Chickens in Arks – Do They Still Need Grit?

Chicken arks give your hens new ground every time they are moved so do they still need to be fed grit? Will they need additional food at all?

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 helps chickens digest their food by assisting the process of breaking it down. Chickens, like many birds, 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.

It’s easy enough to collect some additonal tny stones and put them in the run, if the ground looks too smooth. 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. If you move the ark every day, your chickens will not scratch the ground clean. 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.