Grit is very important for your chickens to have. It’s a must have. Chickens need grit to digest their food. If chickens don’t digest their food properly they’ll stop laying eggs. That’s how important grit is, if they’re missing grit it will stop your egg production.
How grit works is the chicken eats it and it goes into it’s gizzard. Then when the food passes through the gizzard it’s like a little grinding machine. Just like a stone polisher where you put in a rough stone and some sand and it tumbles it around and a shiny gem comes out. The gizzard is like that except it doesn’t twirl.
Without the grit in there the food doesn’t digest properly, which causes endless problems.
It’s something very very simple but all chickens need it from day one.
The momma chickens make sure the chicky babys eat grit.
Grit is just little tiny rocks which is sand. There are two types of sand, sharp sand and round sand. The chicken needs sharp sand.
You can buy boxes of grit for pet birds at most pet stores, or get a bag of sharp sand at the hardware store.
A chicken lives 10 years and they need grit the whole time.
To give the chicken the grit I just dump a pile on the ground and they get it on their own. They will move it with their feet and pick out just the right piece. The girls are very particular.
The sand in my florida chicken run (points at run) is round sand.
I’ve had my hens stop laying eggs and I’m instantly trouble shooting. They all stopped laying at the same time. I was getting 9 eggs a day before.
I went through the list of what it could be, is something scaring them and stressing them out? Was the coop not secure enough? Was a predator bothering them at night? Where there germs in the nest boxes?
Then it dawned on me that I had forgot to give them grit in the past couple months. I ran out and got some grit and gave it to them and voila the next day the egg factory was up and running and open for business.
