Chickens and food and water

This blog may be a less interesting topic for most but if anyone ever stumbles across my blog for the purpose of wondering about how to do "the chicken thing" then this will be useful info:

1) Chickens drink a LOT of water every day...

2) an automatic waterer is a gem

3) don't punch holes in it because you want to put a string in it and hang it from their pen...it will break it...and you can't duck tape the holes because they just won't be air tight enough... :) if you want it to be hanging (which is nice because they do get poop in it (they poop everywhere) and dirt too) you need to buy one that is meant to be hung

4) get an automatic feeder too--if you put the scratch on the ground they'll just scratch it into the dirt and waste a lot of food (scratch is an all natural food blend of whole corn, whole milo, and whole wheat)

5) if they are free range they will eat even less scratch and save you a lot of $$$

6) I've only had chickens for a few weeks or so but I am convinced that layer food is not neccesary and probably not really good for them (despite what everyone says). The only reason I'd ever give my chickens layer feed again is if they were in a permanent chicken run or couldn't be free range. The stock shop people always rave about the layer feed because it has vitamins in it. They get all the nutrients they need from foraging around in your yard and eating the greens (weeds!) and the bugs. Man made vitamins are never as good as the real thing. And really layer feed is not natural and therefore processed food. If you can, it's much better to stick to the real thing. They do love the layer feed though.

Udo Erasmus, a nutritional expert, especially when it comes to Essential Fatty Acids (the fats that our body cannot produce on our own--Omega 3's and 6's--so we must eat them--thus making them "essential"). This is what he has to say on commerical changes in food from his book "Fats that Heal and Fats that Kill":

"Because EFAs [essential fatty acids]--especially LNA [Omega 3]--spoil rapidly, breeding experiments are being carried out to develop genetic strains of soybeans with only 3% LNA instead of the higher amounts found in natural strains. When oils and lecithins from these new strains become commerically available, their shelf-life will be longer, but nutritional quality will be lower. We sacrifice nutrional quality for convenience. The price we pay in diminished health is not considered by manufacturers and marketers.

Similar changes occur when food animals are raised on artificial, man-made feeds. In order to increase feed shelf life, EFAs are largely removed. More stable but non-essential oleic acid (OA, 18:1w9) replaces the missing EFAs.

The EFAs present in eggs, chickens, and meats must come from the feeds the animals consume. Eggs and meat from animals raised on commercial feeds contain low-EFA fats and lecithins, which provide insufficient EFAs for human health." (page 63 of Fats that Heal and Fats that Kill).

This is what I have learned so far concerning food and water...if you have any other tidbits to share feel free to post them in the comments!