Feeding chickens?

[rjrinehart]

What am I suppose to be feeding my chickens? I'm just literally using chicken feed from the seed store.

 

[SueT]

Chicken feed is what to feed them. There are different types of chicken feed, however, for different stages of growth. Chick starter is for the baby chicks, layer feed is ONLY for laying hens. Chicks cannot eat pellets, but need the crumbles. Everyone can have crumbles. Scratch feed is just a treat and not complete nutrition. The back of the bag of feed should have guidelines on all of this, follow it and you'll be fine.
Also do check out the LEARNING CENTER for more details. Good luck!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Age appropriate chicken feed contains all the nutrition they need. They don’t “need” anything else. A lot of people feed other things, some will even tell you that you have to feed other things, but you don’t. A general recommendation is to keep “treats” (that’s anything other than chicken feed) to less than 10% of their diet so you don’t mess up their balanced diet provided by the chicken feed.

Mine forage for some of their food so I don’t have a tight control over how much other stuff they eat. I also toss them kitchen scraps and stuff from my garden. Since I don’t have a lot of control over it I don’t worry about it. I’m a lot more relaxed about this than a lot of people on here. My chickens do fine.

Different people add different things to the water or supplement their feed with all kinds of things. They are absolutely convinced that whatever they add makes an improvement to their chickens’ lives. It’s very possible some of those things do make improvements, I’m not saying they don’t. I’m saying I don’t do any of those things and my chickens are fine. You can do them and it might make an improvement, but you don’t have to do it, whatever it is.