First Coast Pet

Chicken arks give your hens new ground every time they are moved so do they still need to be fed grit? Whether additional food will be required?

These are some of the top questions about chicken arks. Chicken arks are simple triangular shapes that have a covered roosting space and nesting box at one end attached to a wire-covered run. This gives the hens an integral run and the ark is portable, so your chickens are protected from predators and they get new ground every day – a sort of enclosed free-range arrangement.

So the answer to the question is that if your chickens are on new ground every single day, the ground has plenty of plant life for them to forage on and gives them access to gritty or stony soil, this may be fine – and all your chickens will need is some additional calcium to ensure you get good strong eggshells.

To grind up and digest their food, chickens have to have grit in their diet. Birds’ digestion is designed so they swallow their food whole. The weeds, grass, insects and worms that they eat go into the ‘holding tank’ of the crop, then to a stomach wuth digestive enzymes which attack the food. The next organ is the gizzard which is tough and muscular. What happens is that the bits of grit and small stones that chickens scratch up help grind the food up in the gizzard.

If it looks as though the ground they are on will not give them enough, you can coolect additinal tiny stones and put them in the run. They love grit, so will eagerly snap it up. They should be tiny stones and hard gritty soil – and they’ll enjoy some more sandy soil to have dust baths in.

You can easily build a chicken ark yourself from plans and it works well if you have around three hens. Chickens will scratch ground bare, but if you move the ark every day they will not be able to clear it completely. You can let your chickens clear patches of ground completely, or you can let them fertilize areas by movng them on quickly!

Clear chicken ark plans and one free day is all you need for happy hens, protected but ranging free.

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