Raising ostriches

A chat with SarahBeth Henderson, who is the manager of Animal Husbandry at the Idaho Ostrich Farm. I've had. Speaker2: Quite a few different jobs over the years, and my favorites have always been the ag related jobs each time you go to work, anything. Ag There's always kind of that question mark, what's going to happen today? So I typically get met with that, working with ostriches because you never quite know. There's no manual for these guys. There's no definitive information. So we're always finding out new things. Speaker1: And one of these new things is finding out exactly what ostriches should eat. Speaker2: Ostrich has the digestive system of more of a horse or a rabbit than a typical poultry, and their diet consists of the same. So they are an alfalfa based diet versus chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese. They can all eat at grain based diet. So everything that's on the market that's available for poultry feeding is based on a grain based diet, which is extremely inappropriate for the. Species. When I first started here, the adults were being fed in alfalfa based diet, but the babies were actually still on more of a poultry based diet. So we've done some feed changes to get a more appropriate diet for the babies. In general, I would say our current bird team has a lot of confidence working with the birds. The ones that are problematic we already know are problematic. And you always keep your head on a swivel when you're working around those birds because you know that they just have a history of being slightly aggressive. Speaker1: A knowledge based safety program.