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The main condition for poultry health is a high-quality and well-balanced diet, in which Natural supplements should be present for the effective functioning of the immune system and for improving overall health birds. However, a couple of elements are vitally important for the young bird - small gravel and calcium supplements.
Calcium Supplements
The bird's food already contains some calcium, but it will not be superfluous to add a little more of this mineral to the diet, since the eggshell is more than 95% calcium. For this reason, if there is a lack of calcium in the laying hen's diet, then the body of the bird has nothing to create a shell, and calcium begins to wash out of the bones of the bird. This leads to the fact that the health of the chickens worsens, and the bones become brittle.
However, having decided to enrich the diet of birds with calcium, it must be remembered that it is not necessary to mix the calcium supplement with the food itself. Simply fill it in a separate feeder so that the birds can eat a healthy supplement if desired. Believe me, this feeder will be in demand only in laying hens, and roosters and young non-carrying chickens to the bowl will not even come up. Calcium supplement can be bought in the store, it is a crushed oyster shell. You can make such a useful supplement with your own hands from a normal egg shell.
Do not throw away the eggshell, grind it better and pour it into the additional feeding bowl
Gravel (insoluble)
Chickens have no teeth, and food for its assimilation needs to be crushed thoroughly, and the wise nature has its own way. If the bird is free with its movement, it walks around the yard and lifts small stones from the ground, ground and swallows them. However, if the bird is restricted in movement, then these smallest stones must be offered together with the feed. Again, do not mix food and gravel, it is better to pour them into a separate container. If necessary, the chickens themselves will approach this feeder. The gravel consumed by the bird is stored in the muscular stomach and is used during the night for digestion. The pebbles are so small that they freely pass through the digestive tract of the bird.
Since in the warm season the hens are regularly released to take a walk around the yard, there are no problems with gravel, the birds extract it themselves. But with the arrival of cold weather the ground freezes, becomes covered with a layer of snow, and the chickens do not get access to the stones. This problem can be solved quite simply: before the onset of cold weather, dial a pair of buckets of earth and gravel, put in a chicken coop. Birds themselves will glue the stones of the right size.
Grain mix
A mixture of different grains is a real treat for chickens. Grain assortment should be 10% of the total diet of poultry: this is less than a tablespoon per day for one chicken. This delicacy of birds should be treated only in cold weather and only before bed, because digestion takes place at night, and the energy released during the digestion of grains will go so that the bird It was warm. The grain mixture can be bought in the store, or made by yourself.
Buy different kinds of grains and mix them in a separate bowl.
Dried young leaves of dandelion
Herbs, including weeds, are very nutritious for birds. Daily add dry powdered grass to the diet, this helps to increase the immunity of the bird, affects the smell of manure and that the egg yolks are bright yellow.
Collect summer dandelions, dry them and chop. In winter, when the chicken can not eat fresh grass, you can supplement the diet of your bird with this mixture. You can use not only dandelions, but also other herbs that grow on your site - parsley, oregano, sage and basil.
