Recovering Academic on Nostr: Welcome to another episode of egg programming. This note is about feeding fish to ...
Welcome to another episode of egg programming.
This note is about feeding fish to poultry.
Two vital components of fish are eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA).
These are the notorious marine omega 3s.
Up until this point we have been talking about the plant omega 3: alpha-linolenic acid (ALA).
We have been deploying flax seeds to balance ALA with omega 6 fatty acids; and we have been doing this because humans do well when this is balanced.
Here is an image of the chemistry of these fats:
The different elongation pathways for these fatty acids compete to use the same desaturase enzymes, as you can see here:
You will notice arachadonic acid on the omega 6 side. This is the precursor to inflammatory eicosanoids, which are vital for lots of things. However, we do not want them around in excess.
To grug it out a bit: we want inflammation to be well managed, and this is why we balance the omega 3:6.
You might say that another purpose is to make more EPA and DHA from ALA, and this is true. However, those elongations are inefficient processes. But, conveniently, we can utilise other creatures to access more EPA and DHA.
Birds are more efficient than humans at converting ALA to EPA and DHA, so we are kicking goals just eating eggs from birds who eat ALA.
However, we can do better than that.
We can eat fish, and we can also feed fish to our legendary egg producers!
Al-Daraji et al.'s (2010) study "Effect of dietary supplementation with different oils on productive and reproductive performance of quail" found that fish oil at 3℅ of the feed produced the best results in regard to egg weight, hen-day egg production, egg mass, cumulative egg production, feed conversion ratio, fertility, hatchability of eggs set, hatchability of fertile eggs, and embryonic livability—followed by the results of flax oil. The lowest values for these traits was recorded for corn oil and sunflower oil—neither of which (oil nor whole) feature in this egg program.
A more recent review by Alagawany et al. (2019) titled "Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fatty Acids in Poultry Nutrition: Effect on Production Performance and Health" fleshes-out the nuance here and, more specifically to this note, teases apart the differences between fish and flax:
https://image.nostr.build/4ec6eb46526c94013e6a7f35b3b5e5b257ce6a8f6e6f5165033a51b97d53c8f9.
This image was taked from their Table 1 which is a good TLDR on supplements and results.
Here is the article:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6721126/
This egg program features dehydrated pilchards. Why? They are high quality and cheap. Lots of fish meal you might find for poultry has had the oil extracted from it at at least 100°C/212°F, so it is really only useful for protein—not so much for less stable micronutrients and certainly not for omega 3s.
I get the pilchards in frozen block form. These are bait for fishing and the fish look healthy: it seems like they have been frozen on the boat that they were caught from.
Dehydrating the pilchards is a smelly affair: the whole homestead will smell like 1000 piers. But, it will be worth it.
It is exciting to see bones, scales, offal, and oily flesh, making their way into the mix.
It is lovely rich stuff.
I keep the dehydrated pilchard meal in the fridge: there are lots of goodies in there that we want to preserve.
Fish hey . . .
Consider sending some at your birds.
#bird #egg #food #nutrition #science #fish
#health #longevity #farm
#homesteading #eggprogramming thread:
This note is about feeding fish to poultry.
Two vital components of fish are eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA).
These are the notorious marine omega 3s.
Up until this point we have been talking about the plant omega 3: alpha-linolenic acid (ALA).
We have been deploying flax seeds to balance ALA with omega 6 fatty acids; and we have been doing this because humans do well when this is balanced.
Here is an image of the chemistry of these fats:
The different elongation pathways for these fatty acids compete to use the same desaturase enzymes, as you can see here:
You will notice arachadonic acid on the omega 6 side. This is the precursor to inflammatory eicosanoids, which are vital for lots of things. However, we do not want them around in excess.
To grug it out a bit: we want inflammation to be well managed, and this is why we balance the omega 3:6.
You might say that another purpose is to make more EPA and DHA from ALA, and this is true. However, those elongations are inefficient processes. But, conveniently, we can utilise other creatures to access more EPA and DHA.
Birds are more efficient than humans at converting ALA to EPA and DHA, so we are kicking goals just eating eggs from birds who eat ALA.
However, we can do better than that.
We can eat fish, and we can also feed fish to our legendary egg producers!
Al-Daraji et al.'s (2010) study "Effect of dietary supplementation with different oils on productive and reproductive performance of quail" found that fish oil at 3℅ of the feed produced the best results in regard to egg weight, hen-day egg production, egg mass, cumulative egg production, feed conversion ratio, fertility, hatchability of eggs set, hatchability of fertile eggs, and embryonic livability—followed by the results of flax oil. The lowest values for these traits was recorded for corn oil and sunflower oil—neither of which (oil nor whole) feature in this egg program.
A more recent review by Alagawany et al. (2019) titled "Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fatty Acids in Poultry Nutrition: Effect on Production Performance and Health" fleshes-out the nuance here and, more specifically to this note, teases apart the differences between fish and flax:
https://image.nostr.build/4ec6eb46526c94013e6a7f35b3b5e5b257ce6a8f6e6f5165033a51b97d53c8f9.
This image was taked from their Table 1 which is a good TLDR on supplements and results.
Here is the article:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6721126/
This egg program features dehydrated pilchards. Why? They are high quality and cheap. Lots of fish meal you might find for poultry has had the oil extracted from it at at least 100°C/212°F, so it is really only useful for protein—not so much for less stable micronutrients and certainly not for omega 3s.
I get the pilchards in frozen block form. These are bait for fishing and the fish look healthy: it seems like they have been frozen on the boat that they were caught from.
Dehydrating the pilchards is a smelly affair: the whole homestead will smell like 1000 piers. But, it will be worth it.
It is exciting to see bones, scales, offal, and oily flesh, making their way into the mix.
It is lovely rich stuff.
I keep the dehydrated pilchard meal in the fridge: there are lots of goodies in there that we want to preserve.
Fish hey . . .
Consider sending some at your birds.
#bird #egg #food #nutrition #science #fish
#health #longevity #farm
#homesteading #eggprogramming thread:
quoting nevent1q…288c"This is the best job in the zoo: millet distribution."
But, is it really?
Welcome to this installment of a series of notes regarding programming Japananese quail eggs. Featuring: a live code edit.
We'll do it live!
Millet is typical wild food for Japanese quail. An initial focus for me on this journey was to reproduce something approximating wild food. Getting Japanese millet in there was actually a vibe thing, and the red milllet was deployed because I love red pigments.
Millet is typically about 11% protein and 4.2% fat.
We are in the right range on the fat front for Coturnix japonica: we are shooting for 4–5% of the total mix. However, that protein dosage falls well short of the 16% minimum we desire. But, that is fine, we have other sources of protein and the current protein percentage of 21.1 is more than ample, perhaps even too high . . .
Zooming in on the fat in millet, there is .118g of omega 3 and 2.015g of omega 6 per 100g. This is an omega 3:6 of .0586. This is not great: you will not find me eating millet unless I am starving and have a protein shake on hand with ground flax seeds in it.
Since we have 281.5g of total millet in the mix, we have 1.897g x 2.815 = 5.336g of omega 6 kindly asking to be balanced with omega 3.
We will be doing this with 26.68g of flax seeds.
We are at a total ameliorative dose of 51.2g of flax seeds to cover the yellow peas, red lentils, and millet in this mix.
The current mix has 30g as I sacrificed some of the dose to make way for other fats—the butter and coconut oil.
However, this was before the major update that deployed pilchards and beef liver. It might seem that a fork is neccessary where the full dose of flax seeds is restored, and all of the coconut oil and 66.6% of the butter is removed . . . However, I am disinclined to remove all butter as it seems the flavour of the eggs improved after its inclusion.
Some further testing of this fork, with a fork, is perhaps neccessary.
Live Edit:
An idea for a replacement for millet here is white rice, which is:
6.6% protein and .58% fat, and it has an omega 3:6 of .211.
We would only need to deploy 1.42g of flax seeds to balance the omega 3:6 for 281.5g of rice . . . A total of 25.94g of flax seeds would be needed for the entire mix.
The new protein percent would be 20.22, and the new fat percent: 4.045.
Winner winner quail dinner!
I can even increase the butter and coconut oil dose to raise the fat to 5%.
I am excited about how the eggs will taste.
Once I run out of millet, it seems the new rice fork of the egg program will go live, and it will probably also include 14g of bull kelp.
It is astonishing how many feed formulae can be created in a day . . .
"This is the best job in the zoo: [rice] distribution."
There is a great article by Silva et al. (2023) called "Relationship of Linoleic and Alpha-Linolenic Acids on the Productive Performance and Serum Biochemical Profile of Japanese Quail Breeders" if you are interested in diving deeper into the omega 3:6 stuff in these birds.
You can find it at https://www.scielo.br/j/rbca/a/MP8Ptnm55Vdf66ky36VDMsw/
#eggprogramming #rice #millet #omega3 #omega6 #fat #lipids #birdstr #eggstr #farmstr
nevent1q…fva9