Healthy eggs

[SummerChick]

I found this and thought you all might be interested......

Healthy Eggs: What We Knew in 1932
In the 1930s, animal scientists were trying to determine the best diet for cows, pigs, and chickens that were raised in confinement. It was a time of trial and error.

In a 1993 experiment conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, breeding hens were taken off pasture and fed a wide variety of feed ingredients. When the birds were fed a diet that was exclusively soy or corn or wheat or cottonseed meal, the chickens didn’t lay eggs or the chicks that developed from the eggs had a high rate of mortality and disease.

But when birds were fed these same inadequate diets and put back on pasture, their eggs were perfectly normal. The pasture grasses and the bugs made up for whatever was missing in each of the highly restrictive diets.

“The effect of diet on egg composition.” Journal of Nutrition 6(3) 225-242. 1933.


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[pgpoultry]

Should it really surprise us that hens given the ability to forage freely on a wide variety of plant and animal materials will manage to get all they need to lay healthy eggs? The highly restrictive diets in 1933 (not 1993?) were probably not so different from what some commercial arrangements would try to get away with today.

Long live free rangers.

sandie

 

[palochknldy]

And people still wonder why we want to raise our own food!

 

[tuesdays chicks]

I can see why alot of peoples vegetarian chickens don't lay, I think corn is actually an inhibitor to laying because I took my birds off the corn and now the hen is laying 6 eggs a week instead of 5 and its very hot here and shes a BO