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March 7, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
27:58
Tractor Supply chicken feed lab test results released by the Health Ranger
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As promised, folks, this is Mike Adams here with our Food Science Lab at brighttown.com, naturalnews.com.
We're going to be taking a close look at Producers Pride Tractor Supply Chicken Feed today.
This is their 16% layer mini pellets formula and the background on this story is that some people were claiming that this chicken feed caused their chickens to no longer lay eggs and there was a lot of online speculation about whether there was something missing from the chicken feed or some contaminant found in the chicken feed That could have caused that problem.
So when that story began to spread, I publicly committed to using our food science lab that we use for all of our products at the Health Ranger store to test this product, this tractor supply chicken feed product, and bring you the results publicly.
And we've completed our testing, and I'm going to announce the results for you right here.
And it is interesting, that's for sure.
Now today's segment is brought to you by our store, healthrangerstore.com, where we use the same laboratory to test our own products.
And we've got chlorella in stock right now over here.
Chlorella, tablets in bottles, in bags, in number 10 cans here as well.
Chlorella is a natural detox supplement.
It's a single-cell microalgae that's very rich in chlorophyll.
And it can help support your body's natural detoxification.
Find these products and more, all lab tested, at HealthRangerStore.com.
Now, continuing with our results here.
So, we went to Tractor Supply and we purchased six products.
They are Purina Layer Crumbles, Flock Party Egg Maker Pellets, Nature's Best Organic Egg Layer Pellets, Producers Pride, which is this product, 16% layer feed mini pellets, do more 16% egg max pellets, and then do more 16% layer crumble.
And just for anybody watching from Tractor Supply or Tractor Supply's legal department, the lot number that we have tested for this is 3005-205-205-61YY-9901-2894205.
Okay, that's the lot that we tested.
And I should also mention that the last product here, the DUMOR 16% layer crumble, is certified organic, which you'll see actually makes a huge difference.
So we tested all six of these products for aplatoxins, which is a rather deadly contaminant that's created by fungi, mold.
In the food supply.
And it can kill animals and it can kill humans.
It's very, very toxic if it appears in the food supply.
So we tested for alpha toxins.
We tested for glyphosate.
And we have those results I'll share with you here in a second.
And this is in our own laboratory, of course.
We have parts per billion concentration results.
And then we ran a full testing for all the nutritive minerals as well as potentially toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, nickel, you know, things like that.
And let me give you the short version of what we found and then we'll go into more detail.
So what we found is, I think, rather interesting.
This tractor supply product, Producers Pride, it turns out to actually have more than twice the level of glyphosate than the other products on average, and also looks like about twice the level of aflatoxins as the other products.
However, in defense of tractor supplies product here, Producers Pride, the numbers that we found were May not be responsible for any lack of egg laying.
That's for some, maybe, I don't know, an avian biologist to determine.
But let me tell you the numbers we found.
So for aflatoxins, we found in most, well, the other products, numbers like 1.1 parts per billion, 1.4, 1.5, 1.8, and 1.9.
But in this tractor supply product, we got 2.9 parts per billion.
So about twice as high on aflatoxins.
However, that number, 2.9 parts per billion, is well within what's generally recognized as safe by the FDA and the USDA. So for example, the FDA allows corn with aflatoxins below 20 parts per billion to be fed to livestock, and the FDA says that that's safe, and USDA has similar guidelines.
Now, for peanuts, nuts and peanuts have a lot of aflatoxin risk, and so there are rules about being able to export peanuts with a certain level of aflatoxins, and those rules vary from one country to another.
In the EU, the limit has been, for peanuts, it has been four parts per billion.
I think they raised it to ten.
If I'm not mistaken, I mean, these numbers are changing all the time.
But across the world, different countries, some countries have a limit as strict as, let's say, two parts per billion.
And then other countries have limits of more like 50 or even 100 parts per billion.
So this being 2.9 parts per billion, It may potentially be higher than some limits by some countries, but certainly not the United States and not the EU. So there's nothing that tractor supply is selling here that is, at least for aflatoxins, it does not violate any FDA or USDA guidelines that I'm aware of at all.
Is 2.9 parts per billion aflatoxins, is that potentially responsible for chickens not laying eggs?
I kind of doubt it, actually.
I doubt it, but again, I'm not the avian biologist expert.
Someone else could chime in on that.
But certainly it is about twice as high as the other products that we tested.
So I wouldn't call it, you know, obviously the cleanest product in terms of aflatoxins.
So that's my take.
Now, moving on to the next potential contaminant, glyphosate.
Now, glyphosate is the world's number one weed killer, and it's sprayed on, well, Roundup Ready crops, and it's sprayed on weeds and so on, and it's used in areas where some chickens feed, and so there's a certain amount of glyphosate that's in areas, but also in chicken feed.
Glyphosate is used on certain crops.
It's used on legumes.
It's used as a desiccant and so on.
Well, let me tell you the levels of glyphosate that we found in the other products then compared to Producers Pride.
In the Dumour organic product, zero.
We detected zero glyphosate.
And that's good news because it shows that Dumour's organic line really is avoiding exposure to glyphosate.
That's great to know.
Let's see.
In nature's best organic egg layer pellets, we found 1.8 parts per billion glyphosate, which is an extremely low level, and personally I would not be concerned about that level.
That is an organic product, however, so it would be great if that were zero, but it's not.
It's 1.8.
And then in another Dumour product, we found 2.5 parts per billion.
And then in Flock Party, we found 10.5 parts per billion, glyphosate.
In Purina's layer crumbles, we found 10.7.
In Producers' Pride from Tractor Supply, we found 19.8.
So it was, again, roughly, well, more than twice the average of the other products.
But then again, this product is not labeled organic.
And the other issue is that 19.8, or we could round it to 20 parts per billion, 20 parts per billion of glyphosate in a chicken feed product Would not alarm the FDA or the USDA or even EU officials, nor would it alarm probably Canadian officials of any kind.
It's not uncommon to see that in non-organic chicken feed.
So I just want to be clear that the tractor supply company...
It has not violated any, at least in terms of glyphosate, and we already covered aflatoxins, but in terms of glyphosate, they have not violated any FDA guidelines or USDA guidelines.
Could 20 parts per billion glyphosate cause harm to chickens and cause them to stop laying eggs?
Frankly, I doubt it.
I truly doubt it.
I don't think that's responsible for the lack of egg laying that's been reported by some people.
Then again, if you want to reduce your chicken's exposure to glyphosate, you should buy organic.
All the organic products are significantly lower.
And also, by the way, if you have backyard chickens like I do, you want to let them, you know, free-range and feed, eat weeds and little bugs and what have you, scorpions and such.
Don't use glyphosate on your farm or anywhere on your property because that glyphosate will end up in the chicken eggs and the chicken meat.
If you eat your chicken meat, just stop using these products and it won't end up in your chickens.
In any case, also bio-organic if you don't want to have exposure to this in your chicken feed.
All right, next we tested this for heavy metals.
In addition to heavy metals, we also tested for nutritive elements, such as magnesium and potassium and so on.
So let me just go through some of the kind of interesting results in this realm.
And this testing was conducted via ICP-MS, by the way.
It's another type of mass spec for elemental analysis.
So we tested for aluminum, and of course there's aluminum in all the products we tested.
It's a very common element in any kind of feed.
And the producer's pride product actually had among the lowest levels of aluminum.
So if you consider aluminum to be a contaminant, even though it's in everything, I mean, it's in all food, it's not high in Tractor Supply's product at all.
Potassium we tested, and Producers Pride here had the highest levels of potassium, about 30% higher than all the other brands, which is interesting.
So whatever they're doing, they're getting a lot more potassium, which is good nutrition.
Let's see.
We tested vanadium, chromium.
What do we have here?
Iron, nickel.
Not any crazy, weird results in any of that.
Let's see.
Zinc.
They all have a good amount of zinc.
The Dumour had the highest zinc levels, which is good for chickens, but too much zinc can be a bad thing.
Then we tested for arsenic, a toxic element.
And arsenic in water wells is, believe it or not, the number one cause of cancer around the world.
But that's arsenic contaminated water wells where people are drinking a tremendous amount of water that has, you know, inorganic arsenic in it.
And by the way, our test did not distinguish between organic versus inorganic arsenic in this case.
But just from an elemental level, the tractor supply product had 179 parts per billion arsenic.
Which is not much.
It's not unusual to see that.
The Dumour product, the non-organic Dumour, had almost 900 parts per billion arsenic, which is also not necessarily alarming by itself either.
The other products had 379, 268, 137, and so on.
So arsenic, no major red flags there.
Let's see.
Strontium, which is also, it's very important for healthy eggs.
The highest levels of strontium were found in the flock pantry egg maker pellets at about 79 parts per million, which is within a normal range and is important for chickens.
The Dumour non-organic product had almost 70 parts per million eggs.
And Producers Pride here had only about 43 parts per million, which is still fine.
It's within a normal range.
Let's see.
None of them had silver.
Dang it.
It'd be nice to get free silver from your grain.
Let's look at cadmium.
There was a very big difference in cadmium, and this surprised me quite a bit.
Now, Producers Pride, again, the tractor supply product, actually had the lowest levels of cadmium of all the brands that we tested.
Only 74 parts per billion, which for cadmium is, you know, acceptably low.
Now, cadmium is not nearly as toxic as, let's say, lead.
So there's a little more leeway when it comes to cadmium in foods.
I'm happy with 74.
I wouldn't have any problems with something even like a chocolate bar that had 74 parts per billion cadmium.
That would pass muster.
And the flock party egg maker pellets had about 75 parts per billion cadmium, which is also very low.
Purina had 153.
And by the way, I'm going to publish this on naturalnews.com so you can see the numbers for yourself.
Nature's Best Organic Egg Layer Pellets had a little over 100, 103 parts per billion, which is very low.
The Dumour Egg Max Pellets had the highest number by far, 690 parts per billion.
Which, in my mind, that's starting to get a little bit concerning as a food scientist.
I wouldn't want to feed my chickens A feed that had almost 700 parts per billion cadmium on an ongoing basis.
Now, granted, these numbers can vary from production lot to production lot.
I mean, they will vary because these are agricultural products.
So what you're seeing here is just a snapshot.
You know, the next lot could change next week.
But when I see something getting close to one part per million cadmium, which is what I'm seeing in the Dumour product, You know, I would maybe look at changing the feed.
I wouldn't throw away the feed.
I just wouldn't want to keep feeding them that, you know, year after year because it's a little too much to build up over time.
Let's see.
Cesium, all normal.
We test it for mercury.
We found zero mercury in all the products.
That's great.
No mercury whatsoever.
That's good.
We wouldn't expect to see mercury.
If we do see mercury, something's really wrong.
Someone's been dumpster diving in the industrial irrigation stew if they have mercury in their product.
But fortunately, none of these products had mercury.
All right, now lead...
We test for different lead isotopes, and I'm reading from the lead 206 here, by the way.
That's the atomic mass of this isotope.
Lead numbers for producers' pride from tractor supply, the lead was, in fact, the lowest of all the brands that we tested, about 114 parts per billion, or you could say 0.1 parts per million.
That's a pretty low number.
That's acceptable.
I would have no problem feeding my chickens something that has only, let's say, around 100 parts per billion lead.
Other brands, such as Purina, Layer Crumbles, Flock Party, and Nature's Best Organic Egg Layer Pellets, they were in the 200 range.
223, 237, 285 parts per billion.
So starting to get up there, In my world, when you start to get over 250 parts per billion, I give that food a lower grade.
I don't want to see over 250 ppb of lead in anything.
But it's not at a level that's going to kill your chickens.
I don't think this is responsible for them not laying eggs, by the way.
This is just variation in the agricultural supply.
But the Do More product...
In fact, I think, yeah, the same Do More product here, the Egg Max pellets that had the high cadmium, yeah, 690 cadmium had also the highest lead at about 589 parts per billion lead.
To me, that's too high to continue to feed my chickens that product.
I wouldn't do it.
But again, it could vary lot to lot.
Doesn't mean that every D'Amour product has this level of lead in it.
Again, this is just a snapshot.
It's not enough to kill a chicken.
It wouldn't be unsafe to eat an egg from that chicken.
But I wouldn't feed them that over time because it can build up, and some of that can end up in the eggs.
So I would choose a cleaner product.
That's just my personal opinion.
By the way, the Dumour Organic Layer Crumble also had 345 parts per billion lead, which is higher than what I would want to see.
I want to see that below 250.
But organic certification, in case you didn't know, does not say anything about the levels of heavy metals.
So the USDA organic program does not even test for heavy metals.
That's why we test for heavy metals, because no one's doing it, seemingly.
Very few people are doing it.
The USDA doesn't do it.
Most farmers don't do it.
And a lot of organic products that are sold in the marketplace are quite heavily contaminated with lead and cadmium.
Turmeric, for example, which is in my smoothie here.
I've almost finished the smoothie, so you can't really see it, but the turmeric almost always has lead in it when you get it from India or other places, and that's why we have to reject sometimes 80% of those production lots because they're crazy high in lead.
You'll find lead in maca root.
You'll find lead in moringa.
You'll find lead in ginger.
Sometimes even in beets or other root crops, garlic and onions can have lead, but especially turmeric and maca and ginger.
So in any case, producers' pride was the cleanest in lead.
So...
Those are the tests that we conducted.
Again, aflatoxins, glyphosate, and those elements, nutritive elements as well as toxic heavy metals.
And the bottom line in all of this is we could not identify, there's no kind of smoking gun that pops out and says, oh, that's totally toxic, don't ever feed that.
No, we didn't see anything like that.
We saw that this product from Tractor Supply has, you know, about twice the level of aflatoxins and about twice the level of glyphosate, but those levels were not, they were not past any threshold of extreme concern or guidelines from the EPA or USDA. We also, as I said, tested for heavy metals, and it turns out that results really varied.
So some of the organic products, like the Dumour Organic, had the highest, or I should say among the highest levels of metals, whereas this Producers Pride had the lowest levels of cadmium and lead.
So it's a mixed bag, folks.
It's a mixed bag.
Here's what I would say.
As a published food scientist, as someone who has backyard chickens, and someone who cares about stopping pollution and having clean food for yourself, and I eat the chicken eggs from my own chickens, and I encourage you to do so as well, here's my advice.
Number one, buy organic.
Generally speaking, organic is going to be a cleaner product.
It will have lower levels of glyphosate, probably lower levels of aflatoxins.
It typically doesn't sit on the shelf as long, although I know that can vary brand to brand.
But organic doesn't mean that it has no heavy metals in it.
So understand the limitations of organic.
The USDA program doesn't even require testing for that.
So even if you're buying organic, you may end up with higher levels of heavy metals.
As a result, I encourage you to rotate your organic products.
So switch brands.
So maybe you buy a couple of bags of one brand.
You should switch to another brand and you should rotate brands.
Why?
Because if there's any high level or relatively high level of, let's say, cadmium or lead in an organic brand, then by rotating off of that brand, you're allowing the chicken time to do its natural detoxification from that potential contaminant or element.
And by rotating brands, you're allowing the detox to take place and you're giving the chicken time to Before you reintroduce a relatively higher level of that same potential metal or toxin in the future.
So to summarize, number one, buy organic because organic brands are going to be cleaner.
And then secondly, rotate those organic brands over time.
So that you're spreading out the exposure among multiple different products, different brands, different months, different seasons, and you give your chickens time to detox.
Make sure your chickens have clean water.
Make sure your chickens have access to clean grass and shrubs and weeds and bugs.
And if you can avoid it, don't spray anything on your farm because that's another vector of contamination.
But by just giving your chickens clean water, they're going to naturally detox on their own quite a bit.
And then if you have organic food in your own kitchen, save your food scraps and share those food scraps obviously with your chickens.
Let them, you know, Peck through the avocados or the carrots or the carrot shavings or apple cores or whatever, right?
Just give it to your chickens first and let them feed off of that.
You can also, by the way, grow your own local crops that your chickens can feed on.
You can grow, for example, mulberry trees.
And chickens love to eat the mulberries or other types of things that you can grow there locally.
And as long as you're not spraying glyphosate around, that's not going to be an issue.
Yes, you're going to have to probably supplement with feed like Tractor Supply Feed or other brands.
Just rotate those brands and buy organic wherever you can.
One more thing you can do, although this can get expensive, is you can feed your chickens superfoods.
You can get things like Plorella if you wish, although, again, that's expensive.
But you can get superfoods.
You can help your chickens naturally detox.
But I think the simplest and easiest way to do that is just give them a lot of free-range, fresh grass, a clean environment, and clean water.
And I think they're going to do most of the detox on their own.
You can also grow sprouts, by the way, and you can feed sprouts to your chickens, and that's a really powerful detox.
And that's also very inexpensive.
It's a lot cheaper than purchasing supplements.
Nothing wrong with buying supplements, but you can't end up growing like a $50 egg, right?
You have to think about the economy of this.
So sprouting alfalfa sprouts or broccoli sprouts and then feeding some of those sprouts to your chickens, that's a really economical way to get them lots of chlorophyll and lots of good nutrition.
All right, the bottom line here, folks.
We did what we promised.
We ran the product from Tractor Supply through our lab.
We did ICP-MS testing.
We did glyphosate testing.
We did the apotoxin testing.
Share the results with you.
There are some interesting numbers.
No red flags.
So my bottom line answer is, I don't know why these chickens aren't laying eggs.
I don't know if it's tied to producer's pride.
At all.
Or not.
Or maybe it's tied to one local lot number that was sold in one region or something and is no longer even available.
Who knows?
Who knows?
But I didn't find anything that was a major red alarm.
And that's good news.
That's good news for all of us.
Because we live in a very toxic world.
And now we're dealing with dioxin fallout after East Palestine.
We're dealing with contaminated waterways.
You know, we're dealing with freaking chemtrails.
And who knows what all is falling out of the sky.
The world is not clean, folks.
That's why we do our lab testing.
That's why we test all our own products and everything at the Health Ranger store.
The world is not clean.
You're not going to find a product that's zero, zero, zero, you know, zero aflatoxins, zero glyphosate, zero lead.
Doesn't exist.
Doesn't exist, folks.
Sad to say it doesn't exist.
And this is why it's important to have healthy habits yourself because your body naturally eliminates these over time.
So the healthier you are and the more you exercise and sweat and the healthier the water you drink and the superfoods that you consume, the more efficiently your body can get rid of toxins because you're going to be exposed to toxins and your chickens are going to be exposed to toxins.
We live in a toxic world.
That's all there is to it.
That's why when the media freaked out over all these chocolate bars, oh, they have this...
Trace of lead in them.
Trader Joe's chocolate bar.
Everybody run.
Are you kidding me?
Trader Joe's chocolate bar doesn't even have the highest levels of lead.
And there's lead in all chocolate, by the way.
If it's real chocolate, there's going to be lead in it, folks.
I'm telling you.
Because we've tested, I don't know, hundreds of chocolate bars.
There's lead in every single one.
The question is how much lead and how much are you consuming?
That's it.
And how well is your own natural detox working?
So anyway, we kept our promise.
We did the testing.
Sorry that we couldn't find a smoking gun, but I'm also happy that we didn't.
So if you want to go out and feed this to your chickens...
I don't think it's going to kill your chickens.
I don't think it's going to harm your chickens.
But I would choose organic and I would rotate my organic brands.
That's my advice.
So there you go.
Mike Adams here, the Health Ranger for naturalnews.com and also brighteon.com.
And I will mention that we're adding dioxin testing to our laboratory coming up, which is a really fascinating gas chromatography interface addition to our triple quad mass spec.
And I can't wait to do that.
I will be taking a week off in order to do training in the lab on that new interface.
And after that, we're going to start rolling out dioxin testing.
Huh?
Woo, that should be interesting.
I don't expect to find a lot of dioxins in chicken feed, by the way, but I do expect to find them in animal products, such as chicken meat or chicken eggs, cheese, you know, hamburger, things like that.
We're going to find dioxins because we live in a toxic world.
So, hey, continue your detox, folks.
Thanks for watching.
Mike Adams here, The Health Ranger, for naturalnews.com.
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