The Health Ranger's guide to raising healthy, happy chickens without antibiotics

(NaturalNews) Raising chickens is smart. It provides you a healthy supply of food in the form of chicken eggs, and you'll even have a source of emergency meat if times get really bad.

Chickens largely take care of themselves. They're friendly, curious and smart enough to come running when you call them. They'll devour scorpions, ticks, crickets, and even the occasional small lizard, removing all sorts of insect pests from your property.

I've been raising chickens for several years now, both in South America and in Central Texas, and I'd like to pass along what I've learned so that you can raise healthy chickens, too!

The secret to avoiding disease: Nutrition and oregano

To keep your chickens healthy, you've got to feed them trace minerals. They need strong nutrition to fight off infectious disease. Because they're literally cooped up during the night, chickens are especially susceptible to diseases that spread easily from one chicken to the next, so you've got to keep their immune systems in high gear.

I feed my chickens an organic feed recipe made with things like sea kelp, ground-up crab shells, whole grains and supplemental vitamins and minerals. It's very nutrient dense.

On top of that, I put a dropper full of oregano oil extract into their water each day. My experience is that chickens who are raised on oregano are far more resistant to disease than chickens without oregano. Oregano replaces antibiotics in chickens, it seems, at least in my experience. I've never had to resort to using antibiotics.

I lost several chickens along the way while trying to figure this out. I discovered that colloidal silver in their water didn't do much, at least not for the Avian Pox disease that some of my chickens caught. (Yeah, chicken pox, literally!)

Sunshine

I am absolutely convinced that chickens need sunlight to stay healthy. My chickens will often lie down on one side and extend one wing in order to allow sunlight to penetrate all the way into (and underneath) that wing. This seems to be a king of "sunning therapy" that chickens pursue by instinct.

If you keep chickens in an artificial indoor environment, you will only encourage the spread of disease, the growth of fungus, and will end up raising weaker chickens with weak immune systems. Sunlight makes chickens stronger, so the more your chickens can get outdoors and run around in the real world, the healthier, happier and more productive they will be.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/038784_backyard_chickens_egg_layers_healthy.html#ixzz2ImwYAjf9