On the territory of many private farms one can see such a pastoral picture: white, red, black and motley chickens are grazing on green grass. To make the henhouse be cheerful, healthy, and fresh homemade eggs were delivered daily to the owners' table - you need to take care of the correct bird diet, providing the hens with complete nutrition with vitamin supplements.
Why chickens need vitamins
Any poultry farmer who has been breeding poultry for quite a long time knows that vitamins come in natural form to chickens with vegetables and herbs. And in winter, the intake of vitamins is limited, and the poultry farmers add them to food so that the chicken family does not hurt.
Popular egg breeds of chickens are: Leggorn, Sussex, Loman Brown, Minorca, White Russian, Hisex, Kuchinskaya.
Thoughtful and thrifty owner is engaged in the preparation of vitamin mixtures in the summer. To do this, the collection and drying of nettle, green stalks of amaranth. Vitamins in the diet of birds give it resistance to viral diseases, to the main diseases of birds (feather loss, viral diseases, cannibalism). When fully fed, chickens and in winter, closed housing, will be healthy birds.
List of essential vitamins and their values for the body
It is possible to increase the egg production of chickens at home in the winter only by adding to the feed artificially obtained nutrients, in the summer they can be obtained from both grated vegetables (carrots, beets, Jerusalem artichokes) and chopped green mass (nettle, dandelions, clovers). You need to understand exactly what vitamins are required for birds in different periods of life.
Vitamin A - birds need it from the first days of life. They begin to give it to chickens from the second day after hatching from the eggs (mixed with drinking), this contributes to the normal metabolism. A signal of its lack in laying hens are eggs with a light yolk and dry cornea of the eyes. If vitamin A is enough, the eggs will be large, and the yolk is bright yellow. 
Vitamin D - the first sign of its deficiency in the body: thin, soft or completely absent eggshell. In the summer, birds receive this vitamin from free-flowing sunlight from the sun. With winter content, the lack of it leads to such a disease as rickets and bone deformation. To compensate for the lack of this substance, the bird is fed yeast and hay flour, which were irradiated with ultraviolet light. 
Vitamin E - is in sufficient quantity in germinated grains (sprouts) of corn, wheat, legumes, vegetable oil and dairy products. Its absence in the feed causes the appearance of sterile (not fertilized) eggs. It is useless to lay such eggs in an incubator or place them under the hen - chicks will not hatch from them.
Vitamins B1, B2, B6 and B12 - it is possible to provide the chicken herd with these vitamins by adding cottage cheese, beans, beans, soybeans, grains, bran, and fish meal to the diet. B vitamins are responsible for mucous membranes, endocrine and digestive systems. Their deficiency in the body can cause egg laying difficulties in chickens, diseases of the muscles and skin, insufficiency in the feather cover and soft claws.
Of course, it is impossible to rely only on ready purchased vitamins, they should be added to food for birds and in the form of dry crushed eggshell, crushed dry nettle, powdered lime powder and fine sand. These components are ground, mixed in equal proportions and two or three times a week are put up in a separate container in the poultry house for feeding to chickens. 
Normal fresh yeast is a supplier of vitamin B, they can be added in a teaspoonful for the total weight (1-2 kg) of grated feed. Twice a week, regular fish oil, bought from a pharmacy, is added to the food of little chickens. Fish oil contains vitamins A, B and D, it can be added to fine grain feed.
Did you know? Chicken clucking is a real bird speech! In the conducted research, up to thirty semantic "proposals" were identified from the clucking: in some, there is a call to gather for the sake of a tasty worm, others report the appearance of the enemy on the territory of the house or the marriage call of a partner.
Foods that contain the necessary vitamins
It is better for an inexperienced poultry farmer to consult with experts in advance or to study the relevant literature on the preparation of rations for layers. Special attention should be paid to the winter diet of poultry, as an insufficiently balanced diet can have a bad effect on egg production.
Cereals
Coarse and partially crushed grain - - This is the basis of the chicken diet. The most valuable feed for chickens are corn and wheat, in these grains there are a lot of various nutrients (cellulose, carbohydrates, proteins, minerals).
Wheat can be fed to the chicken herd as a whole, and corn should preferably be passed through a crusher. Wheat flour is also included in the chicken ration, but it should be added to food mash consisting of boiled and raw chopped vegetables. 
Protein food
Plant and animal protein is the main building material in any living organism. Have a good host chicken get proteins in the form of dried, chopped herbal, cake, cottage cheese and whey, fish or meat by-products, remnants of food from the table man.
If the chicken herd is contained precisely for the production of eggs, then fish additives in poultry feed should not be abused; eggs may have an unpleasant smell of fish.
Did you know? Laying hens sometimes lay eggs with two yolks. But two chick never hatch from such an egg - there is very little space for the development of twins in a close shell.
Bean grains
If birds are raised for meat (broilers and chickens), they need to include legumes in their feed. It can be:
- beans;
- beans are black and white;
- soybean;
- peas;
- lentils.
Learn how to properly feed chickens, goslings, quails, broilers, ducklings, peacocks, pigeons, goats, pigs, goats, rabbits, milk cows, calves, dairy goats.
All representatives of legumes have a very hard and dry shell, so before adding beans (beans) to chicken feed, they are soaked for 8-10 hours in cold water, then boiled over low heat for 30-40 minutes. Grains swell and become soft.
Mealy feed
Almost any grain is suitable for chickens, reluctantly they peck only oats. To conveniently mix cereal feeds with other ingredients (vegetables, vitamins, minerals), the grain is ground into flour. It is in the form of flour from the grain in the body of the bird is well absorbed cellulose. As part of any well-balanced feed the main component is flour.
Mealy feed can be made from:
- wheat;
- barley;
- rye;
- corn;
- amaranth;
- soy.
Roots
Chopped fresh and boiled root vegetables will help increase the egg production of chickens at home. As soon as grated fodder or sugar beets are added to the feed mixture, in addition to grain, bone and grain flour, this will affect the quantity and quality of eggs laid by layers.
The careful poultry farmer makes a stock of root crops for the winter to enrich the chicken ration in the winter period. For this fodder or sugar beet lay in storage in trenches or piles dug in the ground, covered with a canvas canvas on top and sprinkled with a layer of soil 30 cm thick.
They love chickens and potatoes, but potatoes It is impossible to feed the birds raw, as in its skin, when stored in an insufficiently dark room, the poisonous substance solanin may form.
High content of solanine in potatoes can be seen with the naked eye - the skin will be greenish. Such potatoes are generally not suitable for food. For chickens, the potatoes are boiled, kneaded hot, and the cooled ones are fed as part of mixed wet foods. 
Important! The use of such vegetable additives to the main mixed feeds, as cabbage, carrot and beetroot, will not allow to reduce egg production in the winter. This is what serves as a stimulus for massive autumn harvesting by poultry farmers.
Minerals
When chickens are in closed housing (or in winter), not only vitamins but also minerals should be added to their feed. Mandatory in the chicken diet phosphorus and calcium. It is very convenient to add minerals to the feed mass: you can buy them in finished form in stores of veterinary products, and you can make such additives yourself.
For these purposes ground chalk, long-extinguished lime, seashells, dried eggshell. Supplements such as phosphates and iodized salt can be added to drinking water for poultry. For pecking chickens in bird aviary set capacity with small gravel, pebbles help the birds in the digestion of food. 
When lime is used in feed that has been extinguished for a long time, it is necessary to ensure that the period of quenching with water of this mineral does not exceed six months, since all useful components will disappear from it. Lime before serving necessarily mixed in equal parts with river sand and mixed.
If a eggshell, which is fed to chickens, from purchased eggs, then it must be calcined for 15 minutes in an oven at a temperature of 180 ° C. Together with the untreated shell, viral diseases can be introduced into the chicken coop.
Additional nutritional supplements for laying hens
So that the number of eggs laid does not decrease, hens are added to food fish and meat and bone meal. A very useful supplement for layers is flour from coniferous branches. To make it, ground coniferous branches are ground in a shredder-crusher. The resulting pine meal is added to bird feed at the rate of: 5 grams of flour for each chicken. All three types of flour food supplements are a valuable source of vitamins.
Did you know? In the old days, a weather change predicted by a rooster crowing: if a rooster gives a vote immediately after dark, this means a change in the weather in the morning, if a rooster's cry is heard before nine in the evening, this means a prolonged light rain (at night or early in the morning). It was believed that the first night rooster scatter accelerates evil spirits.
The use of artificial vitamins
With all the efforts of farmers to make poultry food balanced and nutritious, it is not always fully possible to provide it with natural vitamin supplements.
The most reliable way to preserve chicken livestock in the conditions of winter (closed) content - is the addition of artificial vitamins to the combined feed. The path to the successful cultivation of poultry goes through a balanced combination of natural and artificial vitamin supplements to feed.
Complex vitamin preparations
In veterinary medicine developed special vitamins for laying hens. These are vitamins for good egg production, designed specifically for poultry in winter housing. Here are the most popular preparations containing concentrated vitamins in liquid form:
"Vitvod" - A preparation with concentrated vitamins that can be dissolved in water and fed to chickens or injected subcutaneously with the help of injections. It is intended to eliminate hypovitaminosis, facilitate the molting of poultry, and it helps well in reducing egg production.
"VITTRI" - this is an oil solution of vitamins A, D3, E. The diluted drug can be administered intramuscularly or it can be given orally to the bird. These vitamins increase the survival rate of day-old chickens, contribute to the prevention and treatment of beriberi and rickets, are used during outbreaks of infectious diseases in the poultry house. 
Important! In the feather cover of birds in the crowded, close content often mites or other skin parasites settle. There is an effective method for quickly getting rid of unwanted symbionts - garlic powder or garlic. Garlic is a vegetable with many B vitamins and sulfur. Regular addition of garlic powder or crushed garlic in bird food will rid the chicken family of worms and ticks, increase immunity from viral diseases of the respiratory tract.
Foods that should not be fed chickens
Laying hens increase egg production when feeding boiled fish until softened bones. Calcium contained in fish increases the thickness of the shell and reduces its fragility. But we should not forget that there are products that should not be fed chickens at all, or should be given in small quantities. These products include:
- dining beets;
- salty fish;
- raw fish.
From root vegetables it is undesirable to give hens table beets. It is the red beetroot that works as a laxative, and chickens can get sick. The vegetable juice colors the guano in an unnaturally red color and this causes a flash of cannibalism in the chicken herd. It is best to feed the fodder or sugar beets with light pulp.
Based on the experience of practicing poultry farmers, it is safe to say that the egg production of chicken herds depends on more than half the nutrition. And only to a lesser extent, the productivity of the hens depends on the breed of hens. It is a well-thought-out chicken diet with a sufficient content of vitamins, minerals, root crops, vegetables, grains and legumes that will make the chicken content profitable and cost-effective.
