- May 19, 2009
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Ok, now go to Tractor Supply and buy the smallest bottle of Poultry Nutri-Drench. When your chicks arrive they will be travel stressed for several scientific reasons. They will need a nutritional supplement which doesn't need digesting( for several scientific reasons). That is Poultry Nutri-Drench by Bovidr Labs. http://www.nutridrench.com You should also be able to get it at your local feed store. You can also use Goat Nutri-Drench. Just make sure to use the Poultry Instructions, which are:
1.Give each chick one drop only mouth when they arrive. Repeat as necessary every 8-10 hours until perky.
2. Add to their water for the 1st 2 weeks of life. The water should look like very weak tea. The Drench combats pasty butt and the runs. Jumpstarts the G.I. tract and helps restore the immune system.
I raised a whole flock of Light Sussex on Goat Drench using Poultry instructions. I have never had a sick or dead chick when raising them on Drench water. Just nice robust chicks! That's all you need besides some probiotic of your choice for them to snack on. Medicated chick crumble. Add chick grit after they are a week old. You won't visually see any outside difference in the birds if you give hem the correct size grit at each stage of development. What is happening inside is the gizzard muscle is getting stronger, healthier, and larger. At time to lay eggs, this can result in up to 20% more eggs per hen. To read about grit see the thread in this Raising Chicks section titled
" The Science of Feeding Grit to Poulltry".
Scientific reasons for the above:
This is all about getting the G.I. tract up and functioning efficiently as soon as possible. It is difficult for harmful pathogens to get established in a correctly populated and efficiently functioning G.I. tract. Plus adding in extra nutrition for the chick to use in developing muscles and G.I tract. That nutrition was supposed to come from the yolk sac. However the chick used the yolk sac up for energy instead during shipment. So now you need to replace it as soon as possible. Using a supplement which doesn't need digesting is the best way. Because the nutrition is needed for the developing G.I tract which is now stressed because it didn't have the nutrition it was expecting from the yolk sac. See? In other words, the G.I. tract is nutritionally "behind schedule" in development so we feed it a supplement which does not need digesting to keep from stressing that G.I tract further and to get the nutrition to it faster.
Best Success,
Karen in western PA, USA
P.S, In neonates ( which I have been studying for 20 years) it's all about the G.I tract. What you have in the neonates( 1st 2 weeks of life) whether mammal or avian is cascade scenarios. Everything is linked nutritionally and if it isn't kept in balance then you can get body system cascades from several directions. The immune system gets the nutrition it needs to mature from the G.I. tract. That nutrition also helps the immune system fight pathogens. The runs and pasty butt are caused when environmental or nutritional needs in the G.I. tract affect the tracts ability to uptake nutrition correctly. Drench is very forgiving of novice management mistakes. Because it doesn't need digesting. and gets there every fast. It provides the fast nutrition the body needs to realign the body systems which are unbalanced due to stressed or sick G.I tract's inability to properly uptake nutrition to those body systems. It is all about correcting nutritional deficiencies before the body systems reach a tipping point where lack of enough proper available nutrition causes the body systems to start a cascade of failure and then the chick dies.
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I'm so ready to work on building the coop (even though I'm still deciding on its final resting spot), build up some layers in my first attempt at a lasagna raised bed garden, build our king bed frame (ana white site plans), etc...and yet here I lay. I've definitely decided to go seek out a Dr and find out what is causing this. This mama has chicks coming and nowhere to put them!
