chickens and cherries

[mamachickenlady]

I am canning sour nanking cherries. I have a TON of skins and pits. The pits are much smaller than a standard cherry pit. Can I feed these to my chickens?

 

[JennsPeeps]

My chicks had a nice treat of sweet cherries this weekend. They liked them quite a bit. I'd see if they eat them & go from there. The pits, though, will be too big for the chickens.

 

[waldeneffect]

We've discovered that Nanking cherries are a good trouble free crop to plant in a chicken pasture.

They expand each year, take almost zero care to keep going, and the chickens love to eat them off the plant and off the ground.

Here's a blog post about Nanking and other such crops we are experimenting with in our chicken pasture.

http://www.avianaquamiser.com/posts/One-year-old_forest_pasture/

 

[BressMan]

Upon googling "can I feed cherries to chickens" I got the answer, yes, the chickens will eat the cherry part and discard the pit. Well, I have nan-king cherries (very small pits) and after feeding the flock of 3 month old EEs these cherries, I didn't see as many pits as I expected. I watched as a cockerel ate a cherry and swallowed it, no pit expelling going on. Now, a human eating a cherry pit is no big deal, it goes right through. A chicken, however, uses a gizzard to grind up that which it eats. I gotta believe the chickens are getting the full dose of cherry pit cyanide when they consume a cherry pit.

None of those chickens have died so far, so obviously the cyanide did not reach the level required to kill a chicken. I do wonder, however, whether the cyanide collects in a chicken heart or liver and would be potentially dangerous to butcher shortly after eating cherry pits. I have read that cyanide does not accumulate in a body like mercury does, so I gotta believe the danger (if there ever is any) passes rather quickly.

The net, I no longer plan to feed the chickens Nan-king cherries. Whether I can keep them away from the tree in the spring when cherries fall off, that's another question.

 

[Folly's place]

I think there would be a difference between the birds eating some cherry pits as they work over the shrubs, and offering a pile of cherry pits and skins after canning. How much cyanide? I have no idea, but would be cautious here.
At least many birds are able to eat fruits and seeds that we can't, or shouldn't, like poison ivy, for example. And nightshade. Is it actual tolerance, or a matter of so few being eaten, I don't know.
Mary