Ever wonder why the cost of organic meat is so high? The answer is simple: it's expensive to give an animal organic feed. According to Jacquie Jacob, a poultry nutritionist at the University of Minnesota, the cost of organic feed amounts to about two thirds of the final production cost. "Organic feed is much more expensive than traditional feed, making the costs of production much higher for organic poultry," says Jacob. "As long as the premium for organic poultry remains high, the system works, but as more farmers begin raising organic poultry, the premium paid will drop, and it will become uneconomical for organic poultry producers." Jacob is specifically studying organic poultry diets, looking to find nutritional options that are simultaneously economically feasible for farmers.

Organic feed is expensive primarily because there's not much to go around, Jacob explains. "Some farmers have been lucky to get organic corn or buckwheat," she says. "But a lot of it is hit and miss, and people often end up using whatever they get their hands on." In conventional farming operations, oil is chemically extracted from soybeans, and the byproduct, along with corn, becomes feed. But such products cannot be certified as organic, so farmers end up trying to use alternative crops instead.

For Jacob, this need to use alternative crops for feed represents a great potential market for small farmers. More and more small crop farms are switching over to organic crop production and are growing alternative crops in crop rotations as part of their new practice. By annually rotating their traditional corn and soybean crops with alternative crops such as oats and alfalfa grown in the same place, they organically prevent the spread of any single pest or weed. The main challenge to this system? There are no strong markets in place for nontraditional crops such as oats, buckwheat, rye, flax, and field peas. For Jacquie, that's precisely where poultry feed comes in.

"Organic poultry production is one possible market," says Jacob, who also points out that doing so benefits the small farmers, who cannot compete with large conventional poultry companies. "Organic poultry is a niche market in which small-farm operators have a competitive edge," she explains. The opportunity exists for both poultry and crop producers to benefit from each other.

The missing link, then, is to research nutritious options for organic poultry feed. "There is very little research into the use of combinations of these alternative crops as the sole ingredients in a complete poultry feed," Jacob explains. "The purpose of our research is to develop a feeding strategy for organic poultry production using the non-traditional crops grown in the area. This would assist both the organic crop producer by developing a market for their crops, and the organic poultry producer, by developing a feeding strategy that makes the most economical use of the crops available."

Finding the best nutritive option, however, is complicated, especially under organic standards. Animal proteins, commonly included in conventional diets, are restricted from organic feeds. So is the use of feed enzymes, a kind of protein that reduces the anti-nutritive effects of certain crops. For instance, sorghum is an alternative crop that is similar to corn in many ways; but it contains tannins, which form strong complexes that resist digestion. This problem would be remedied with enzyme supplements in a conventional feed, but it is difficult to manage in an organic feed.

No crop, of course is perfect: oats are too fibrous, rye inhibits growth, wheat slows digestion, and so on. Flax seed, wondrously high in protein and in oil, affects egg flavor when used as more than 10% of the feed. "Each one of them has something," explains Jacob. "In small quantities, each one is okay. But if that's all a farmer is using, then it's going to be a problem." The challenge becomes finding a diet that is simultaneously high in protein and essential amino acids, and minimizes the effect of the anti-nutritive aspects of each crop.

"For traditional feed, there's a very strong database of nutrition information," says Jacob. "We don't have that kind of nutritional information for organic feeds." That's where Jacob' work, which has received a USDA grant, begins. In the first year, along with graduate student Allegra Toll, she will be creating a database of the nutrient composition of organically grown feed ingredients, and testing them for nutrient availability. In the second year of her project, she'll design a variety of organic poultry feeds based on nutrient composition, and test them on both broiler and egg chicks. These trials will test for production (body weight gain and egg production) and overall product quality. Finally, she plans on taking the most promising diets and making recommendations for field-testing in actual organic poultry operations.

"We're just trying to help out those farmers who are choosing to go organic and find nutritionally and economically feasible options for them," she said.

For information on poultry nutrition.

See more information on organic poultry production.

Jacquie Jacob's web page.