Why does nobody mention the oyster shell grit thing until your hens get pasty butt
I keep seeing new folks on here fill their feeder with layer pellets and call it done, and I did the same thing for the first 8 months with my 6 hens in Fresno. Then two of them started getting pasty butt and one laid a soft shell right on the coop floor, so I dug into it and realized they had zero access to calcium grit because I never put out a separate dish. I grabbed a $12 bag of oyster shell, put it in its own little bowl near the waterer, and inside 3 weeks the shells were hard again and the messy butts cleared up. If you're only feeding pellets and never checked what your girls are actually picking up, what finally tipped you off that something was missing?