The Gritty Truth
- Kate Orum
- Jan 3, 2018
- 4 min read
It's hard to believe that 2017 has already gone into lock-down and 2018 is hatched and ready to go. Full speed ahead as we charge onward with the new plans to continue growing our small farm. With the help of my family, we managed to finish the pallet coops and get the last of the loose birds put away. A hearty feat in itself! The pallet coops were made out of recycled materials, about 90% of it was materials we already had lying around the farm. Each coop is 12x8 and will hold approximately 10 birds full time. Inside there is an menagerie of vertical space used, many different rows of boards and planks make up poultry playgrounds to keep them entertained. Each level has it's own purpose, and the birds are beginning to learn them. I will do a step by step tour of the inside at a later date once the insides of the coops are completed. At the moment, they're just inhabitable!
Just in time! Saturday afternoon we will be subjected to our first bi-annual PT/TP testing as per our NPIP protocol. Every bird on the property over 16 weeks of age will be tested for these two deadly diseases so we can continue shipping eggs and chicks to all of you! This is not a fun process. It requires drawing blood and is not an easy task for any of the handlers involved. Even the tamest birds do not appreciate this gesture. It's not painful, just tedious. Any birds not in cages will not be tested and could possibly cause the tester to put our flock on hold. Not something we are wanting to risk.
This bi-annual testing takes place during the Bluebonnet Classic Poultry Show, which we had planned to attend. We can not split the flock up ( or the handlers ) on this stressful event so we have decided to keep everyone home.
All that aside we move on to the subject of this blog post.
Grit: Why is it so important?
When looking at the anatomy of a chicken, it doesn't take long to realize that chickens do not have teeth. Go ahead and look, open their beaks and peer down inside. What will you find? A tongue, a larynx, and an esophagus.
That means that everything your chicken eats, they eat whole. The food they take in goes straight from their esophagus into their crop where it is processed into material that the body can absorb. This is the first line of the digestive tract in poultry. Often, when they have eaten large amounts at once, you will see a bulge at the base of the neck. This just means that your bird has eaten plenty throughout the day. A fat, full crop can be the sign of a healthy bird. Just make sure that it empties out later or you have another world of problems to deal with.
Once inside the crop the body begins to process the food. It begins to break it down into viable products that will later move through the Proventriculus and finally on to the gizzard before ending it's cycle in the intestinal tract. Through all of these movements, all food starts in the crop. A crop full of grit (see left) is a happy crop. The grit helps the bird 'chew' and helps prevent things like 'sour crop' and 'crop impaction' from happening. Both of these can be lethal if not caught in time. ( Maybe a discussion for next week?)
As most of you are backyard poultry owners, your birds may not have the opportunity to run around and fill their crops up with things they find around the farm. They're likely caged and fed a processed food, the occasional treat, and scraps from the kitchen. They are asked to do all of this without any teeth to chew with! Can you imagine trying to chew a t-bone steak without teeth? No? Then don't ask your ladies to!
Our hens are given grit even though they are allowed free ranging time twice a week, because you never know when a bird needs the help of a few extra pebbles. A chicken always knows what it's body is asking for. Since I don't speak chicken, I just leave everything they need out 24/7.
Sometimes they catch full grown mice and lizards, and go crazy for live crickets and worms from the edges of the forests and fields that surround us. I wouldn't want to eat any of that without being able to chew if I was one of my ladies (or gentlemen, let's be frank if it wasn't for the roosters we'd be out of business!) I make sure my flock has plenty of access to the things they need in order to properly process food and water intake, and this includes an endless supply of grit. I'm not sure how much of it they actually gobble down and how much of it they spread out throughout their pens to pick up later, but I know it's there.
Until next time, and happy hatching!
Kate
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