How much vitamin E required for poultry?

How do I give my chickens vitamin E?

Vitamin E is antioxidant and is important to ensure your chickens are healthy and safe. To give your chickens vitamin E, mix cup of ground up sunflower seeds or ground flaxseed with cup of water and use as a feed additive. In the past I was using powdered sunflower oil but I found that it was causing my chickens to break their bones. It's not recommended to give your chickens vegetable oils so the ground sunflower seed should be a good alternative.

I find 1 ounce of dried ground flaxseed mixed with a little hot water makes a good feed additive for chickens. It can also be used to treat broken wings and legs. Some people make homemade medicated poultice sticks for chicks and give them to help in the recovery process. Poultices should be given very lightly, as if you were putting on some bandages. A few times I have even wrapped a poultice stick with gauze to make it more secure and give it more staying power. For a more detailed article about poulticing, read How to Give First Aid to Chickens.

My best-selling poultry feed bucket from Amazon! What kind of feed do you feed to chickens? I prefer to feed commercial poultry feed, which is much more convenient than the home-prepared stuff. If you use the homemade stuff I would suggest to check it twice before feeding. I have always found that chicken feed mixed with water, in the ration ratio of 1:3, made by itself in the feed mill seems to work just fine. If you mix in an added feed additive to it, don't add more than one teaspoon per pound of the ration. Also, check the ingredients section for each chicken feed you choose to buy to be sure they will not harm your birds. I have never had any problems with commercial chicken feeds. The only negative is that sometimes they need the feed to be replaced. You will know your birds have reached their optimal weight if they are beginning to store body fat. Then you will want to stop feeding them in order to let them lose weight. At this point you will either have to keep buying the chicken feed that works for them or stop using feed all together.

The one-bird-one-food rule works great for chickens, however, it isn't as effective for ducks or geese.

How much vitamin E required for poultry?

This is a discussion on ?

Within the Chicken & Duck forums, part of the Small Livestock category; The other day I was watching a video about raising ducklings, and at the end they said that every . The other day I was watching a video about raising ducklings, and at the end they said that every day it was better to give it 2-3 times the amount needed for beef, but not just two, because the vitamin is a fat-soluble one, so when you give too much of it, your eggs will not be as high in quality. What's the proper dosage? Or is it the same for all birds? In general, I think it's 2x or 3x higher than the dosage for beef. But you can never really know what is right for your own animals. For me, at least, the dosage I used before with chicken was just barely half of the standard one.

In fact, the best way to give vitamins and minerals to chickens is in their feed. Not pills, but real food.

The usual dosage for chickens is 10k IU per bird per day. Now, if you look at beef, it's about 100 IU per pound of bodyweight. So in the case of chickens, it's 1/10 of that (10k IU) per 1 pound of bodyweight (a 10 lb hen would be 0.9k IU per day). This is the same for other poultry, like turkey, and I guess even ducks.

I'm pretty sure the usual dosage for chickens is 10,000 IU of vitamin E per day. Now, most of the vitamin E in the standard feed is probably the synthetic version, but this might be a good starting point if you don't want to waste money on special feed.

Here's the most recent issue of "Beak & Feather" from December 2011: "Vitamin E - The most popular vitamin added to the diet, but the least understood," says a new article by Beak & Feather, written by Dr. John Haughton, PhD.

How much selenium and vitamin E for chickens?

I have a coop with 4 free-range chickens that I am interested in feeding some selenium and vitamin E.

My only concern is that the amount of each they are getting from their feed, if it is appropriate. My plan is to gradually increase the amounts over time, but I am not sure what the right amounts would be. How much selenium and vitamin E would you feed them?

2 Responses. Selenium and vitamin E are both fairly inexpensive additives for chickens and make sense for them. I feed one of each for a while (until they start to act a bit ill) and then I increase the dose until they stop acting sick and get better. So far, I haven't needed to add more than one or the other to make them feel better, so I don't think that you need to worry about making a large change at once.

I do recommend that you keep careful track of how much you add, however. After you have added a dose, you'll be able to check to see if your birds are reacting well, so you can adjust the amount next time.

Your comments were spot on! Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. I am a newcomer to chickens, but I have been in contact with a few local farmers who raise them. They have really good feed, so I figured that their diet must be pretty balanced. But it would be nice to get a second opinion from someone who actually raises them.

I know I will be taking careful note of their reactions as I increase the amounts. Thank you again! I was thinking about the same thingbut I have not done anything like that. We have had 2 hens since this summer. The last one is 14 months old now. I have been keeping track of their weight and health through the winter, and it seems to be getting better. She is finally laying eggs again. When I bought her she was 15 weeks, and weighed 2.4 lbs. this morning she weighed 2.6 lbs. the first week of her laying eggs, she dropped down to 2.0 lbs. so I'm wondering how much is enough? I can't find any information on this on the internet.

What happens when you put vitamin E on chicken?

This article from The Washington Post describes how the U.

S. Food and Drug Administration was pressured to back down when it took a stand on chicken enriched with vitamin E:

When the FDA began testing for vitamin E in poultry in 2024, it took no steps to remove the vitamin from the food supply. In fact, it told industry groups that it didn't expect any of its regulations to affect vitamin E levels. It did, however, want to ensure that the chicken people eat in supermarkets had adequate levels of this and other vitamins.

That all changed in February 2024, when the agency, which is tasked with regulating foods, released a draft document warning that high levels of vitamin E could make poultry unsafe. "The FDA has decided that it is safe for consumers to eat chicken products in the marketplace provided that the products do not exceed the stated tolerance level for vitamin E," the agency said in a document posted on its Web site. The draft document went on to recommend that if companies wanted to sell chicken with higher levels of vitamin E, they should do so voluntarily. And because vitamin E is so common in poultry and many other foods, the FDA warned consumers about the risks of getting too much of the vitamin.

"In general, high vitamin E intake is known to be associated with hypervitaminosis A, a toxic condition that can cause liver damage and even death," the agency said. In a subsequent email exchange between FDA officials and a group of industry representatives, government officials explained that the draft document was written before they received guidance from the Institute of Medicine on how much vitamin E the body can safely absorb daily. That guidance, in turn, was based on analysis of more than 1,000 people who ate high doses of vitamin E over a three-year period. The researchers found no evidence that those people suffered from hypervitaminosis That message -- that high levels of vitamin E may pose a health risk -- did not sit well with the industry. Chicken producers, poultry suppliers and a trade group representing vitamin E manufacturers lobbied the FDA to reconsider its position. The industry groups said the draft document's warning was written before the institute's report was published, and that the FDA should focus on the best science, not lobby science.

The FDA backed off, and in June issued a final document that did not address whether vitamin E in chicken posed a health risk.