Can I feed my chickens peanut shells?

[BigBossPants]

My partner eats a lot of peanuts in the shell, and I'm constantly filling the bin with the external shells. Is this something the chickens can have?

 

[donrae]

Why is using free peanut shells as bedding ridiculous? Sounds like good recycling to me.

 

[sourland]

Depending upon your partners consumption, the shells might be an addition to bedding, but they contain little to no nutritional value for chickens.

Edited to say Welcome to BYC!

 

[azygous]

Peanut shells, not so much, but peanuts are a whole 'nother ball game. They'll eat the peanuts until the cows come home.

 

[ChickenJerk]

Do not use it as a bedding, thats ridiculous. Peanut hulls are one of the most desireable bedding materials that has been used for decades in poultry production. If you have a paper shredder, you can use the paper shreds has a bed, it's one of the most common things, Shredded paper is a very undesirable bedding material due to the fact that it mats when it becomes the least bit wet that's what I do to my chickens. Yes, you can feed them peanut shells, chickens eat many things. Well they are not going to willingly ore enthusiastically eat peanut hulls. You should crush them and mix it with other foods. Why? To dilute the nutritional value of the other feedstuffs?If you have bags of straw, that could also be a bed. It's more common than paper shreds and anything, you can find the bags in Ace. (These are not pictures of my coop, I thought they were good examples.)

The value of this advice should be researched more closely.

 

[nc farm]

Seems like it would be fine to add to bedding and a great example of recycling.

As far as bedding goes, we have recently tried sand in the chick brooder and it's great! We bought the construction grade sand and change it out every other day. It produces much less dust than other bedding options, as these chicks are still pretty much living inside. The chicks seem to enjoy it and they are using it for dust baths.

On another note, please be kind and refrain from referring to another user's comment as ridiculous. We're all playing in the same sandbox. Be nice.

 

[BigBossPants]

I didn't think they would be terribly nutritious, but using them as bedding sounds like a plan. I was mainly worried that they could be toxic Thanks for that

 

[RonP]

I throw them in the deep litter run all the time.

I'm not sure they eat them, but never had issue.

 

[pdirt]

Not sure if they did this before the styrofoam "peanuts", but the shells would make a decent packaging filler/cushion. I don't know I'd ship 6 jars of homemade tomato sauce with them, but less fragile things it would probably work great for. Reusable/compostable.

 

[ChickenLegs13]

I boiled a bunch of peanuts a while back and figured my animals would love the soft soggy shells.
The chickens turned their noses up at them and the horse sniffed at them, pinned her ears and turned around and kicked the crap outa me.
So I dumped them under the quail cages to become part of my world famous quail poop compost.