I was off work today and was able to spend a little extra time with them.

Recently I've been reading a bit more on the www.omlet.co.uk forum about various aspects of chicken keeping including boosting their calcium intake by feeding them baked egg shells.

To be fair, when I first read that I thought it was almost cannabilistic and wasn't too impressed but researching further I found two things:

1: Apparent evidence it works
2: Another school of thought saying it doesn't, can't and is a bad thing to do.

Before I continue, I think it's best to state that if you feed your hens layers pellets they should be receiving the required amounts of calcium anyway. The reason they may not is if you are bullied by them into giving treats to early in the day! We've read it's good practice to leave them to eat layers pellets until about 3pm or later, then treat them with other goodies. This ensures they are eating a good balanced diet rather than a treat based one.

To go further into it, here's what to do to prepare the egg shells.

Clean them in so much as cleaning any egg white or broken yolk. Leave any membrane.

Bake them in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 6 for about 30 mins.

Powder using a pestle and mortar to grind it as finely as possible, some people use blenders.

Add a teaspoon to your feed per chicken per day, mixing it in.

The reason you bake them is to adjust the taste so that they don't taste like egg shells. This is important as you don't want the hens to associate eggs with food or you will end up with freshly laid eggs being eaten by the hens!

As for the science bit, it's reported that the egg shells digested in this way will contain the right amounts of calcium and other nutrients but the hen won't digest much of it, in tests apparently 4% is digested correctly, meaning 96% is wasted.

However, keepers have reported that hens laying softies (eggs with soft, under developed shells) after being supplemented with the baked eggs shells have produced normal eggs the very next day.

It is not clear from the posts if the hens ate more layers pellets or if they had any other supplements. Given the 4% figure given earlier it's entirely possible that they could have eaten more pellets or something else that provided any shortfall in their diet as well as the shells, providing the good result.

The recommended approach is to add limestone flour to their diet as that is more readily digestible.

I tried them out on it today even though they aren't in lay yet, just to see if they would eat it. And they certainly did!

We'll wait a bit until they are in lay before doing it again and let you know the results.