Oh boy where do I start.
Oz: Thanks so much for the info. My local mill sells bulk fish meal and I am going to look into it. I have been using something from Horse.com called horse manna and it does supply the selenium and the biotin. You just have to grind it up a little or it ends up being ignored amongst the other pellets. But I don't powder it because then it ends up as powder at the bottom of the dishes. I think that all of my hatch problems have been nutritional and today is the topper- I have had six silkie eggs in the hatcher for lockdown and today is their due date. Usually I have chicks hatching early if anything and I expected to be woken up this morning by chirping but I wasn't. I just candled and I only see movement in one where there was great movement three days ago. Air sacs look perfect and everything looks perfectly formed. but they don't look even close to pipping. The two things I notice is that there is a lot of fluid in the eggs still and that the blood vessels are starting to break down. According to what i remember from that list of vitamin deficiencies and resulting hatch/development problems that someone had posted a while back (wish I could find that post but I just cant find it), it definitely seems nutritional. The shipped faverolles that I have hatching are doing perfectly, no problems but my own egg hatchability has been going downhill very quickly. It will be interesting to see how things change since I've added the supplement and since I've been giving them yolk from my free rangers (they like it poached, not fried).
I raised free-range pigs once and they were no more messy than a couple of geese. They did eat just about anything- including recently deceased chickens if I didn't get to them fast enough- which was super grotty.
Scooter: Chickens are omnivorous by nature and when allowed to free range they will eat all manner of seeds, bugs, critters and herbs to make up a complete diet which wont need to be supplemented. That is why I am supplementing my penned up and obviously deficient breeders with eggs from my free rangers.
Sally: What about Tolbunt Polish or those Middle-Eastern black faverolles that aren't called faverolles but I can't remember what they are called. I could breed vicariously through you.
Oz: Thanks so much for the info. My local mill sells bulk fish meal and I am going to look into it. I have been using something from Horse.com called horse manna and it does supply the selenium and the biotin. You just have to grind it up a little or it ends up being ignored amongst the other pellets. But I don't powder it because then it ends up as powder at the bottom of the dishes. I think that all of my hatch problems have been nutritional and today is the topper- I have had six silkie eggs in the hatcher for lockdown and today is their due date. Usually I have chicks hatching early if anything and I expected to be woken up this morning by chirping but I wasn't. I just candled and I only see movement in one where there was great movement three days ago. Air sacs look perfect and everything looks perfectly formed. but they don't look even close to pipping. The two things I notice is that there is a lot of fluid in the eggs still and that the blood vessels are starting to break down. According to what i remember from that list of vitamin deficiencies and resulting hatch/development problems that someone had posted a while back (wish I could find that post but I just cant find it), it definitely seems nutritional. The shipped faverolles that I have hatching are doing perfectly, no problems but my own egg hatchability has been going downhill very quickly. It will be interesting to see how things change since I've added the supplement and since I've been giving them yolk from my free rangers (they like it poached, not fried).
I raised free-range pigs once and they were no more messy than a couple of geese. They did eat just about anything- including recently deceased chickens if I didn't get to them fast enough- which was super grotty.
Scooter: Chickens are omnivorous by nature and when allowed to free range they will eat all manner of seeds, bugs, critters and herbs to make up a complete diet which wont need to be supplemented. That is why I am supplementing my penned up and obviously deficient breeders with eggs from my free rangers.
Sally: What about Tolbunt Polish or those Middle-Eastern black faverolles that aren't called faverolles but I can't remember what they are called. I could breed vicariously through you.
Very sad 
