We are approaching the Dog Days of Summer and the chicken coop was already acquiring that "ripe" smell a couple of weeks ago. The neighbor lines up his garbage cans just on the other side of the fence and with 2 dogs in his yard . . . well, let's just say that I didn't really want to add to the problem.
After reading thru this ScienceDaily article a couple times about a Clemson University study on garlic in chicken feed, I decided to give it a try. Fortunately, I didn't do the math before heading off to buy a 3.1 ounce bottle of garlic powder at the supermarket for $2.50.
The Clemson researchers used a 3% garlic powder formula for their laying hens. That would have been 1.5 POUNDS of garlic powder to a 50 pound bag of feed
! I figure that I'm going to make this 3 ounce bottle last thru 30 pounds and that's about .5%. It amounts to a generous one-half teaspoon of the powder for every 2 cups of feed.
This is quite a lot of garlic in the diet. Imagine a half teaspoon of garlic powder in every 2 cups of your food! My 11 chickens didn't show any concern about their feed with this new addition.
I am certain that the garlic made an immediate difference in the odor. It doesn't quite smell like a "pizzeria" in there but there's not much of a bad smell coming from the coop now. If anything, the days are hotter than they were 10 days ago when I started this trial.
And, the youngsters aren't old enuf to be laying so I don't know if a taste test will show that we ". . . preferred the eggs produced by the garlic-eating hens."
Remember if you want to try it, this is garlic powder and not garlic salt.
Steve
After reading thru this ScienceDaily article a couple times about a Clemson University study on garlic in chicken feed, I decided to give it a try. Fortunately, I didn't do the math before heading off to buy a 3.1 ounce bottle of garlic powder at the supermarket for $2.50.
The Clemson researchers used a 3% garlic powder formula for their laying hens. That would have been 1.5 POUNDS of garlic powder to a 50 pound bag of feed
! I figure that I'm going to make this 3 ounce bottle last thru 30 pounds and that's about .5%. It amounts to a generous one-half teaspoon of the powder for every 2 cups of feed.This is quite a lot of garlic in the diet. Imagine a half teaspoon of garlic powder in every 2 cups of your food! My 11 chickens didn't show any concern about their feed with this new addition.
I am certain that the garlic made an immediate difference in the odor. It doesn't quite smell like a "pizzeria" in there but there's not much of a bad smell coming from the coop now. If anything, the days are hotter than they were 10 days ago when I started this trial.
And, the youngsters aren't old enuf to be laying so I don't know if a taste test will show that we ". . . preferred the eggs produced by the garlic-eating hens."
Remember if you want to try it, this is garlic powder and not garlic salt.
Steve
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