Sour Crop and Impacted Crop
Those are a couple of pretty serious situations for hens ?
It’s actually a yeast infection ?
The crop bacteria gets out of balance and if it turns into a yeast infection…
The crop can quit working
How can you tell if it’s sour crop or impacted crop?
In both cases the food is not being ground up properly in the crop and moving down into their stomach
The hen might be lethargic ?
The crop will be swollen, it might feel soft and mushy, you might hear some gurgling when you’re checking it out
In the morning, after spending the night sleeping, the crop should be empty
At night time when you look at them, you should see a big bulge in the crop because they’re going to fill it up right before bed.
Then it should get processed over night while they’re sleeping and in the morning it should be pretty empty
They shouldn’t still have that big bulge
If you see that big bulge in the morning, that would be something to check out
If it’s sour crop, a lot of times you can smell it from their mouth ?
If you get too close, it smells sour, that’s why it’s called sour crop
The bacteria has gotten out of whack in the crop and it’s not working properly
Impacted crop typically comes from eating too many stringy things like grass, straw, hay
And it’s knotting up in the crop instead of passing through ?
What do you do about it if you think that you’ve got a hen with sour crop or impacted crop?
Well, you need to empty the crop to get the food out of there
To do this you massage it
You can put a little bit of oil down their throat so that the oil can grease it up a little bit to help it pass.
Massage it every couple hours
If you can’t get it to pass down through the digestive tract…
Then the next option would be to hold them upside down
(You probably need someone to help you do this)
Instead of massaging down, you would massage up, and the idea is to get them to throw up
Chickens don’t naturally throw up the way humans do so you would need to force whatever is in the crop out so that they can then get back to a normal crop bacteria
Worst case, you can take them to a vet and have the vet take care of them, but I know that vets can be expensive, so that would be how you could handle it yourself.
Watch for any crop issues
To prevent them don’t give them a lot of pasta which can cause a yeast change in their crop
Also, don’t give them a lot of stringy grass
If you’re going to give them grassy treats like that, I would break it up into smaller pieces
When you let your girls out in the morning, make it a habit to check everybody real quick
Make sure everyone looks okay and it looks like their crop emptied overnight
Remember … Be The Organic U – Feed Your Soul
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