Our water has a lot of iron. You can smell it. We drink bottled water and up until now I have been gkving my chicks bottled water too...but I am wondring if switching to the well water will be bad for them? Thanks in advance!
A chicken will happily drink from a mud puddle. Well water certainly won't hurt them. Besides, when the chicks grow into chickens they will need several gallons per week, so bottled water could get expensive.
Iron levels have to be extremely high to affect chickens. We have a lot of iron in our water that is removed by our water softener. As soon as we run out of salt all of the fixtures start turning orange. We give our birds straight well water and it doesn't affect them.
We have high iron in our water and that's all my birds have ever had. They're all fine on it and lay good. I get 8+ eggs a day from 12 birds and it's slowly increasing.
We have a lot of iron in our well water too, and I have the orangish/brownish tee shirts to prove it. I have always given my chickens the unfiltered well water, and the goats and donkey's too. I can't imagine trying to give them all filtered water. Anyway, I've got healthy animals so it must not hurt them, and from where I've seen those silly chickens drinking from, a little iron in the water is the least of their worries.
