnormally formed bones, pancreatic atrophy, and susceptibility to diseases.

So, when you eat meat or eggs from chickens that are fed soy, you can imagine that there would be implications for your nutrition, too.

Since the animals are not the healthiest, the meat and eggs are not as nutrient dense.

And then there’s phytoestrogens. The levels of phytoestrogens in soy are significantly higher than any other food and do carry into the meat and eggs. High phytoestrogens cause health issues in humans like hypothyroidism and various types of cancer.

And, to make things worse, growing soy is bad for the environment.

First off, so much forest has been cleared to grow cheap soy. 

Second, about 85% of soy grown is GMO, which means that the fields are sprayed with toxic pesticides and herbicides. This disrupts our fragile ecosystem in so many ways - from water contamination to displacing native plants, bugs, and animals. 

So, what should we do? Let’s remove the soy from feed!

A soy-free feed replaces cheap soy protein with other proteins like peas or fishmeal. Our feeds contain a specially formulated blend of wheat, peas, barley, fishmeal (from sardines), flax seed, kelp, vitamins, and minerals.

All of our chickens for meat are fed a soy-free feed. In fact, all of our food is free of not only soy but also corn. 

After reading this, what would you do? Would you spend a bit more to have soy-free chicken and eggs?