Vitamin Deficiency Question

[Bigfishbobby]

Hypothetically speaking, if you have a hen that has a symptomatic vitamin deficiency and you treat her, making her well again, how do you prevent her from returning right back to the deficiency? This is assuming she was always on a regular diet of quality feed.

Do you put her on a vitamin regimen? Do chickens somehow get deficient, then better and not have the issue again?

 

[dawg53]

It all depends on what vitamin deficiency symptoms you're observing in your hen.
Here's a link for you to read to help you find the root cause of what possible vitamin(s) are lacking in your hens diet:
https://www.merckvetmanual.com/poul...ement-poultry/vitamin-deficiencies-in-poultry

 

[Perris]

Hypothetically speaking, if you have a hen that has a symptomatic vitamin deficiency and you treat her, making her well again, how do you prevent her from returning right back to the deficiency? This is assuming she was always on a regular diet of quality feed.

Do you put her on a vitamin regimen? Do chickens somehow get deficient, then better and not have the issue again?

This is an excellent question.

So, in the realm of theory and not in the case of a particular hen with particular symptoms, every bird's needs are different, and they change all the time. The hypothetical hen that is particularly sensitive to a particular nutrient may need a different feed. But nutrient deficiencies typically take quite some time to show (except with hatching eggs and chicks who have no long built reserves or alterative sources to draw on), so something else could be at play, especially if she were a mature bird who had not had such issues hitherto.

Formulated feeds are designed to deliver (usually at least cost) the MINIMUM required type and level of nutrients that are essential (some feeds add some discretionary nutrients too) to rapid growth / daily egg laying / whatever for the AVERAGE bird. But no bird is actually average. Some need a bit more of this or that. Some need a bit less of this or that. Some need a little of this or that now, but didn't last week, and won't next week.

The manufacturer guarantees the minimum quantities of the various nutrients on the label. Occasionally they will also specify a guaranteed maximum, because too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. And although the packaging stays the same, different bags of 'the same' feed from the same manufacturer may actually contain different ingredients, because often they are compounding each batch to the nutritional analysis (% protein, lysine, whatever) rather than to a list of ingredients. Protein can be obtained from numerous sources - meat, soy, poultry manure for example - and the function of a chicken feed calculator is to find the cheapest solution to the problem of meeting the nutritional profile minimum, given the price of all the various raw materials that could be used and that are available on the day the feedstuffs out of which the feed will be made is purchased.

The nutritional values of the ingredients are typically taken from a recognized published resource (and animal feed equivalent of MyFoodData) where the average major and minor nutrients of a sample of a given food are listed; they are not normally performed anew by the lab at the feed manufacturer, though they may spot check some samples for quality control now and again. Some of the values are rather historic, and decades of modern farming methods have led to a noticeable reduction in the nutritional values of some crops, so they may no longer be accurate, especially for anything other than or derived from NPK (which is often all that is measured and applied on the fertilizer front).

And they are all averages, whereas the actual values of, say, wheat grown on one type of soil with one feed and weed regime may be rather different from the values of wheat grown on a very different type of soil or with a different regime or even using regenerative farming practices. Further reading on that, Montgomery and Bikle, What your food ate, 2022.

So, in short, what is in one bag of feed is probably not exactly the same as what is in another bag of feed, unless they are part of the same *batch* - not just manufacturer and feed type, but batch number. Mistakes happen, batches can be bad for one reason or another, monitoring and enforcement can be haphazard. But those things would affect all birds eating it.

A single hypothetical hen with a deficiency issue is therefore likely either to be the bird in the flock most sensitive to this nutrient in inadequate supply, and merely the first to show the problem, which will in due course appear in others; or to have an individual problem with the metabolism of that specific nutrient, and therefore require a different feed, or a supplement, lifelong.

 

[Bigfishbobby]

Incredibly insightful post @Perris. It sounds like getting serious about diversifying their diet is my best recourse to ensure they get what they need. It sounds stupid to that out loud, since it should be common sense, but I think most newbies like me just think chicken feed since it’s designed to, well, be chicken feed.