Homemade Chicken Feed?

Do you make your own feed for your chickens?

  • Yes

    Votes: 3 14.3%
  • No

    Votes: 6 28.6%
  • No, but willing to give it a try!

    Votes: 12 57.1%

  • Total voters
    21

MarthaTheRooster

Songster
Dec 19, 2018
54
133
107
Carlisle, Kentucky
Hey Y'all! I recently scrolling through Pinterest and found a post about making your own chicken feed. I have a lot of questions regarding this subject, as I have never heard of anyone doing this before. How do I go about making sure the feed is nutritionally balanced? What is considered nutritionally balanced diet for a chicken? What types of grains/seeds/supplements should I use and avoid? What portions of those ingredients should I use?

My flock already gets a huge assortment of "treats" like corn on the cob, cabbage, tomatoes, leafy greens and more, but my thought is anything homemade has to be better than premade feed we buy at the store. I am very new to this idea of making chicken feed at home so any little bit of information you can offer me will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
 
my thought is anything homemade has to be better than premade feed we buy at the store.!

Explain what this means to you a bit more. One one hand you may be able to claim you used higher quality or fresher ingredients (maybe). But on the other hand you have teams of PhD level animal nutritionists who developed the feed formulations for the commercial feeds you buy. Educated people who are paid a living to formulate feed and know about the tiny variations in all the vitamins and minerals needed. Some folks will claim that those PhD people are paid to find the cheapest way to meet the minimum to keep an animal alive. There might be some truth to that.

The problem you will run into, and the common problem you will find if you read some of the dozens of other threads on this site about homemade feed is that you will not be able to source the vitamin and mineral concentrates at a cost effective price unless you are feeding hundreds of chickens. The vitamin and mineral concentrates are expensive, and come in volumes that are meant to be added to literal tons of food. So it would be hard to even measure a small enough amount to add to a smaller volume of feed, such as 50 or 100 pounds that you might be making at one time.

My knee jerk reaction whenever I see someone post about wanting to learn to make their own feed is to just yell NOOOOOOOOOO!! Especially when it includes the key word "Pinterest". Just being honest here.
 
Explain what this means to you a bit more. One one hand you may be able to claim you used higher quality or fresher ingredients (maybe). But on the other hand you have teams of PhD level animal nutritionists who developed the feed formulations for the commercial feeds you buy. Educated people who are paid a living to formulate feed and know about the tiny variations in all the vitamins and minerals needed. Some folks will claim that those PhD people are paid to find the cheapest way to meet the minimum to keep an animal alive. There might be some truth to that.

The problem you will run into, and the common problem you will find if you read some of the dozens of other threads on this site about homemade feed is that you will not be able to source the vitamin and mineral concentrates at a cost effective price unless you are feeding hundreds of chickens. The vitamin and mineral concentrates are expensive, and come in volumes that are meant to be added to literal tons of food. So it would be hard to even measure a small enough amount to add to a smaller volume of feed, such as 50 or 100 pounds that you might be making at one time.

My knee jerk reaction whenever I see someone post about wanting to learn to make their own feed is to just yell NOOOOOOOOOO!! Especially when it includes the key word "Pinterest". Just being honest here.
I completely see where your coming from here. Maybe I could use my normal feed as a base and add some other goodies to it???
 
you will not be able to source the vitamin and mineral concentrates at a cost effective price unless you are feeding hundreds of chickens. The vitamin and mineral concentrates are expensive, and come in volumes that are meant to be added to literal tons of food
I too see where you are coming from, and do not diss the abilities of specialist nutritionists. But as a backyard chicken keeper I (and I suspect the OP) am not looking for concentrates nor a cost effective price; I seek the vitamins and minerals in the form nature provides them, in plant and animal stuffs. And since they and chickens co-evolved, they often come in the right size packages naturally; the trick is to identify and then supply them, if they are not already in the environment and/or the chickens can't free range adequately.
 
I am so confused, to make my own feed or to not? I free range my girls on a few acres and then they have a huge amount of farmland to go an explore. Should I be feeding them layers crumble, should I mix it with other goodies, can I just make my own feed?

I understand that premade food is made with a lot of attention to detail but what if I just want to make them my own feed? Cost doesn't really concern me I just want happy and healthy girls.
 
This seemingly simple question can become complex. I like a book by Harvey Ussery, "The Small-Scale Poultry Flock" has a lot of great information on this subject. The feed we get keeps going up in price, and some question the quality.
 
I completely see where your coming from here. Maybe I could use my normal feed as a base and add some other goodies to it???
This is what I do... I add split peas, seeds, oats, barley, and a few other things then I stir it all up. My chickens and chicks love it, they are very healthy too. I give their egg shells with oyster shell on the side for a calcium supplement. They also get scraps at dinner time, but that's after they've eaten their feed and foraged all day.
 
This is what I do... I add split peas, seeds, oats, barley, and a few other things then I stir it all up. My chickens and chicks love it, they are very healthy too. I give their egg shells with oyster shell on the side for a calcium supplement. They also get scraps at dinner time, but that's after they've eaten their feed and foraged all day.
I think this is what I'm going to do. My girls already forage all day and get all our household scraps. Is there anything else I can add to this mix?
 

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