How ACV per gallon?

[Jose11632]

Wondering the ratio of ACV per gallon. Just using it as a little boost my chickens are healthy. They have plastic buckets and their water gets changed daily

 

[nuthatched]

I'm not sure of the correct ratio, probably not too strong. ACV is useless unless you have the real fancy stuff with the mother, but even then, it's not a magical cure-all.
Always provide another source a plain water so they won't get dehydrated since they won't want to drink vinegar water all the time. Another way of giving chickens prebiotics is good yogurt (with the active cultures) they really like it, just stand back when you give it to them since they tend to fling it everywhere. :]

 

[neo71665]

None there 0 proof it does anything but negatively effect calcium in chickens

 

[Jose11632]

I'm not sure of the correct ratio, probably not too strong. ACV is useless unless you have the real fancy stuff with the mother, but even then, it's not a magical cure-all.
Always provide another source a plain water so they won't get dehydrated since they won't want to drink vinegar water all the time. Another way of giving chickens prebiotics is good yogurt (with the active cultures) they really like it, just stand back when you give it to them since they tend to fling it everywhere. :]

I got the Bragg raw unfiltered heard that’s the good one. Yeah they get really excited with yogurt. Heard the ACV helps prevent sour crop, my chickens have plenty of grit in their though is the ACV needed or should I put it to the side

 

[Jose11632]

None there 0 proof it does anything but negatively effect calcium in chickens

Oh ok seen way too many threads here that they put it in their water for some reason

 

[Acre4Me]

anytime you provide water with additives, you should also provide plain water in addition.

You should never add ACV to a metal waterer.

Although I have never provided ACV to my chickens, we had quail before chickens. Wondering if there was benefit with ACV I would add a few drops to their waterers (approx 16-20 ounce waterer per cage). I was early in my poultry/ bird keeping and learning. I noticed that they would drink ACV water, but always drink more of the plain water. I stopped giving ACV water as I did not see any benefit. There was more benefit in buying more water containers for the quail so that they received fresh water daily in a clean waterer that had been washed and allowed to dry fully the day before.

 

[3KillerBs]

None.

There is no substitute for clean, fresh, pure water.

 

[aart]

Oh ok seen way too many threads here that they put it in their water for some reason

Much 'bad info' is repeated ad nauseam...doesn't make it true.

 

[Feathyr]

Out of curiosity, is there anything ACV is actually proven to treat or prevent? I know it's been scientifically proven to help with urinary calculi in horses, but am unsure how poultry can benefit from it.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Out of curiosity, is there anything ACV is actually proven to treat or prevent? I know it's been scientifically proven to help with urinary calculi in horses, but am unsure how poultry can benefit from it.

The only benefit to ACV is what any grade school chemistry kid would expect. It alters the water's pH. How much ACV to add depends on exactly how much you want to alter the water's pH, and why you want to do it. Yes, you *CAN* alter the pH in a way that helps select for different gut bacteria - but the end result isn't the elimination of parasites (and pH alterations aren't "bug specific") - its simply an alteration of which bugs best thrive inside your chickens.

If you have "the mother", which is to say its a live ACV culture, then you are also adding a moderate acid-tolerant yeast to the chicken's gut, which may, or may not, help to make certain vitamins more bio-available to your birds. If they are present in a form within your feed the yeasts can work on efficiently - and even then, there's no guarantee that your birds actually *need* the vitamin boost - many excess vitamins are simply excreted as part of the fecals, not stored in the body for later use.

Its not all beneficial however. Splash some ACV on your dish of oyster shell. Notice anything??? Yeah. Exactly. Acidified water reduces bioavailability of calcium.

So while there is some science behind it, its quite fact specific - and the way most use ACV is *NOT*.

and of course, don't do it in metal dishes, particularly galvanized metal dishes - unless you think your birds need a heavy dose of zinc?? Thought not...

/edit and for what its worth, there are a couple of recent studies on the benefits of ACV vs coccidia, Newcastle! and a host of other things, out of Poland, Iran, etc. I'm not linking them, because none of them are reproducable. There are no old (more than a decade or so) studies showing positive benefits which I could find from a country having a more robust history of poultry studies - in spite of the fact that ACV and chicken water has been a popular (old wife's) tale for at least a century. One would think the US, the EU, China, or even India would have been all over it by now if cheap vinegar at concentrations of 1, 2, 3% had anything like the outrageous success rates claimed by the recent studies.