What the Crap Is Wrong With My Chicken? Jeff Mattocks Talks Poop, Feed & Mycotoxins
In this explosively informative episode, we're joined by the legendary Jeff Mattocks, poultry nutrition expert and feed formulator, to answer the #1 mystery in backyard poultry: "What the crap is wrong with my bird?"
Jeff breaks down:
What normal vs. abnormal chicken manure looks like
Signs of mycotoxins in poultry feed and droppings
The truth about wet feed, fermentation, and feed spoilage
How to recognize Clostridium, coccidiosis, and nutritional imbalances
Why apple cider vinegar is not the enemy
The power of Redmond Conditioner and natural mycotoxin binders
Secrets to interpreting color, texture, and smell of poultry poop
Why poop tells the story of your flock’s health
We also laugh through talk of pigs, turkeys, ducks, and why raising poultry is just like raising kids — only more rewarding.
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Carey: 0:01
All right everybody, we are back with an exciting episode and this is gonna be one that we're going to try our best to describe to you what it should look like.'cause we know that y'all are listening, not watching. But we have the infamous Jeff Maddox on today and he is going to talk about in this episode the exciting. World of manure. Y'all asked what's wrong with my bird? And several people have laughed at me when I said, can you send me a picture of their crap and their feed tag? We're gonna have Jeff on here and we're gonna let him explain what different crap looks like, what we're looking for and how to do it. Jeff, how are you today? I'm good. You? I'm good. You ready to tell us about mycotoxins and all those good indicators that let people know what the crap is wrong with their chicken when they look at their crap?
Jeff: 1:11
Yeah, you can tell a lot by looking at the droppings. So let's do, what is the mycotoxin. A mycotoxin, and that's in the early slides that we have, but nobody's gonna see that, but a mycotoxin. So when you have a mold or a fungus or okay, so penicillin, because it is the byproduct of a bread mold. It is. Could be considered a mycotoxin. So it is what is left behind after a bacteria or a fungus has lived and expired and died. So it's a secondary metabolite, right? So it's the chemical compound It. This is a show about poop. So it is basically the poop of fungus and bacteria. There's the easy way to say it. So it's what's left behind after molds and tox or after molds and fungis have lived and died. That's the easiest way to say it. That's pretty simple's a lot complex and chemical. Yeah. That's the easiest way to think about it, and now if a PhD that has a degree in microbiology watches this show or listens to this show, they're gonna be like, that's not what it is. Okay. Yeah. At the end of the day, that's really what it is. Okay.
Jennifer: 2:40
All right, so why are they important?
Jeff: 2:43
Because if you actually go to the bio website you'll find that 80% of all the grain samples that they pull in and do random testing all over the world, not just here in the grand old United States. All test positive for mycotoxins. Okay? These organisms actually live in the soil and they're waiting for a prime opportunity. Whether it's weather, stress, too much rain, not enough rain, whatever. If the plant's under stress, then these molds are fungus. We will start growing on the plant, and so they're gonna be there, but. Because of our agricultural system being bigger, faster or whatever. And they say better, but it's really not. And the the theory of no-till farming where you just go out there and spray it and kill it, and you plant right into whatever's left, you actually leave behind enough crop residue from the previous crop to keep those spores. Alive for the different molds and fungus. So we're seeing a higher and higher contamination rate. And so yeah. So when the plant is really small, when it's a seedling just coming out of the ground, if we get a heavy rain, it'll splash dirt. Or manure or whatever they used up onto the tissue of the plant, right? So it's high enough up on the plant that dirt residue will, that dirt residue will remain as the plant matures. And in the final stages of ripening off where you have, highly condensed starches and energies, right? You get another rain or you get that stress event and. It gets a chance to grow. Like fusarium, on a wheat crop or a barley crop or something like that. It's actually looks pretty pink. Yeah, you can go after and you can see it, and then eventually it'll go to this black blackish gray kind of musty looking. But in the early stages, it's got a kind of a pretty purplish pink Q to it. Some are blue, but most of them are pink.
Carey: 5:18
So what room goes silent? Yeah. Like I'm just thinking, you know the difference.
Jeff: 5:26
Let me wind up the cat
Carey: 5:27
again. So now let me ask this. That all happens when the grains are still in the ground or in the fields or wherever they're at. If you, I saw this recently on one of the groups. Somebody got a bag of feed wet and they're like, what's the best way to dry it out? If my okay if I have a bag of feed that gets soaked in the rain. How much time do I have before that crap becomes toxic and starts growing mold?
Jeff: 6:06
You have about 24 hours. It depends on the feed, if it's whole grain or if it's, if we're talking like mash and pellets. You've got. 24 hours. Okay. If I had greens, like someone was trying to ferment it, I could probably sneak that along for, maybe two days. And here's the thing, as soon as that bag, if it gets really wet inside birds like wet feet, there's no doubt about that. They like wet clumpy feet. So if you feed it soon enough, right? You catch it, you've seen it, right? You can open that bag up and you can get it out there in front of as many birds as possible, right? And get through it that first 12 to 24 hours, you really don't have a problem. Okay? Everything after that 24 hour mark is a gamble on what's grown. So a lot of those seeds are, a lot of those seeds still have active spores on them. And that's why you've heard me and I discourage people from doing the fermented feed thing. It really bothers me because I don't know. How many active mold or fungus spores are still alive and viable in that bag of feed they bought, whether it's pellet, crumble, whole grain, whatever. Okay.
Carey: 7:27
And that's just because you don't know the source. You don't know if it's, what kind of pesticides they sprayed on it. You don't know any of that. I dunno, either. I don't know. None of that, right? Yeah. Okay, so let
Jennifer: 7:39
me back up for just a minute. So you were talking about how the plant grows and then the water's splashing up and that's where the stuff the mycotoxins come from. So now we're translating that into the bag of feed. And when you get it wet, that's what takes off the day. Makes it bad,
Jeff: 7:56
right? Okay. So when the plant is still a seedling, right? When it's down in what they call the flag stage, where it's one or two leafs out of the ground, right? And depending on your weather, like I said, if you get a heavy thunderstorm, a really heavy downpour, it's going to splash soil particles up off the ground onto the plant tissue. Okay. And they're gonna stay there as long as the plant grows, especially, okay. We've all seen a young plant, right? It comes up and it makes a v.
Carey: 8:30
Okay.
Jeff: 8:31
So if that dirt or that soil I hate to call it dirt, it soil's a living creature. But if you splash some of that soil up into that crown or that opening between those two leaves, okay, it's gonna stay there forever, right? And it's gonna grow with the plant and every, and it's gonna feed on the moisture of the plant. And every time you get rain, you know it, it lives there and it's gonna be viable. So throughout the lifecycle of the plant, no matter what crop we're talking about, that, it's gonna, it's gonna transfer right through, it's gonna keep on going, and then when that plant decides to ripen off, right? When it makes its grain and it sets fruit, whatever, however you wanna refer to it, now you have that high carbohydrate, high starch environment. That's really, it's a perfect. Breeding ground or growing ground for that fungus or that bacteria, to do something to continue its lifecycle, right? It's trying to live too, just like the plane. So it's gonna, and in the south, where you all are. We tend to see more like aflatoxin and some mycotoxins, in the north. We don't have the heat stress usually, so we don't usually, we don't have an extended period of heat stress, so we don't fight as much aflatoxin, which is a different category, but it's still part of the mycotoxin family. So there's a bunch of different mycotoxins out there. Most labs will test for 11 or 12 different types or strains. It's not a cheap test. Last time I looked it was about 88 bucks to do a mycotoxin test, but you got bad feed, you can lose$88 in a hurry, if you've got a breeding flock or you've got high dollar birds, show birds, whatever.
Carey: 10:28
See that's why when I saw them talking about. I saw one person say, lay a tarp out and put a fan on it and this, that, and the other. And I was like, you're probably at a$20 bag of feed and you're risking that, like, how many birds do you have? Just go feed the crap out of'em and let'em. Eat off of it, yeah. Do something, but get rid of it over the next couple of days. Again, that's one of the reasons why I like to have pigs on the farm because,
Jeff: 11:06
okay. Now wait. Hold on. You get some wet chicken feed? No, hold on. Because pigs have a lower tolerance for mycotoxins than poultry do. You start feeding moldy crap to to a pig, and you're gonna lose pigs in a hurry. Okay? So again, the 12 to 24 hour mark. But they have a lower threshold or tolerance for most of those mycotoxins that than a chicken does. And the big one that we were talking about before, you know the don ba toxin. Take a really close look at that. At that name. Vomit toxin. You know how it got its name? Because they discovered that pigs a guy named Don Vomit. No, that's the technical word, but it got the vomit toxin because it will actually cause pigs to vomit.
Jennifer: 12:02
I said, I thought you were saying, okay.
Jeff: 12:05
Yeah. That's for real. If.
Jennifer: 12:09
If the mycotoxins getting on the grain at the plant stage, and let's just assume we don't water our bags of feed on our daily basis. Is it important? Is the amount of mycotoxins in the feed important or is there anything we can do about it?
Jeff: 12:25
Look, all your big feed manufacturers doesn't matter whether it's Tucker, whether it's Comba, whether it's Cargill, whether it's Purina, I don't care. You name one and every one of those is actually, if you read, I know how, reading down through the ingredient list, I know how to pick it apart and know. You know what things are in there for, but they're all adding a mycotoxin binder or a protective agent against those mycotoxins. Now, when you get the feed wet, all bets are off, right? Because now you have just, put too much salt in the soup and you can't back up at that point. Yeah. The best thing you can do, you get a wet bag of feed. You feed as much of it as you can in a 24 hour period, and the rest of it goes to the compost pile. Okay. And that is your safest option, right? Mix it in the compost pile.
Jennifer: 13:24
So outta curiosity, what's the binder called?
Jeff: 13:29
Yeah, give us some examples. There's a bunch of them out there. There's like micro curb, there's Microban. Most of'em will have a sodium aluminum silicate in'em. Some of'em break'em down and use their really long technical name, which isn't coming to mind right now. A bunch of'em, you'll see like proponic acid in there as a preservative. Some use aquin as a preservative. And I don't want nothing to do with aquin. They've got so many studies that link that to cancer and skin disorders and dogs and cats. It's and what? When I read an ingredient list for somebody. As soon if I see Aquin or B-H-A-B-H-T in it, it's nope that right there stops the conversation. That we're done.
Jennifer: 14:16
Okay. Writing that down. B-H-A-B-H-T. And what was the other ones?
Jeff: 14:21
Equin, E-T-H-O-X. I screwed that up already. E-T-H-O-X-Y-Q-U-I-N-E, I think
Jennifer: 14:38
any of those are on there. Don't buy the feed.
Jeff: 14:40
I don't, I mean that I steer people away from'em, right? That's a quick red flag for me. Why do I wanna put a carcinogen into my animal that I intend to eat the meat or eggs out of? Okay. And people dig around out there and find, there is scientific studies, not just Google responses from, Susie Housewife that will tell you that, Aquin has a lot it's a known carcinogenic, right? But it is the cheapest. Probably the most effective antioxidant or slash preservative that is available to the feed industry. Nobody in the horse or the pet food industry will touch it, right? It's not even, it's not even an option, right? Because those groups of people, equine people and pet owners. They already, they're fully aware of the negative side effects of Ox Aquit. Now, I shouldn't say nobody uses it. There are still some pet food companies that do. But most of the time when I see, dogs with, the tumorous bumps on'em and things like that, if I go back, look at the feed that they've been eating and so on, I'll usually find aquin or BHT or BHA or one of those, eventually the liver just can no longer filter that crap out. Just. The animals just bombarded with too many byproducts and chemical components that, that just can't deal with it anymore. But they trying to solve one problem
Jennifer: 16:19
by creating another.
Jeff: 16:22
Exactly.
Jennifer: 16:23
All right, so how does all of this go to manure?
Jeff: 16:29
All right, so early indications of mycotoxins. So when you have when you're seeing a mycotoxin, if it's a mycotoxin and there's other problems with manure, but mycotoxin will tend to be you're gonna start to see looser. Okay? The bird's gonna drink more and eat less. So this is actually pretty important for all poultry owners to understand, is we need a way to monitor how much feed the bird ate and how much water the bird drank, right? Even if we do it at a flock level. So if you feed 25 pounds of feed, which is enough for a hundred chickens, right? And you, they should consume 50 pounds of water. Okay. It's not really that hard to do, right? So even if you wanna look at it from a five gallon bucket standpoint, five gallons of water is 43 pounds. Okay? So that should be pretty close to, they consume 20 pounds of feed. Anytime that ratio gets significant, severely outta line, right? Then we have to start looking for some sort of health issue. And I really think mycotoxin type issues are being misdiagnosed by a large amount of poultry keepers out there. And they start thinking they got co acidosis or they got worms. Next thing I know, they're grabbing CID or they're grabbing, I have a neck, or they're doing something and they don't really know what they had. Somebody said, oh, that's Cox IDs. You better give cord. You can get loose manure from a whole bunch of things, right? It's not always co acidosis and it's rarely worms, but that's the easy thing to do. And everybody's scared. So mycotoxins are gonna give you loose manure. I'll tell you what, you feed too many table scraps to your chickens, too many greens, whether it's lettuce, carrot tops beet tops, whatever. They're gonna get loose manure. And it's not a mycotoxin, it's they consumed more fluid that day. They drank more water that day, which caused that manure to be runny. It's probably gonna stick to their back end, right? Again, another big red flag, people think, oh, I got coi. The manure's sticking to their back end. No, you don't have coy. You probably fed'em something they weren't used to. And you know they got the Hershey squirts. So just don't get excited if you don't see blood in the manure, you don't have, COI
Carey: 19:04
ain't happening. See, like I, I had somebody wanna argue with me the other day because they were trying to figure out what they could grow for their birds to eat. And this specific question was about quail. And I was like, why? Why don't you just feed them game bird starter, grower layer pellet? Like, why don't you just feed them that because you know you shouldn't feed them plants? And they're like that's what they eat in the wild, so why can't they eat that here? And I'm like,
Jeff: 20:09
you didn't redirect them to me. You didn't redirect them to me so I could have fun with that. That was one of those enjoyable moments for me.
Carey: 20:17
Unfortunately, io specifically, I think
Jeff: 20:20
that I may have actually got kicked outta a Facebook group. Ah, goodo Koil are Insect and Sea des. Okay. That's exactly what they do in the wild, before we turn them into what they are today. Before we screwed'em up they would really aid a high level of insects, so they spent the majority of their day looking for insects, but they didn't turn down, a grass seed or a native seed. They like beach nuts. They like small acorns, they can really get down some pretty big pieces if you let'em.
Carey: 20:56
I just asked a simple question. When was the last time you saw quail out in the wild?'cause people will typically hatch'em out and grow'em in a barn, and there's a lady that hatches out hundreds of thousands of'em a year just so hunters can buy'em at hunting clubs and. Yeah, they can shoot them. So she must be doing Bob White? Yeah, she, that lady does Bob White. But you know that you don't really see them in the wild where they hatch.'cause quail don't really get Brody. So that was part of my whole argument with the whole thing and their crap will look like crap. And. Yeah, you don't feed'em spinach'cause that's not what they want.
Jeff: 21:44
But that's what I want'em to eat. It's like feeding a dog vegetarian diet. It's that's, I can't believe they make vegan dog. They can, they make vegan dog food for real. That's,
Jennifer: 21:55
Sorry if you're vegan. Anyway. Crazy anyway. So if you're feeding your indoor coil layer pellets and you have that lime green poo, what does that tell you?
Jeff: 22:07
So usually like a lime green. Okay. And the color really makes a difference. So if I see lime green for one day, if I see, a spot here or there on a day on a given day. It's actually the bile duct connected to the liver that is, it's just recycling itself, right? So when that bile duct empties out, you're gonna see that lime green, almost fluorescent green kind of coloration, and then that poop, and it usually won't continue, for more than a day. Okay? It should be extremely spotty and rare. Now I realize you got, a hundred quail in a pen or more, but, so you might see two or three in a day. If it was feed related or if it was disease related, you'd see 50% of that daily poo, showing up like that. It's just part of the natural cycle, right? They're gonna do that and whether it's chickens, no matter what foul it is, right? That bile duct is gonna regenerate itself and it's gonna dump out the old bile, and you're gonna, it's gonna rebuild new. Now, under some stress conditions, they may dump that out. Okay? I don't wanna see it repeatedly, for more than, a whole bunch of days in a row. But, like I said, if it's three or four out of a hundred, five out of a hundred on a given day. And it's nothing that I get concerned about. All right. Really I'm looking for when you get a drastic color in your poo and you didn't change the feed, right? You're feeding the same feed, you feed them every day, and all of a sudden, you know it, what the colors I'm worried about are, like when it goes all white or if it goes all yellow. Rusty colored, right? That's a warning sign that something in the digestive tract is not functioning correctly. Okay? So whether they've been exposed to some sort of outside bacteria, basically giving them a stomach flu. Or something like food poisoning and, if you've ever had food poisoning, you know what it's like, right? You eat something four hours later, you don't want to be more than about 10 steps from a toilet. And that can happen to our animals as well. And it's often misdiagnosed. Like that wet feed you were talking about, Gary. If I kept that and I fed through that for three days, yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna see, a whole bunch of food poisoning going on in those birds. Got it. And then it's gonna, again, it's gonna end up being misdiagnosed, which, can be annoying. It is annoying actually. But we're ha we're doing this so people are. Better educated and more informed. So hopefully, more quail won't die from the overuse of court.
Jennifer: 25:04
So what is yellow, loose, runny stool?
Jeff: 25:09
So actually when it's that, so sulf free yellow like that bright yellow kind of color. Daffodil yellow, if that's a better, correlation for you. That's actually a sign that the bird probably hasn't eaten for quite a while. And the digestive tract is empty and the last thing that pushes out is that yellow. And,'cause that's the accumulation. So the bird's kind of feeding on itself and in the gut. There's no feed for the bacteria to feed on. So it'll build up that bright yellow sulfur looking, slime manure, slimy poop. And then that's what it'll, so it's a, it's really a sign of an empty digestive tract and the bird is not eating, and then we have to figure out why. Okay. Do they have a fever? Is it stress related? Try and figure out again, if I see one in a hundred, I don't get overly excited. If I see 10% or more, then I really start getting excited. First thing I would do is change out. Get a different, bag of feed just to make sure that it wasn't the feed. I'd get a fresh bag.
Jennifer: 26:21
The one I'm envisioning is more like baby poop yellow, where that, I don't know how to describe it. I don't know okay. So
Jeff: 26:29
there's one that's a little bit more there's one that's a little bit more to an orange color.
Jennifer: 26:34
Yeah.
Jeff: 26:34
Yeah.
Jennifer: 26:35
That
Jeff: 26:35
similar to Yeah, there you go. Yeah. So when it leans a little bit more to the orange versus the bright fluorescent yellow. That is a Clostridium most of the time that's a Clostridium bacteria gut infection. So the bird is eaten something that is spoiled probably off the ground or corner of the feeder or, this is a prime example of when feed gets wet. Especially if it's in a compacted area, like in the corner of the feeder and that gets any moisture and clumps. I don't know if you ever see clumps of feed coming out of the feeders like when you clean the feeders. All right. So the clumps have a reduced amount of oxygen content because the, it's all congealed together and clumpy. And it's a great growing environment for Clostridium. Okay. So to me that is most often, not always, nothing in life is always Exactly. So there's no perfect answer. But that's most of the time tends to be a Clostridium infection, where they've eaten. And the weird thing about Clostridium in those clumps. Next time you pull one of those clumps out, they have this uniquely, almost like sickening, sweet smell to'em. You may not really like it, but it does okay. Because it has that partially fermented, wants to try to go to that alcohol wet mash type smell for those who like to make their own moonshine. And it has a little bit of an addicting or attracting smell to it, and the birds will eat it and. They like it it makes'em feel a little euphoric at first. So they come back and they keep eating it, right? Keep digging at that clump and they keep eating it. And eventually you end up, after two or three days you end up with poop like that.
Jennifer: 28:26
Does it just work itself out the system?
Jeff: 28:30
You can have mortality from it if you if those clumps don't disappear and they don't get back on.'cause like I said, it's habit farming, right? And you know that those birds are gonna go back to eating and because they like it, they're gonna go back there and keep eating it. So if they eat it for a week, you probably would start seeing mortality out of it. It takes about three days to see that kind of color poop. And
Jennifer: 28:57
so the reason why I was bringing that up is in the Turkey pen every once in a while, often enough that I notice it, but not. Like a daily thing that I see that yellow poop, but nobody's died and nobody seems sick. They just keep going. But I have a hanging feeder, so that may be what it is. They're clumping up some food in there from the moisture in the air
Jeff: 29:22
when you start talking about larger foul, when we get away from quail where they have opportunity to eat other places. So like your large foul and your turkeys? What I start looking for are the potholes. They like to, they'll find a spot that's all kind of capped over and clumped, and then they'll start digging a hole in it, right? And they like to get down in there and they want to scratch and eat what's down below that capped off area. And those potholes are usually, I call'em potholes'cause that's what they remind me of. But those potholes are usually the place that's holding those pathogenic bacteria. So you wanna try and break up clumps. You don't want to let things get capped over with bedding, manure and feeds, spillage, and, so for outdoor, like your turkeys I would encourage you to move that feeder to a new location every three to four days. But for this is gonna blow your mind, Jennifer, so just hang onto your sheet. Okay. Fully matured or large turkeys honestly prefer to eat. Out of a five gallon bucket, you will be much further ahead to feed them straight out of a five gallon bucket and putting feed in the feeder for a Turkey.
Jennifer: 30:43
How are they gonna get down in there? They're not that big. I.
Jeff: 30:47
Like your adult, they're bourbon reds. They're your adult bourbon Reds will be able to eat halfway down. So here's the cycle, right? They'll eat about halfway down that bucket, okay? They can reach down in there and they'll enjoy it. Okay? And then the next day, or when you get to that halfway mark and you come out with, you know that much feed in a bucket and you put yesterday's feed on top of. What you just carried out there and you just keep that rotation going right, and that's how you keep it. But a farmer friend of mine up in northeastern Ohio. He went out to tend his turkeys one day. And he's, he got so tired of fighting them to put the feed in the feeder. And one day he sat down all of his four, five gallon buckets that he took off of his, gator or whatever, four wheeler and. He was emptying out the feeders and moving them around and getting'em where he wanted them. He turned around and every one of his turkeys were standing there eating right out of the top of the five gallon bucket, and they was just the happiest turkeys ever. And he had the epiphany, why am I put, why am I fighting this? To put feed in a feeder if they prefer the bucket? Anyway, so he went to feeding out of a five gallon bucket. And you can start this when you're younger, like you can get the one gallon buckets. When they're, six, eight weeks old, and as they get bigger, then you can go to the two gallon bucket, three gallon, you can step'em up as they get older. They have so much more fun eating out of a bucket. Why we put it into a feed trough or a hanging feeder is beyond me. They don't care.
Jennifer: 32:24
No, they don't. And then, and actually that makes sense for my, my grow outs when I have'em in the summertime. I generally use one of those deep flex black flex bowls, and I just mound it up because they, by the time I get the gate locked, they've eaten half of it anyway.
Carey: 32:42
Yeah.
Jennifer: 32:43
If y'all don't have turkeys, they eat more than pigs, I swear. They do. They eat a lot of feed. Yeah.
Jeff: 32:53
Turkeys and pigs are my two favorite farm animals, so we're not gonna pick on them.
Carey: 32:58
Oh, I love that they're the only
Jeff: 32:59
two animals. Yeah. They're the only two animals that really care. If you show up every day, they're happy to seed. The rest of them really don't care.
Carey: 33:08
And that they
Jeff: 33:09
both have great personalities.
Carey: 33:11
Since getting turkeys or since getting pigs. I've noticed that if they see me or hear me, they start making that noise and they'll come to the fence and they're like, where you at? What you got? Did you bring me something to eat?
Jennifer: 33:29
They laugh your jokes.
Carey: 33:32
Yeah, they do. They do. And if turkeys are close enough to you while you're talking to the pigs, the turkeys are making that little. It is almost like a little chirp, high pitched chirping, sound like they're trying to talk and they're like, what are you talking about? Are you gonna come see me? What do you, what are you bringing to me? I like that I, if I could get my kids to do that, I'd like them more, or,
Jeff: 34:00
I hate to tell you this, but raising pigs is better than raising kids every day of the week.
Carey: 34:05
I've got. I got a lot. So I do have more kids in turkeys or pigs, even combined. So I could agree with that.
Jennifer: 34:15
The ducks talk to you the most, but they can talk to you. So if you want them to shut up, they talk a lot okay. I like them all. I have them all. That's why I like them. So what about duck poop? What makes it so wet? And all the time, like it comes out all the time. Is it from all the water filter feeding?
Jeff: 34:39
It's partly that, but also your waterfowl are better grazers, so they're going to consume more greenery than any chicken ever will. Okay. Turkeys are good. Turkeys are better than chickens. Chickens are okay at eating grass, but they're, it's not really what they want. They'll eat some. About 5% of their diet is about all you're gonna get a chicken to eat. Turkeys can be up to 10%, but now ducks, you can get up into that 20% range if you've got really good grazing for'em and they're happy. And then geese can be even higher than that. If you've got the right, if you've got the right range for'em out there, forages ducks can get 30%. Off of what they're eating, out there ranging around, but it's gotta be the right stuff, right?
Jennifer: 35:30
So when I got out of all this technical stuff that you gave us is to pay attention to what they're eating and then look at their poop and see if it's changed. So if you fed them, say a bunch of watermelon, it's probably gonna be a lot runnier than it was before.
Jeff: 35:47
It's gonna be a lot run here because I used to do that. Yeah, you're dead on right there because, I had a grumpy old neighbor and he always just, he pissed and moaned about everything he could think about. Right? And, one day he'd come over and he was complaining about my cat digging up the fish he had in the garden. He buried fish to grow his plants. And he was complaining about my cat and blah, blah, blah. And one day I walked over and I just, I gave him two dozen eggs, right? And he just, he didn't know what to say. A couple days later, he ran a little fruit stand alongside the road. A couple days later, the unsalable, cantaloupe or watermelon started showing up on my porch for the chickens. And I, every now and then I'd give him a dozen eggs and he was happy. Never, he never complained about my cats again, ever. And, but yeah. When you crack open a watermelon, I don't wanna get 25 to 30 chickens in the backyard for eggs for us and mom and, a few friends, but they could clean up 25 chickens can clean up a watermelon in no time. I don't know where they put it. Oh
Carey: 36:51
God. They can,
Jennifer: 36:53
they just leave that green skin. That's all that's left.
Carey: 36:56
Yeah. That's it. Yeah. In the summertime when it's gonna be a hundred plus. I'll get a watermelon and I'll put like a huge chunk in my grow out pen and then I'll cut up little sections and put in my breeding pens and they just go nuts. But it's a lot of hydration.
Jeff: 37:20
No nutrition. No nutrition. All you did is gave'em pink water. Okay,
Carey: 37:26
That's fine. Just know that I feed them. I feed them Bougie feed.
Jennifer: 37:32
Okay. So there's really nothing we can do at this point about mycotoxins except keep our feed dry, right?
Jeff: 37:38
You can, I know I you didn't ask me that question. You said what are we doing about it? So there are some excellent products on the market. The one I stand behind is a product called Redmond Conditioner. It is made by Redmond Minerals and Redmond, Utah. Okay. That's how it got its name. It's not a person. So that's a lot of Redmond. That's a lot of Redmond. So it's actually a volcanic ash deposit from whenever, the continents, the continental shift or whatever happened out there in Utah. And it they just go, scrape it off the top, and. It has excellent toxin binding effects, for pretty much all animals, right? So yeah, we can add this to the feed. Usually add it at about 1%, so four ounces for every 25 pounds of feed, and that does a really nice job. And I'd much rather see people using that versus, looking for chemicals to try and kill something or.
Jennifer: 38:44
So that will bind up the mycotoxin so it doesn't affect the birds,
Jeff: 38:50
right? So most of the mycotoxins are. Positively charged ions. Now we're gonna get into some different kind of chemistry stuff here, and I don't wanna lose people, so let's just, we're gonna keep this as basic as I can make it. So clay particles, those ash particles are negatively charged and. Most mycotoxins are positively charged, so those clay particles will attach, just like when we played with magnets in grade school, okay? They're going to attract and attach and they don't allow them to be entered to be absorbed or enter into the bloodstream, and they'll come out the backside of the chicken. And we have now, it will make a dry, it'll also dry up poop. So if the poop is a little too runny it's a great way to recondition the gut. Even if you don't have mycotoxins, it'll recondition that gut and it'll get your poop back to normal moisture levels or viscosity. It's really an excellent product.
Jennifer: 40:03
Okay. Is just for the sake of conversation, is there anything else like you might have around your house that would do the same thing?
Jeff: 40:13
Not really. Not that I can think of.
Carey: 40:16
Okay.
Jeff: 40:16
Nothing. Pop trick, unless you're keeping activated charcoal. You could and you can get activated charcoal quicker,'cause you can get it at pretty much any pharmacy. So if you weren't prepared and something hit your flock, you could run down and get a couple pounds of activated charcoal. But by the time you buy it at Walgreens CVS or wherever you go, it's pretty expensive at that point. You could, nah, Jennifer, you're one of those people. You could make your own biochar, which is activated to charcoal and you could keep some on hand all the time, right? So that would work for you. Not everybody's gonna make biochar, but biochar would be almost as good at buffering out the toxins. Okay. And actually, for if people want to actually start making biochar, I'm all in for letting people, free choice it, don't mix it in the feed you just like you do with your grit and your oyster shelf kinda thing. If you wanted some biochar out there and let the, an, the birds self dose on it, they know they can figure it out. We don't need to, we don't need to choke'em with it. And they, as long as it's easy to find they'll find it.
Jennifer: 41:36
Cool. Is there anything else we need to know before we wrap it up for the day?
Jeff: 41:43
There's lot.
Carey: 41:44
I gotta know something. There's
Jeff: 41:45
lots I can talk about poop forever.
Carey: 41:48
Will apple cider vinegar kill your birds in the summertime?
Jeff: 41:53
I have, I'm on my 29th year and I have never ever seen that happen, right? I have only seen positive effects with the apple cider vinegar, but. Where they're coming up with, I've seen those posts and I've seen people talk about it and I have no idea how they come up to that conclusion that it's gonna cause some sort of acidosis or something and cause it increased the heat stress on the bird. I've never seen that. And apple cider vinegar combined with other things, has been used for. More than 500 years as an electrolyte replacement, for farmers for pretty much everything.
Carey: 42:40
And I was gonna say don't commercial poultry houses, buy it either in the 55 gallon drum or in the 275 gallon tote and inject it into their water. Some do all the time.
Jeff: 42:55
Yeah, some do. Yeah, they're running it, at 200 to one or a hundred to one, something like that. It gets expensive on the commercial level, and they're targeting certain windows of opportunity, when they may run into necrotic enteritis or COCC acidosis. They also know that acidifying chicken's gut the digestive track of poultry. Actually increases feed efficiency and keeps'em healthier, right? So they're less likely to get pathogenic bacteria, co acidosis, things like that. So it's a pretty good preventative. Like I said, I have no idea where that post came from. I've only seen it once, And I haven't tracked it back, but. Where people are talking about apple cider vinegar will deplete calcium from their bones, is another one that I hear. It's if your feed has the correct amount of calcium in it. No, it's not gonna do that. So people also don't understand that even though you feed dietary calcium to your birds to, for the eggshells there's always a transfer of calcium from the bloodstream to the bone, and then from the bone to make an egg. So it is part of the normal routine. All the calcium for an egg does not come out of the digestive tract.
Carey: 44:27
Okay. I was just curious about that because people have all, every summer it's this huge thing and I'm like, mine mind drinking it every day. Yeah. So yeah,
Jeff: 44:45
if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Carey: 44:46
All right. We appreciate you coming on with us today and talking about your favorite subject. We can get a whole lot
Jeff: 44:54
of poop. We got stuck on mycotoxins, but, all right, that's, we had a little bit of poop. So the bottom line is if you don't, if you don't see red in the poop that looks blood red. Blood red, okay? Not this little, not okay. If you don't see blood colored red in the poop. It's not cocc acidosis. Okay? And you can prove me wrong. Take a manure sample, do a fecal float, count the eggs, count the OO cyst in a gram of whatever poop. Okay? I don't care if it's yours. Your chickens, your quails, your dogs, whatever. It's pretty much universal. So there is supposed to be for a healthy poultry digestive tract, I. There should be between 40 and 60 co cocc, acidosis, os, or egg, if you will, in every gram of poultry poop, and it's supposed to be there. If I see numbers below 40, I'm really worried. That bird is not healthy at all. Okay. When you get above 60, you can start to be a little bit concerned. Really? You don't see blood in the poop until you get up around a hundred.
Jennifer: 46:14
Are you saying, suggesting that a digestive system is like an ecosystem and like they all coexist in there?
Jeff: 46:27
Everything's an ecosystem. From the world scale to, all the way down to the soil. If you pulled up a gram of soil and you looked okay, there's this many nematodes and this many co acidosis and this many bacteria and this many fungi. Everything is a microbiome at its own level. People check their own poop. They're gonna be amazed. There's co acidosis in there, and it's supposed to be there.
Jennifer: 47:00
It is all about balance.
Jeff: 47:02
It's all about balance.
Jennifer: 47:04
Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly.
Carey: 47:10
Yeah. Sterile people, diet sooner ain't we're supposed to eat a balanced diet. So if it works for people, we don't, But if that's what people should do, that's what birds everything should do.
Jeff: 47:21
That makes sense and people should get out of the way and quit making things imbalanced. Okay? They just need to, they need to roll with it, and they need to check the numbers, right? They need to pick up an old used microscope somewhere that still works. They need to learn how to do their own fecal floats. They need to quit having knee jerk reactions. They need to quit overreacting. Okay. You do subtle changes to fix things. You don't go in with something that ends in CID and kill everything and start.'cause every time you do that, you start over, right? You just cleaned the chalkboard and you clean the slate. We're starting over and that actually drags down the immune system of the bird. Because immunity for every creature is in the gut and how well it functions. Eh, the immunity of every living creature depends on its digestive tract.
Jennifer: 48:24
Yep.
Jeff: 48:25
All right.
Jennifer: 48:26
All right. Thank you.
Jeff: 48:28
We'll pick it up later. All right. Thanks for having me.
Jennifer: 48:32
Okay.