Feeding chickens

Time and time again I read on smallholding and self-sufficiency forums how people continue to feed their hens kitchen scraps and left-overs, supposedly because it’s less wasteful and “cheap”.

Are chickens mobile waste disposal units? Are domestic chickens supposed to be a cheap means of producing eggs?

If you want to get rid of non-meat food scraps, compost them.

If you want cheap eggs, buy them from the supermarket.

But if you want healthy, happy chickens that lay good quality, tasty eggs then make the effort to feed your chickens a balanced diet that’s intended for chickens.

Unless you really do know what you’re doing, the best option is to buy ready made feed from a local farm merchant.

Ready made feed will give your birds a balanced diet that keeps them in good condition without risk of malnutrition or diseases and disorders caused by a lack of essential nutrients and vitamins.

Think about it. If a commercial, free-range, organic egg producer who relies on each and every one of thousands of birds producing an egg a day does not bother to feed his hens any old rubbish, why should you?

Especially when you’re claiming to put your chicken’s welfare first.

Most feed merchants offer a choice of mash or pellets. If at all possible, opt for mash - and no, you don’t add water to it to create a sort of porridge.

Adding water makes the mash spoil and go sour, most hens won’t eat and those that do will get sick.

But why mash?

Chickens are really, truly stupid but they are also curious and easily bored, especially when kept in a small run.

If you feed chickens pelletised food, they can gobble in down fast and then find themselves with nothing better to do than tug out each other’s feathers and do a bit of vent pecking.

Other poultry keepers will then make all sorts of weird suggestions about keeping your birds occupied.

It’s much easier to avert this problem from the off by feeding chickens mash. It takes them much, much longer to peck up their dinner and keeps them occupied for hours as they find enough to satiate their hunger.

Mash also reduces the problem of the biggest, strongest birds gobbling down the bulk of the feed in one go while the weaker ones are pushed to one side. Even the biggest, dumbest hen is not going to stay at the feeder long enough to scoff all the mash on her own.

Keep their minds focused on feeding and it helps stop them developing nasty habits to occupy themselves.

Next, feed your chickens ad-lib.

Poultry books and magazines often list precise weights of food to be fed to individual chickens.

This is all very well if your hens are in little cages, fed by conveyor belt and with no competition for the foot.

But if you have hens that share a feeder, then there is no way Top Hen is going to back off when she has scoffed her 120g of feed for the day.

She and her cronies will keep scoffing until they’ve had their fill. Only then will the bottom hens get a look on - and in extreme cases they may even starve to death.

Instead of feeding by weight, buy a good covered feeder and fill it to about halfway.

If the feeder is empty the next morning, then you need to fill it to a higher point. If there are a couple of handfuls of feed left, it’s about right. And if there’s a substantial amount of feed left, you need to fill it to a lower point.
The next thing to remember is that birds do not have teeth.

They peck small sharp stones and hold them in their crop - a pouch in its throat - which grinds the feed as it passes through.

Chickens that are kept in a run need extra grit to grind their food because, while there is some grit in ready made feed, it’s not sufficient for their needs. (Genuinely free-ranging birds should be able to find enough grit, but it’s still worth providing them with a grit hopper anyway.)

Feed merchants should stock grit as well as mash.

Grit is not needed to produce hard egg shells - that’s the job of calcium.

Ready made feeds include sufficient calcium to ensure hard egg shells so chickens kept in a run should not need oyster shell (a source of additional calcium), but we’ve found some of our free-range hens do benefit from having oyster shell added to their grit hopper.

To reiterate, hens need a good quality, balanced diet to produce eggs and remain in peak health.

If you feed them rubbish, then you will get rubbish eggs and your hens will be at higher risk of disease.

Why should your hens eat stale bread, aging baked beans and mouldering mashed potato that you don’t want to eat yourself?