Hen Stopped Laying Eggs- Possible Vitamin Deficiency?

[Arya28]

Use organic chick starter than. Humans need 9 amino acids, chickens require about 13. Quinoa may be great human food, but it is insufficient for chickens.

We aren’t giving them quinoa as their base diet, just to supplement what they already have... does chick starter have more protein than layer pellets for it to make a difference?

 

[Molpet]

We aren’t giving them quinoa as their base diet, just to supplement what they already have... does chick starter have more protein than layer pellets for it to make a difference?

starter has the most protien, then grower , then layer.. usually check the bag

 

[Scott214]

I have given mine meat broths and left over scrap meat as well cooked of course. They really enjoy it on a cool day and also I’ve mixed our layer feed into a chick starter and just combined the two if I’m needing an extra protein boost.

 

[junebuggena]

We aren’t giving them quinoa as their base diet, just to supplement what they already have... does chick starter have more protein than layer pellets for it to make a difference?

Starter is typically 18 to 20 percent protein content. Layer feeds are typically 15 to 16 percent. Starter is perfectly balanced nutrition for maximum digestibility. Quinoa will not provide enough of a boost unless you feed it in quantities that will overly dilute the nutrition in the layer feed.

 

[Arya28]

Ok so maybe we will look into switching them back to chick starter.. we have a broody hen who will be hatching eggs into our hen flock so we will need to do that anyway in a few weeks. They also go outside every day and have access to bugs and worms for protein... but we switched their pens around the time we collected their eggs and so when we were getting the eggs for the incubator they weren’t having as many bugs at that time.

Also we are growing painted mountain and glass gem corns which have 14-17% protein. We are going to make them our own scratch grains out of that and some other things. Because it’s not precracked corn it will have the germ (where most of the protein is) that cracked corn doesn’t have.

I hear what you’re saying about quinoa, but would you be able to explain about why that is? Links to info about it?

 

[lazy gardener]

One of our Easter Egger hens stopped laying her beautiful blue eggs about a month ago. At the time it was cold so we thought maybe she was slowing down due to that. However, all of our other hens are laying- even our other Easter Egger. She’s definitely not egg bound (it’s been way too long for that, and she acts totally fine), and we don’t think she’s laying internally either. Her behavior is totally normal, she eats, drinks, plays, etc. She’s about 7 months old.

We loaded our incubator about 4 weeks ago, and we had gotten two of her eggs to put in it before she stopped laying. We loaded 30 eggs into the incubator (the other eggs in it weren’t hers) and 5 of them hatched. The last 10 that didn’t hatch we did an eggtopsy on and they died in the shell mostly full-term. Her eggs were some of the ones that died almost full-term. We think this might be connected to why our hen stopped laying. You can read more about it here.

We were looking into this being due to a possible vitamin deficiency, such as riboflavin. Is there any way being deficient in a vitamin could have caused the chicks to die, and her to have stopped laying? If so we want to correct it and make sure they get what they need.

Right now all of our hens (of laying age) are on Dumor Organic Layer Pellets. Anyone know what that vitamin might be or what we could do to fix it? It just seems odd all of it together so that’s why we are thinking a vitamin deficiency.

Anyone have any thoughts on this??

1. did you calibrate your thermometers? You can't trust a thermometer no matter how much you paid for it, or even if it came with the incubator. It must be calibrated. Incubating your eggs upside down very well may have had a lot to do with your hatch rate. I think your humidity may have been too high. I keep my humidity between 30 and 40% through day 18, then increase to 65 at lock down UNLESS air cells tell me that I need to enlarge them. I've been known to run the bator completely dry for the last few days if air cells are not to my liking. Some times I don't increase humidity until first internal pip.

2. Diet. I recommend conditioning the flock before collecting hatching eggs. Extra multi vitamins. Whether your flock is on organic feed or on standard feed ration, a bit of extra protein, especially animal protein, and a good multi vitamin will make up for any possible deficiencies in the feed.

Actually it’s about 17% hatch rate, and it is incredibly low. The incubator has very good reviews online, and the temp and humidity stayed very consistent throughout incubation. Temp and humidity was naturally our first thought, but it was right in the range it should be. Temp was between 37.5 and 38 Celsius and humidity was about 45% before lockdown, 65% during lockdown. We live in a humid environment so we kept humidity to a little lower in the range. The chicks that did hatch seem very healthy, thankfully. As far as we’ve read, these things shouldn’t make for so poor a hatch rate. Since our one hen did stop laying, and those things were consistent, we are looking for other possible causes so as to prevent it in the future.

Plus, we had an oops (which you can read about on that thread) with loading the eggs the wrong way (as per misprint in incubator instructions) which we think contributed to the first couple we lost, but not the full term ones.

1. did you calibrate your thermometers? You can't trust a thermometer no matter how much you paid for it, or even if it came with the incubator. It must be calibrated. Incubating your eggs upside down very well may have had a lot to do with your hatch rate. I think your humidity may have been too high. I keep my humidity between 30 and 40% through day 18, then increase to 65 at lock down UNLESS air cells tell me that I need to enlarge them. I've been known to run the bator completely dry for the last few days if air cells are not to my liking. Some times I don't increase humidity until first internal pip.

2. Diet. I recommend conditioning the flock before collecting hatching eggs. Extra multi vitamins. Whether your flock is on organic feed or on standard feed ration, a bit of extra protein, especially animal protein, and a good multi vitamin will make up for any possible deficiencies in the feed. Also, what is the mill date of your feed? It rapidly breaks down in nutrients after 6 weeks.

So, you're either back to trying to figure out if your poor hatch rate was related to bator management, or was it due to flock diet. Again, I suggest a 2 pronged approach: beef up their diet, and review your incubation technique.

As for quinoa, a google search indicated that raw quinoa is about 14%. IMO, while you have a high regard for it as a food source, it is less than adequate as a supplement to your flock's diet. If you can find a nutritional analysis on raw quinoa, and do a line by line comparison of that to the nutritional analysis of a good balanced poultry feed, we'd love to see what you come up with.