Coccidiosis

It is important to understand how and what coccidiosis is so that you can make an informed decision for your farm and needs. Information is gold and the foundation to making good decisions.

• Transcript

  Jennifer: 0:00

  Welcome poultry enthusiasts to another exciting episode of the Poultry Nerds Podcast.

  Carey: 0:08

  Whether you're raising backyard chickens, diving deep into the science of avian health, or just obsessed with all things feather and eggs, you're in the right place. I'm Carey.

  Jennifer: 0:19

  And I'm Jennifer, your host. And today we've got an episode packed with everything you need to know about coccidiosis.

  Carey: 0:28

  From expert tips to fascinating facts, we're here to help you become the ultimate poultry pro. It's time to get nerdy about poultry.

  Jennifer: 0:39

  Looking for a poultry supplement that goes beyond the basics? Meet ShowPro Poultry Supplement, the only supplement with cysteine, a powerful amino acid for stronger feathers, healthier birds, and better egg production. Give your flock the boost. They deserve a show pro poultry supplement because healthy poultry starts from the inside out. You know what? I realize that's an ad, but it goes together with what we're fixing to talk about. So what's in the show pro supplement that would help with coccidiosis?

  1:15

  Mhm.

  Carey: 1:23

  It's got a lot of different vitamins. A, D, E. The amino acids, like cysteine, which that one's really for feather production probably the main thing that helps with toxidiosis and other pests that could be internal or external like mites or whatever, would be the sulfur that we add into it. We mix a little bit of that, not enough to where it's toxic. We're well below those levels, but it is enough that it has found to we, we've had birds that have gotten oh, what is that stuff called? Fowl Pox. And not all the birds get FowlPox in the persons, where they keep all their birds. And we've also had people have birds where they brought them in or whatever, and they looked not great, but they started feeding them their feed that has the ShowPro in it. And they got better.

  Jennifer: 2:32

  You and I have had serious conversations that, and we actually involved Jeff into about sulfur because my breeder pens are on my well, and it's a sulfur well, that's where. We didn't ever do a podcast. I don't think about it, but we have talked extensively about my sulfur well, and the fact that my birds up there, I don't have a pest problem on my birds. And of course I didn't have, I didn't know. I just was yakking away with you one day, and that it had sulfur in it, and it was stinking. And then we put two and two together, and went from there.

  Carey: 3:11

  Yeah, that's why they don't get sick. Yeah not good for, it's probably not good for taste, although some of the stuff I've seen chickens drink and eat, I don't know that they really. Their taste buds don't work the same as ours.

  Jennifer: 3:27

  I drink it. It does not bother me in the slightest bit. Don't have bugs either, I don't think. But, the, we had some guys here putting up some fencing for us. And he filled up his water jug with it and took a huge swig. It was really hot that day. And David said he just up chucked everywhere. He said, that's sulfur water. And we yeah. Now he is.

  Carey: 3:49

  You took it straight out of the well there, buddy.

  Jennifer: 3:52

  It's 55 degrees. It's good. My garden grows good on it too.

  Carey: 3:57

  Yeah, and you the small pests that will typically attack, things with leaves on them and eat the leaves away. That's not happening with that either, because they'll bite the leaves and die.

  Jennifer: 4:12

  Gosh, I wish they would, I wish it would kill squash bugs though. Did not, did squash bugs flourished? So it didn't help me there. All right, so let's get back to our topic for the day, which is coccidiosis and it's a pretty generalized problem. If you have an issue with it, you're not alone. It's very common, but there's a lot of things that you can do to negate the possibility that you're going to get it. And there's a lot of things you do to. Amend your soil to try to prevent an overstocking of the parasite in your soil. And then, of course, there's treatments that you can do if you should need to get to that point.

  Carey: 5:01

  Now, Jeff and I have talked about it, and he says that every bird will have a level of coccidiosis. At any given time in its intestinal tract.

  Jennifer: 5:17

  And I believe that, everything is a balance, right? If you have coccidia, it should show up on every fecal. There are some present because low

  Carey: 5:30

  levels

  Jennifer: 5:31

  because the chicken's gut health is a balance. It's its own ecosystem. So don't be alarmed if they come back. If you had a fecal run and it says, oh, they've got coccidia in there. Yeah, the imbalance is what we're wanting to not have. So our our take on it is to boost their immune system from the get go and then they don't get that imbalance and can handle your dirt, the load in your dirt.

  Carey: 6:09

  I'm a pretty firm believer that if you're feeding your birds a nutritionally sound feed, they're not even going to get the sniffles. I've and I use myself as an example, but I've been watching what I eat and taking the vitamins and stuff that I should, and I have gotten very little illness this year and normally I will get sick to the point that it will take me down for 2 weeks. Can't get out of bed, can't function, can't do none of it.

  Jennifer: 6:46

  Gut health.

  Carey: 6:47

  There you go.

  Jennifer: 6:48

  Okay, so let's 1st tell everybody what it is, because if you know what it is. then you know what you're doing. The terms are used interchangeably, it seems, but they're very specific. Coxy means it's just a fear shaped organism. Coccidia is the parasite that bugs us, and there's nine strains of them, and they're species specific. coccidia in your turkeys, that's not the same one that's going to be in your Chickens or your ducks. Coccidiosis is the infection from a coccidia overload. Okay. So when you have a problem, now, the right vocabulary.

  Carey: 7:33

  So when the word gets really long, you got a problem.

  Jennifer: 7:37

  The bigger the word, the bigger the problem.

  Carey: 7:39

  Okay. That makes sense.

  Jennifer: 7:41

  Okay. So it lives in the dirt. Okay. And it's not in the air. It's not just magically appearing. So if your chicks get it, it had to be introduced to them somehow

  Carey: 7:58

  from the dirt.

  Jennifer: 8:01

  So

  Carey: 8:02

  is that one of the reasons why you use feeders? And don't throw feed on the dirt.

  Jennifer: 8:08

  Listen, we're talking about chicks at this point, right? So we haven't got to that point yet. We're starting at the beginning. If your brooder is clean, sterilized, no coccidia is living in it, and the chicks hatched, this is important, if the chicks hatched on your property and you put them straight into a clean brooder, Theoretically, they should not have Proxidia introduced to them, unless you have it on your hands, on your clothes, in your hair. Unless you introduce it to them, they won't get it. Now, the reason why I emphasized That they hatched on your property. If you go to tractor supply or your neighbor's house and pick up chicks. Now, that is now out of your control and you don't know what they've been introduced to

  Carey: 9:03

  and 1 thing 1 thing that would be a huge, just making people think, hey, I need to go take care of my chickens. Do I empty out my incubator or do I go feed my chickens and empty out the incubator when I go in the barn or what? At one point I never, I would not have thought, Oh, I need to take care of the chicks first because if I pick up one of my chickens, if they got poo on their foot, I could very well get my chicks sick when I take them out of the incubator. You don't really think about that kind of stuff all the time necessarily.

  Jennifer: 9:40

  The rule of thumb would be you take care of the smallest, newest first. So you wake up in the morning, you have clean clothes on, and you go take care of the chicks first. And then you work out to the older birds. That's the general rule of thumb. Anyway, it

  Carey: 9:58

  makes sense.

  Jennifer: 10:00

  Okay, so the symptoms once, once you've determined that something's going on in your brooder you've got symptoms. Now what I've seen is they usually become lethargic. They puff out, they, they're cold. So they're going to sit under the heat longer. Their wings hang down, their wingtips will be down on the floor. What else?

  Carey: 10:27

  They act like you do when you go out to the wing place and you get some wings that aren't done all the way. That's what happens to the chickens. They just, they're droopy. They mope around. They don't have an appetite. They don't want to eat. You will also see bloody poop. And at that point, if you're not doing something immediately. You, it may be too late you will notice, their poo should not be running and it will get runny and very liquidy before you will see the blood. So if you're not taking care of your birds every day, paying attention to what's going on and looking at that kind of stuff, you may not notice until it's too late, but everything I've ever seen. And from when I've actually seen it, when. There's blood in the poo. You got maybe a week.

  Jennifer: 11:31

  So what's going on the inside of the chick is the parasite has latched on to the intestinal wall. And it's literally sucking all of the vitamins to itself. Which prevents the chick from using the vitamins to stay healthy and to grow.

  Carey: 11:49

  Right.

  Jennifer: 11:50

  Okay. So at this point let's back up for just a second. So I know a well known breeder out of Georgia. He shows very nice birds and he literally goes outside and gets a handful of dirt and puts in his brooders. Because he wants to weed out the ones that have a weak immune system from the get go. That's his goal. That's his first cull, I guess you would say. His first survival of the

  Carey: 12:21

  fittest.

  Jennifer: 12:22

  Exactly. This is the point, if you have it in your brooders, this is the point where you decide for yourself which way you're gonna go. Are you gonna do survival of the fittest, or are you going to treat? Okay, now we're not going to tell you which way is the right way because it's your farm. It's your rules. I will tell you what I do and he will tell you what he does. And then we're going to tell you how to do the other way because I just let him go because I need him to be healthy. I breed for survival.

  Carey: 13:00

  Chick vigor is very important to me because. I ship birds you can't have a bird go a couple of days without a whole lot because grow gel only lasts so long and you don't want somebody getting a box of birds that haven't expired. So you know, they need that vigor. They need to be hardy birds. So I will do I'm pretty brutal. I want birds that survive, and I want fighters, so that's how I am. I do not do medicated feed. Now, I don't bring, dirt from outside to try to make it happen, but I keep a clean brooder to prevent it, and also, there's some other stuff that I do to prevent it, but

  Jennifer: 13:50

  We're not as extreme as putting dirt in the brooder. No, I clean my brooders. You clean your brooders. Everything starts off fresh every time. And we work on building gut health from the beginning. So we want to give the chick all the tools. It can possibly have to be vigorous. Okay. We're not throwing dirt on them and throwing disease on them and stuff and saying, sink or swim. That is an extreme that's an extreme. Yeah, that's a bit much. Does it? I understand why I

  Carey: 14:24

  totally get it. I do,

  Jennifer: 14:26

  but it's an extreme way of doing it. It's not, I'm not going to say it's wrong. It's just an extreme. So we err on the side of. Give them all of the nutrients they need to build strong gut health, build a strong immune system and move them forward in that way. I do garlic water and oregano water in for the 1st week and then at times of stress if I move them, but I also have very good, chick starter, non medicated chick starter, but I add your show pro to it with the other stuff in it. Now you and Jeff come up with a putting milk out for them in order to help build gut health, and I think you can use yogurt too, right?

  Carey: 15:14

  Yeah, so You can use, it's best to work with raw milk if you have it available because it has the prebiotics and the probiotics. And you put out enough for the birds to consume all of it within about an hour on day three. And then every seven days, like day three, day seven, 14, 21, 28, do that for the first month to help them build up the, uh, the immune system, help it to be strong, build the gut health. You can also use plain white, regular yogurt to do that. There's also another product that I like to use. It's a Dr. Paul's product called CEG, and it is organic apple cider vinegar, cayenne, and garlic. This is where the CEG comes from and you put a little bit of that in there and I'm not 100 percent sure behind the science, but I know it works. And I'll give you an example. Two weeks ago, I hatched out 680 quail. Since then, I have had three. that passed away, not on purpose.

  Jennifer: 16:42

  Not on purpose. I get what you're saying. There's

  Carey: 16:47

  some things that they're used for that, it happens on purpose, but, I've still got a few hundred of them in brooders right now waiting to be some breeders that I have this year to give me lots of eggs to help take care of all the people that want them.

  Jennifer: 17:04

  I can tell you about the garlic. Now, garlic is antimicrobial and antibacterial. That would be why they use garlic. And then, because I use it, and I don't know about the cayenne. I don't have never seen the science on the cayenne, but the apple cider vinegar would be to change your body's pH. People take apple cider vinegar also. Because if you bring your pH down, it makes you sicknesses grow in an acidic level, basically, though, you use the vinegar to bring your pH level down into a basic level. So that would be

  Carey: 17:41

  like. As low as five, five and a half, six, that's a really good place, even for your water to be for your birds, to help prevent stuff from growing.

  Jennifer: 17:55

  On a side note, did you know that apple cider vinegar is super expensive now? Like stupid expensive. So I made my own.

  Carey: 18:04

  I was going to say I have made it and I buy it by the 55 gallon drum when I buy it. Because by the gallon is expensive,

  Jennifer: 18:14

  what in the world do you do with 55 gallons of apple cider vinegar?

  Carey: 18:18

  I have a lot of customers that use it. And they buy in bulk too. I break it, I break down a couple of five gallon and sell it in five gallon buckets. And I use, I use a lot of it in my place. It's vinegar. It's not like it expires.

  Jennifer: 18:35

  It just gets better with age, right?

  Carey: 18:37

  There you go. Shake the drum up every now and then.

  Jennifer: 18:40

  Just a fun one. Okay. We've talked about 1 extreme where you can get rid of them straight off the bat with the dirt. Then we've talked about how we build up the gut health. To give the chick a good solid start and sink or swim with those tools. And then the next level would be medicated feed. So medicated Medicaid feed has and Prolia in it.

  Carey: 19:07

  It does, but I really don't like that. Given if you give a check. and prolium, it blocks the, that chick's body from taking in the vitamins in the feet. So it's hey, you won't die from coccidiosis, but you're not going to get all the vitamins that you want to have, that you need either. It's counterintuitive. So keep a clean brooder.

  Jennifer: 19:41

  Yes, I have bought, I will be honest, I have bought medicated feed one time when I brought some original birds in, they were already on, he feeds medicated feed and I, the stress of shipping, these were older birds, they were four months at the time and The stress of shipping the stress of all of it. I wanted to limit the amount of changes that I expose them to. So I went out and I bought the same fee that he used and it happened to be medicated and I used about half of that bag. At 2025 pounds, and slowly move them over to my feed after a week, I left him on it for a week and then slowly moved him over to my feed and they did fine. But I felt one less thing that I changed was best for them.

  Carey: 20:34

  That makes sense because one of the things that makes the very minute amount of coccidiosis that's in their, or cocci, that's in their intestines, one of the things that makes it inflame and go full fledged is stress, extreme stress can cause it to come out and make everything else happen. So not wanting to change anything about the bird's life, that's, to me, that's good stewardship. That's what you should have done.

  Jennifer: 21:07

  So when we're giving you all of these options, you were the only one that knows your farm. And you only know how you're doing the chicks. So are the chicks coming to you through the mail? So they're going to be stressed? Or did you just literally move them five feet from the incubator? So all of these things play a role in the choices that we make on how we handle The chicks, so amprolium is the same thing that's in cord. So that would be the next level. So now you've got a full fledged outbreak, even though you've done everything. So do you decide that you're going to move on to using cord, which is amprolium liquid form? I believe you add it to their water. I honestly have never bought it, so I don't know. So

  Carey: 21:56

  I have, because I had a friend of mine that is close to me that he he's a flipper. And I'm not big into that, but he had a problem and wanted me to come over and help him figure it out. And I told him, I said, look, this is the deal with the birds. If you're going to do something, you need to do it fast. And so we got some amprolium that, we, I think I got a gallon sized jug of the cord and you mix it in the water. It's got instructions on it and neither one of us are vets. So I would highly recommend you actually read the instructions and mix it correctly. They don't have pictures, so you'll have to read them. You can make that choice and it did work out for him and he was very thankful because he had got a couple of hundred spent layers from a house up in Arkansas and lost a couple of them on the way home because they were already so sick from being in that house, being stressed out from going from Arkansas to Alabama, it was rough on him. He had to do that pretty quick because they were, their poo was like water. It's pretty bad. There's a, another thing that's coming out. I think it's been out for a while, but it's Tylosin. T Y L O S I N. That's another one that you mix up with their water. And, again, follow the instructions on that, too.

  Jennifer: 23:37

  And then how they work is they block the vitamin uptake to the parasite and basically starve it, right?

  Carey: 23:47

  Yep.

  Jennifer: 23:48

  But that also is blocking a lot of the vitamin uptake to the chick. Yep. Be aware of that.

  Carey: 23:55

  It's going to be tough on the chicks too, and if I remember correctly, like you do it for several days and then you don't do it and then you do it again, or you do it and you wait a couple days. It's been a couple years, but there, there is a whole process to it. You don't just, it's not a one and done thing.

  Jennifer: 24:15

  And you're not going to want to give probiotics or vitamins while you're doing it, because that's counterintuitive and not useful to your pocketbook. You'll do 1 at a time. So you would do Corrid if you choose to do it, and then after the run of Corrid, you're going to do your probiotics and your vitamins and start working on building that gut health back up again.

  Carey: 24:40

  Yeah, after you've followed the process that they have. On the bottle, if the bird is still with you, then I would definitely start putting the nutrition to the bird to help it get its strength back and recover.

  Jennifer: 24:57

  Yeah. What you don't want to do is spend all this time and money on making the bird well, and then feed it garbage and expect it to stay healthy. Okay. So if you're going to go through the expense and the time of treating it. Then go through the expense and time of treating its gut health after the fact.

  Carey: 25:17

  But if you do too much of it You can cause a thiamine deficiency and that's going to lead to neurological disorders like, you have a bird walking around like they don't know where they're at because they could be blind,

  Jennifer: 25:36

  stargazing

  Carey: 25:38

  yeah, all that kind of stuff,

  Jennifer: 25:39

  shaking their head.

  Carey: 25:41

  Sometimes I'm wondering if mine are shaking their head at me because they're wondering what I'm doing. So I don't really look at that as a symptom a whole lot. We look at chickens like, what the crap are you doing? But I think mine look at me like that sometimes too because there's sometimes when I go in Houdini's pen, he's staring me down. Like, why are you in here? Why did you open the door? Why are you touching my girlfriend? If I pick up one of the hands that's in there with him, he's going to come over to my feet and just look at me like, where are you going? So I don't really look at that one as a whole thing.

  Jennifer: 26:22

  Okay, so now we're out of the brooder and we've got some older birds. Now, older birds can get coccidiosis also, but that is, that is going to be a husbandry issue at that point. Are they in mud? Are they in wet, moist conditions? Are they overcrowded? Are they stressed? Lots and lots of things going on that way, and the treatment's going to be the same. You're And then fix their gut after the fact. But mostly you need to work on your husbandry skills at that point. You need to treat the ground, you need to give them more space, get them onto dry space.

  Carey: 27:08

  I think most of the time when I see. people with the issue with adult birds. It's because they went into tractor supply on Valentine's Day and they heard that chirping sound. They bought 10 times too many chickens. They all lived. Now they don't have enough. run space, poop space, and they're really overcrowded. So there's a lot of poop on the ground. They're overcrowded, they're stressed out, and that's typically when it starts coming out.

  Jennifer: 27:48

  Yep, so you can do a couple of things to treat your ground. First, we're going to have to get it dried out. Saw pellets will dry it out. Ag lime can help dry it out a little bit. Sand would probably help dry it out a little bit. Don't try straw or wood chips because those things hold moisture. We're trying to draw we're trying to dry it out. Peat moss, I, I use straw pellets and peat moss everywhere. Everything stays dry for me. But you can put salt in the mix. To help dry stuff out and you dry out bacteria that way and it kills it. I use a lot of Ag Lime to change the pH of my soil. Because manure is acidic. So I use a lot of Ag Lime to bring it back down to basic. What else could we do? Yeah,

  Carey: 28:40

  the first time I heard that about salt, I was watching a TikTok. When you're, when you need to kill time or when your brain's running and you need to slow it down, you just scroll a little bit cause you see a lot of humorous stuff. But the quail lady was talking about how she stroves out salt and I was like, why in the crap does she do that? But if you think about it, the properties in salt. Kills a lot of bacteria.

  Jennifer: 29:10

  She she has dirt floor and hoop houses and big, long, 200, 200 feet. Yeah. She has several of them. Now I have concrete floors, so I'm not going to use salt, but I do like we cleaned every pen today and made it snow in there with ag lime.

  Carey: 29:30

  That makes sense because you're killing. You're lowering the pH or stuff can't survive and, first the salt, I was like, what? Then I thought about it. People will literally take like ham and pork and, cure it with salt or. A long time. So it makes sense that it kills probably all kinds of bacteria.

  Jennifer: 29:58

  So before we recorded this and we were talking about the salt and I actually did some quick Google searches and stuff and it's a thing. You put the salt down and it dries out the the cell walls or the

  Carey: 30:13

  membranes.

  Jennifer: 30:14

  Yeah, membrane, I wanted to say skin and I knew that wasn't quite right. The membranes, it drives them out, which kills off the bacteria. Yeah, I just never thought about it, but I'm working on concrete. Different, I would do something different. You have to look at your situation, be educated and, be honest about how you want to go forward. Do you want to continually medicate? Animals to move forward, or do you, you want to be a little bit tougher and weed them out a little bit. But those are for your choices. That's not for us to make that choice for you just to give you that information.

  Carey: 30:51

  Yeah, I have my reasons for doing it. It works. You have yours. And I would say that if your birds, it would also, it would be a good way to find out if your birds had really good hybrid vigor. But as you grow your breeding program, that type, the resistance and that type of stuff can grow too. So

  Jennifer: 31:15

  before we started doing the podcast and people would ask me all the time would you treat for this or treat for that and everything? And my answer always was. If you came here to buy chicks and I told you that I continuously had to treat in order to keep them alive and keep them healthy, is that the kind of bird that you want to go home with? Or would you rather go home with something that was able to handle the stress, the environment stress? And the immunity stress, the constant attacks on the immune system and able to stand up against it and take that bird home. So when you're shopping, pay attention to that. And decide for yourself what works best for you.

  Carey: 32:04

  Sounds good to me.

  Jennifer: 32:07

  That was off the top of my head. All right, I'm going to put this on the website under our podcast. You can find all of our podcast on the website, and I will put the articles that we referenced for this information as links so that you can go read that. for yourself and decide what works for you. And please hit subscribe and follow and check out the new website. And if you have any questions or want us to do something different or talk about something, let us know.

  Carey: 32:41

  Hey, don't we have an event coming soon?

  Jennifer: 32:44

  We do. We do. So if you want to learn about quail, come check us out. That's on the website too. And sign up to, to see about that.

  Carey: 32:55

  Quail mania.

  Jennifer: 32:56

  Quail mania.

  Carey: 32:57

  Y'all have a good night.

  Jennifer: 32:59

  All right. See ya.