Chicken Bread

When we had our ISA Browns, we noticed that the egg shells were very poor. I did some research and discovered that the most likely reason that the egg shells were either very thin, or in some cases absent, was that the chickens weren’t getting enough calcium in their diet.

We were merrily throwing the egg shells from the eggs that we ate, into the compost heap. Enriching the humus in our compost with lots of lovely … calcium. Well, enough of that nonsense I thought. More research into calcium deficiency taught me that when chickens don’t have enough readily available calcium in their bloodstream, they strip calcium from their bones. That’s bad.

So, how to fix this problem? My wife and I decided that the best thing for it was to feed the chickens their egg shells. The egg shells need to be cooked so that the calcium is more easily digestible. We could pelletize the egg shells, but that would not be either easy or cheap. It was my wife’s idea to make the chooks their own loaf of bread, cut it into slices and then feed it to them every morning with their feed and table scraps.

Initially, we cooked the egg shell in the microwave for about a minute on high and then crushed it with the kitchen mallet, dropped the crushed egg shell into the bread mix and cook. Hey presto, easy chicken bread.

Later we decided to add other “treats” and dietary supplements to the chicken bread:

· Linseed – for Omega-3. Honestly, I can’t prove that the Omega-3 passes through the chickens gut and benefits us via the egg at all, but the chickens like it;

· Soy Grits – vitamin B2. Not a very high dose of B2 (at around .6mg/100g) but very high in the products that we have available that are not meat based; and

· Oats – “treat” and good for fattening the chooks. We are less interested in fattening the chickens because we don’t eat them, we will probably change that policy with excess cocks, but our hens are safe from the oven;

With our White Leghorns, we have one hen who has curled toe. Research indicates that this is most likely caused by one of two things:

1. Too high a temperature in the incubator in the last week of gestation; or

2. Vitamin B2 deficiency in the mother hen.

Absolutely nothing that I can do about either of those for this hen, she does not suffer and is in no pain from the malformed foot. So nothing to do really. However, when two of our chicks had curled toe as well, it became more of a task for us to improve the chicken’s vitamin B2 intake. Enter the most amazing source of vitamin B complex on the planet … vegemite.

Vegemite is now added to the bread mix so that the chooks are well dosed up on their vitamin B. The next clutch of chickens did not get toe-curl so, either the level of vitamin B is sufficient, or none of her eggs hatched (we had a very high mortality rate with our last hatching, approx. 54%).