Poultry Keepers Podcast

The Importance of Vitamins & Minerals Part-1

• Rip Stalvey, Jeff Mattocks, and Carey Blackmon • Season 2 • Episode 84

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In this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, hosts Jeff Mattacks, Carey Blackmon, and Rip Stalvey discuss the significance of vitamins and minerals in poultry diets. 

They delve into the roles of vitamins A, E, D, and B, explain their impact on health and development, and highlight the difference between minimum and optimum levels for poultry nutrition. The discussion includes practical advice on ensuring proper vitamin levels, the limitations of current research, and the importance of maintaining higher nutritional standards. 

The episode also touches on optimal feed storage practices to maintain vitamin efficacy and concludes with a preview of the next episode, which will continue the discussion.

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Alex:

​Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast we're happy you joined us. In this episode, Jeff Mattacks, Carey Blackmon, and Rip Stallvee are discussing the importance of vitamins and minerals in poultry diets. So let's get started.

Yeah. Yeah.

Rip Stalvey:

We're going to be talking about vitamins, minerals, and metabolizable energy. I've been getting some, a lot of questions about that here late, so I thought it was time to bring it up on the show. So Jeff, just to get us started, are the purpose of vitamins in poultry diets.

Jeff Mattocks:

Most of them are to support health, right? You know what I mean? Like your vitamin A is really important for your retinols and stuff like that. And keratin for like eye and different internal organs that play a little bit in skin. Vitamin E is going to be your immune system support. As well as it also is going to aid the skin, both A and E are going to transfer because a hen requires a higher level of vitamin A and E than like a growing or developing bird. A lot of that gets deposited into the egg. For either you to eat or the chick B vitamins or your calming vitamins. Again, they also have, they're going to support healthy liver function. A lot of those get deposited in the egg as well. They just they're drivers, so to speak body systems and. Yeah, vitamin D, that's your sunlight vitamin, but a lot of birds don't really get enough and they're finding a connection between vitamin D and actually immune system support as well. Before vitamin D was often ignored and it was felt that, 30 minutes of sun exposure would get develop all the vitamin D you actually needed. While they're rethinking that And they're saying that vitamin D pretty much in all living species does play a beneficial role. Vitamin D also is key for your calcium absorption, so it's going to be tied into your eggshells. There's your quick rundown.

Carey Blackmon:

So I have a question real quick. In reference to the vitamin D, Does when you're using artificial lighting, does that help or hurt or make a difference?

Jeff Mattocks:

As long as it's full spectrum, right? And they're getting the right wavelength, then the birds going to be able to process some vitamin D from that. And the vitamin D levels like, that I recommend in the feed 1500 to 2000, you're still safe. It's not like you're overdosing on the vitamin D. Honestly, I'd like to see vitamin D closer to 3, 000, but there's no data to support that, and I don't want to be the only lone lunatic out there doing it, but I could see benefits of vitamin D levels at 3, 000, um, especially when birds are being challenged or, really been laying for a long time and haven't had a proper mold, things like that. Yeah. We don't honestly know the right, the perfect level for vitamin D. The whole poultry community, what they study is what is the minimum requirement, not what is the optimum requirement. So they're always worried about saving a nickel or saving a dime, right? So they're looking at what is that kind of that least number to not jeopardize production. First and health second. So like I said, we don't really know what an optimum level is. What we know is required level is okay. And those aren't the same thing, right? Like I only require one scoop of ice cream, but I do a whole lot better on three. So yeah,

three, four

Jeff Mattocks:

is the problem. I'm good at three. So

Rip Stalvey:

Jeff, you were talking about optimum levels and minimum levels, and I wish more people would realize that what they're seeing published are those minimum levels and they see those and they think, oh man, I'm good to go. But oftentimes that's just not the case.

Jeff Mattocks:

Well, a lot of folks aren't even looking at what the requirements are. Sadly, people make the assumption that the feed company is putting the right level in the feed. And they're going off of there's a, it's called national research council and our C values and you, anybody can look these up, you can look up NRC values for laying hands. Okay. That's going to be only for commercial laying hands. And what is that, recommended, what is that required value? And that gets updated about every 10 years. So it could be old, could be not depending on when they updated it last, but that's the NRC values, National Research Council, people are welcome to go out there and dig around. It's really dry. It's hard to actually find what you want, but it is a published document and it can be found on the internet. And that's where PhDs around the world, based on research studies and what they've learned. They come to a conclusion and say, we believe that a chick needs this to get its life started. And like the 3000 units of vitamin A, the 1000 units of vitamin D, 10 units of vitamin E. And those are the bare minimum. Those are the numbers that, they run with. And then there's so much that gets set on those numbers, right? There's so much emphasis being placed on the NRC values. There again, nobody's publishing optimum values and nobody really has researched optimum values, particularly in the vitamin world. Not that I've seen, right? I'm not saying it's not out there. I'm saying I haven't found it so far. They're starting to have more and more, like they're always doing amino acid work. They're always doing, there's always something going on out there. But the PhD community and the large poultry community keep it a secret within their small circles. So they don't release it to us until it's, 10 or 15 years old or older. So we have to learn it the hard way, but that's all right. That's all right. We're doing fine. We are doing good.

Carey Blackmon:

I'm sure a lot of people, they don't want to take their best bird that's perfectly healthy, looks great, go do a necroposy and pull some blood work and see what its levels are to find out what those, great levels would be. And that would be about the only way you would take some very healthy birds and run those tests.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah. And I don't even know if they have standards for the vitamins. Most blood work is done on vitamin or on mineral work. And here's the thing about blood work, right? If you, if any of us goes to a lab to get blood work, the majority of the blood they're going to pull, we have to do a fasting diet. So they want to know that you haven't eaten in 12 hours. Here's the thing, right? So you would have to fast your chicken to get a true number because if it ate 10 minutes ago or it ate half an hour ago. So blood values can change really quickly depending on how good the digestive tract is or isn't. So you know, yeah, again, nobody set this standard. So if you feed your chickens at eight o'clock in the morning. Do we pull blood at two o'clock in the afternoon? I don't know. And not all chickens eat exactly at the same time. When I had my chickens in the backyard, then, some, every time you went to the feeder, 80 percent of them ran up to the feeder and they ate something. But there was always 20 percent that were more interested in a grasshopper or, finding an earthworm or cricket, whatever. And they weren't as dependent or as interested in the feed. I don't know, getting blood work to have a good number and know if you're even on track or not again, when did he last? What are they eating? I don't know. It would be great to know. I would love to know what optimum levels are now. I don't know. I know they're doing divided. You can do D through blood. And I know you can do some of the B's through blood, but I have not seen I have not seen like A, E, some of the other. I don't know if they can do them or not. David brought up there are new NRC tables, but he thinks the latest are from 1994, and they very well may be for poultry. I don't know when they've been updated last. They don't update each species every time they do an NRC update.

Rip Stalvey:

Let me, let's kind of shift gears here and let's talk about some specific vitamins, basically what do they do? And what level should we be looking for in our nutrition? Let's talk about vitamin A. Now you've already mentioned it supports vision, the immune system function skin, anything else?

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah. Something in the feather. Some of it's going to, if there's enough of it, it's going to support proper follicle and feather growth. It's going to be there, which is, that's part of the whole skin structure as well. A little bit in the muscle tone sort of thing, muscle growth, development, and tone. Most of it's going for like nervous system. I, skin, feather is where I see most of it going that's, and it's got a direct connection to things like iron, and the absorption of iron and it's going to, again, a large portion of it's going to go into the egg. If there is a large portion, there's a large portion going to go into the egg and or the development of egg.

Rip Stalvey:

You were talking about the follicle and that sort of thing. Occasionally, I'll see a bird that has retained part of the feather sheath as the feather grows and you'll see real ready looking feathers. But sometimes you can break that off of there and they'll come out of that. But could that be related to vitamin A?

Jeff Mattocks:

It could be. It is. I, it, in part, I believe that the vitamin A is driving some of that, that sheathing is not, isn't, didn't develop right when it was still in the body. And that feather was pushing,

Rip Stalvey:

That's exactly what it looks like.

Jeff Mattocks:

And, so it just didn't, the, that, that sheathing didn't actually fully develop so that it can break away and, and fall off or the feather underneath that sheathing wasn't strong enough to do its job and push the sheathing off. But yeah, I could see vitamin A being a direct connection to that. And whether that might be more of like the, so the retinol is going to be more your nervous system. And I, that's probably more in the carotene family not carotene, carotene, c a r o t e n e. But I think, that's going to be more in that carotene. Family of vitamin A's are split. There's several different sources of vitamin A. There's beta carotenes, retinols. They're not all just straight up vitamin A. Diversifying where your vitamins come from. And this is a big reason why I push alfalfa meal in almost all of my feeds. is I'm getting a whole different set of vitamin A's from a green leafy, vegetation like alfalfa carries a high vitamin A. And it actually is one of the few plants that retains that vitamin A because it can retain its chlorophyll and its color. After preservation, whereas a lot of other green leafy, they lose their color and they fade out. So that's why I push alfalfa meal. It helps me get that extra vitamin A that I'm looking for.

Rip Stalvey:

It's funny, you were talking about that just about the time that Rob Guerin's comment came on. And he said, I had someone tell me that if the feather isn't getting clean of the sheathing to feed more greens, could that be vitamin A?

Jeff Mattocks:

That's exactly what it is. But look, most of your off the shelf layer feeds are going to run 3, 000 to 3, 500 on vitamin A. Vitamins are expensive. Vitamin A right now to somebody like me, who's a vitamin blender, making products. I haven't, I didn't look at the price list at the beginning of the month, but I think the last time I looked at it, it was like 8 and something a pound. So it's not cheap. It's not horrible expensive, until, man, I hate to even say this, but until like combat come out on the market and started pushing higher numbers The commercial feed industry's been on a race to the bottom, Frank, to who can make the cheapest feed. And and that's because the consumer goes in there trying to save a dollar on a bag of feed. You can save your dollar, but you're going to spend it somewhere else. You're just going to feed more feed.

Rip Stalvey:

That's like I had somebody contact me today and said he was having a hard time finding a quality feed that was economical. And I said I hate to break the news to you, but you're not going to.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yes. Those two don't come together, right? No, not at all. Yeah, I, and we see those posts on the, on Poultry Keeper 360 or poultry breed or nutrition, or I wanna find a good feed that doesn't break the bank or is economical can't wait. This is what don't they call that an oxymoron? You can't have both, right? Yes. One or the other. So, like

Carey Blackmon:

trying to heavy cake and

Rip Stalvey:

eat it too.

Carey Blackmon:

You're not gonna go, you're not gonna go to a steakhouse and get a filet mignon for five bucks.

Rip Stalvey:

It's probably a good thing. I'd spend a lot of money,

Jeff Mattocks:

Here's the challenge, right? If you ripped on it now, Carrie did it before, when you break out of the mold of buying, locally available common feed, and you actually step up to the plate and you try something that is properly formulated for breeding fowl. It is night and day. You give it 30 days. It's

Rip Stalvey:

a huge eye opener.

Jeff Mattocks:

When you're feeding 25 percent less and your birds look better. It is day and night and I'm not just trying to sell you something. I'm

Rip Stalvey:

not, I'm not,

Jeff Mattocks:

you

Carey Blackmon:

don't even sell feed.

Jeff Mattocks:

I don't sell feed, but every time I have to recommend all flock or flock grazer or whatever, it's still drives me nuts. Cause I know it's not as good as it could be. Yeah. It's better than some of the other stuff on the shelf, but that doesn't mean that it's great. Exactly.

Carey Blackmon:

Like earlier, you were talking about vitamin A levels being in the three thousands. Ideally, they would be over double that.

Jeff Mattocks:

In an ideal world, they

Carey Blackmon:

would be closer to 7, 000 to 7, 500 IUs a pound, right? Yeah.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah, when I'm doing breeder feeds for you or Rip or, when I'm doing breeder feeds for people who really, want to do it right, I'm at minimum 6, 500, right? Bottom, my bottom line is 6, 500 and a lot of them I'm cranking out at 7, 500 or 8, 000, right? Because I know what that's going to do for the chick figure. Okay. I know what head start that's going to give the chick the day it comes out of the shell. And if we're breeders and we're worried about the next generation, that's where we got to spend the money. 30 days prior to harvesting eggs till, until you're done, at least. Something, step it up.

Rip Stalvey:

It makes a huge difference, a

Carey Blackmon:

huge difference. I had somebody asked that question today and they were like, Hey, we want to start hatching eggs, putting eggs in the incubator around the 1st of February. How soon should we be feeding either your feed or breeder supplement in with our feed? And I said, Christmas time would have been the best.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah, exactly.

Carey Blackmon:

And he said, really? And I said think about it. Anytime you start taking extra vitamins and minerals and supplements yourself, it takes time for that to get into your system and make changes. A chicken is no different. It takes time for that stuff to get in their system. and do what it's supposed to do. And he said I guess we're way behind. I said, what you can do is get a really good start on next breeding season.

Rip Stalvey:

Yes. And honestly, I got started on Jeff's recommendations. After I already had a bunch of birds hatched out. Okay, and I saw a lot of improvement. Don't get me wrong, but where I saw the most improvement was the following hatching season.

Yeah,

Jeff Mattocks:

you can't really do it intermittently. You can't, right? If you only want to feed for the breeding season, fine. You're going to see improvements, but if you feed them at that higher level. all year. You're going to go even to another level, right? You're just going to go to exactly a completely different level.

Rip Stalvey:

Exactly right.

Jeff Mattocks:

Because the parent stock, both, the hand and the rooster have been fed right all year. So all their tissues, all their body functions, all their glandular work, everything is optimized, right there and it's peaking and that's all going to transfer to that chick. While the rooster has a small contribution. But, that hen, that yolk, that quality of the protein and the whites, a lot of it, a

Carey Blackmon:

lot of it's there. Yeah,

Jeff Mattocks:

it's, yeah, it's there.

Rip Stalvey:

What about vitamin E? Now that I know acts as an antioxidant protects the cells from damage supports immune function, but what are some optimum levels? that we should be looking for.

Jeff Mattocks:

Again, we don't really know what Optima is. Um, I used to run like everybody else at 15 to 20 IUs per pound. And, when I learned what vitamin E did in combating Marik's disease and other diseases, I brought up the nutrition level in our Poultry NutriBalancer to 50. I honestly think a hundred IUs. or even 200 IUs per pound would be spot on. So there's this synergy between selenium and vitamin E. They need each other to be, to work at a higher efficiency level, right? To get a hundred percent out of your selenium and your vitamin E, you've got to have an ample amount of both. So, I'd love somebody to start running around 200 IUs per pound. And I think you're gonna. Take the immune system to a completely different level. In fact, I was approached today at the conference here. Fella asked me, he goes, Hey, do you want to do a video clip? He goes, is there a way to, to protect or guard our birds against high path avian influenza? And I said, yeah, absolutely. He goes what do we got to do? I said we have to break the law at one and take the selenium level higher than what NRC or the government allows us not huge not get carried away because selenium can be toxic also and get that vitamin, get the vitamin E level up and get the other vitamins up. I said, I explained to him, just like I said earlier, most feeds on the market are running actually at about 50 percent of optimum levels. On vitamins, not even 50%, right? And I said, if somebody would spend the money to feed at that higher level all the time, I said, their immune system is going to function at a much higher level than if they have a, a mild challenge to something like high path avian influenza, it's not going to be devastating. It's not gonna, because the bird's immune system has the ability to respond at a, faster and at a much higher level, but, most of the birds that are getting wiped out are birds that are being fed, at these lower levels, right? These bare minimums. You didn't give them anything to fight off a disease with, right? You just, you're just keeping them alive. It's almost like life support,

Carey Blackmon:

I mean that, to get the vitamin levels. Of that high like what you were talking about earlier at eight dollars a pound, People are always looking for a more efficient feed. So they're not going to pay forty dollars for a bag of feet

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah, and he asked me how much more it would be, the guy who asked me and I you know When I say eight dollars a pound that is for one million I use a vitamin a per gram. Okay. So the total cost to bump up like a ton of feed would be about 25 bucks. Okay. Now you're talking, 55, 60 cents about 65 cents per bag on a 50 pound bag of feed. It is not a big investment. This desire to feed cheap, eat cheap, all this other stuff just drives me crazy, for a few nickels more, when you're talking about, 60 cents a pound. No, not even 60 cents a pound. What am I talking about? It's 25 a ton, right? So you're only looking at 5 cents a pound difference. When you break that down to what one chicken's eating, you're only looking at 1. 25 cents per chicken per day. Or, yep. Yeah. Wow. If we can't afford an extra one and a quarter pennies per bird per day to do it right, Then you shouldn't have them. Yeah, chickens are an addiction and people keep too many. Rip, I saw you laughing. I saw you laughing.

Rip Stalvey:

I'm just snickering over here. I'm just keeping my mouth shut.

Jeff Mattocks:

You've been there a couple times, right?

Rip Stalvey:

Multiple times. Let's talk about B vitamins and that's a broad category just to say B vitamins because there's several B vitamins in there. But I think the thing that really got my attention when I switched over to Pertrell's Showbird and Breeder supplement was a difference that the B vitamins made in the attitude and demeanor of my birds. And that was just two or three days.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah, they calm right down. People get worried. They just, they mellow right out. It's wait, are these the same birds? Are they sick? Are they going to die? Right? When your bird goes from being really anxious and Half hyperacting all the time to, they just calm down and don't really care about anything. It's just,

Rip Stalvey:

it was hard for me, at least at first to wrap my mind around the fact that they were now acting normal. Where previously what I was seeing was abnormal behavior.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah. Before you thought it was normal.

Yeah.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah.

Jeff Mattocks:

What you saw before was normal. And all of a sudden they're just really calm. They're really docile. They're fun to handle. They're not as squirmy. None of that. And you're like, is this what normal supposed to be? Exactly. Now you wish as a judge, everybody fed extra B vitamins. So when you're judging.

Rip Stalvey:

I would almost be willing to go through and slip them all a B vitamin, before we start judging.

Carey Blackmon:

Yeah. Just stick it in the water.

Rip Stalvey:

Vitamin C. I know it aids in stress, reducing stress and immune support. Basically, overall health of the bird. Is that really essential in poultry diets?

Jeff Mattocks:

It's not essential, but it is an antioxidant and it's also excellent for heat stress. So if we had a way to use it when we need it, like in the middle of the summer when they're really under heat stress, here's the thing. It's really hard to add hand. And add vitamin C to your chicken feed because we're we use a pure form of vitamin C, right? It's 99 percent vitamin C ascorbic acid and we are only adding Either a half a pound to one pound At the most two pounds and a complete ton of feed. So working out that percentage, you're looking at 0. 01%,

Of

Jeff Mattocks:

the feed, how do you even contemplate adding that? And if you get too much vitamin C. It causes diarrhea, and you end up with really loose manure, and it is still an acid, so you can throw off the digestive tract a little bit. I don't know how, short of feeding apples or oranges to your birds, especially if you wanted to freeze them and let them peck at them in the summertime, that might be your best option. Can try running a little bit through the water, but to make that feed adjustment, It's pretty tough, but it is, it's been proven time and time again for heat stress, it is phenomenal, right? So

Rip Stalvey:

let's talk a little bit about, I guess the best way to put it is feed storage to prohibit. Excessive vitamin loss. What's your recommendations there?

Jeff Mattocks:

Most of your vitamins are somewhat shelf stable. Your fat soluble vitamins like your A and your E, I don't worry about them. Vitamin D is also really stable. The vitamins I'm worried about are going to be your B class of vitamins. Um, they are the ones, your thiamine, your niacin, your riboflavin, and riboflavin goes in at such a small amount. But to have those oxidize off, before you get to feed your bird, I worry about that a little bit, the birds are going to be, are you going to see the difference? No, it's a problem for me only because of how I think about things, a little bit too much of a perfectionist at times, you're paying for those B vitamins. And like you said, when you started feeding the show and breeder is the B vitamins make a big difference, right? And they go all the way down. Keeping it away from air and keeping it away from heat is going to be your key factors. We've talked about, you can package it up. If you're going to have to keep feed for more than a month, you can pack it up. You can put it in the freezer, make it airtight. That'll, that doubles your shelf life.

Carey Blackmon:

And not a whole lot. What I was doing is I like to wide mouth mason jar and I would take a tablespoon out of the kitchen and I would keep that inside the mason jar and I would keep that with my feed along with my oil, but I only had that little bit, I get. Like a quart size jar and fill it halfway up. And I would use that and then I would get more out of my bag from the deep freeze so I could make sure that those vitamins did not lose their stability and make it all the way.

Alex:

This brings us to the close of part 1 of our discussion of vitamins and minerals. Be sure to join us next week when we'll finish up our discussion on this topic. Thank you for joining us for this weeks episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, where we talk poultry from feathers, to function.

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John Gunterman

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Mandelyn Royal

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Rip Stalvey

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