Chickens in Arks - Do They Still Need Grit?

Chicken arks provide new ground for you chickens every time you move them – so do you still need to add grit to their feed? 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.

Grit is an important element in their diet, as chickens need grit to grind up their food. Birds’ digestion is designed so they swallow their food whole. The grubs and insects, weeds and grass that they eat pass quickly into the crop an then on to a stomach that has digestive enzymes that start to break the food down. 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.

What you can do if you think they may not be getting enough grit is to collect small stones and add them to the area they’re foraging on. 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.

For a small number of hens a chicken ark can be a good solution and easily built from plans. 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!

Get some good chicken ark plans, spend a day building a chicken ark and you and your chickens will be all set.