How Much Do Chickens Really Eat?

[eeiko321]

hi guys,

im still new to this with very little experience.
im wondering how much do chickens eat?
theyre fully grown and it seems to me....the more i feed, the MORE they eat!

they dont STOP, they only Slow down...but all day long they EAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i usually put aprox 100 Grams of chicken feed a day in a feeder

and when i come home...its all GONE....i dont know if other birds steal them also

but theyre always willing to eat watever i give them

when do u stop?

 

[chixmix]

Haveing flouted trios off rarebreeds I use a simple feed ing Methodist one hand full for the hen to eat on for the crop that I have found is a good meathead

lol, that is some interesting autocorrect there!!

 

[CrazyHatchingLady]

I have a 2 week old chick eating sun up to sun down. After a couple hours it looks like she has swelled half her size. (Not quite that big but pretty big.) But by morning it's flat again. Is this normal for her to eat so much?

 

[Dar]

that would depend on a what kind of chickens you have..

I have 10 chcikens and i go through a 25KG bag of food in 1 month I have laying chickens..

 

[eeiko321]

well maybe im over feeding it?

coz i bought a 5 kilo bag 2 weeks ago and its nearly finished
and its only 2 hens....and one doesnt lay

 

[WoodlandWoman]

I've always read 1/4 lb of feed per day for a light breed and 1/3 more in quantity for a heavy breed, which most people have. You do the math!

Actually, that would be 4 oz for a light breed or a little over 5 oz for a heavy breed. If you have 2 heavy breed laying hens, that would be about 300 grams of feed a day. My 10.5 oz bag of fish food is 300 grams.

Free ranging, treats, not laying eggs, molting or how much exercise they get, can all effect how much they eat.

 

[pbnjellyfish]

I only have 3 chickens but I have never actually weighed their food or limited them on how much I give them. I thought they were supposed to have food available at all times so I make sure their feeders are always full. Maybe that is just a baby chick thing. I keep one feeder in the coop for them to eat at night and one in the yard for during the day. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. The chickens seem to waist so much feed that if I weigh their food and only give them so much how do I know if they are really getting enough? Especially since one of them is a really big pig - she'd probably eat it all herself. When I used to keep their feeder in the dirt it seemed like they went through food really fast - they never seemed to eat the food that they flip into the dirt. I moved the feeder onto the cement and now they actually eat the food they flip all over so we have less waist. I try to let my chickens free range as much as possible-most days that is all day long so they do eat a lot of grass (and tomatoes, cantaloupe, peaches and everything else in the now destroyed garden). Now I'm a little worried I'm feeding them too much?

 

[WestKnollAmy]

My goodness, I never thought about measuring out the food.

I have over 100 chickens in different age groups and I feed about 250 lbs of pellets and crumbles a week plus most of them free range.
I bought some new birds and brought them home from the breeder and they ate pretty much non stop for the first 2 weeks. They have finally slowed down but I never limit food.
I have never had a fat chicken and I refuse to have a skinny one.

Have you dewormed them?
I always add DE and red pepper flakes to water and food once a week. I also put Apple Cider vinegar in their water with a bit of garlic. Healthy birds are happy birds.
Oh, and they get table scraps plus extra stuff from the garden.

 

[WoodlandWoman]

I should have added, that we have food available at all times for our chickens.

I really just wanted to give information on what typical feed consumption for chickens is. Sometimes people think their chickens are eating too much, when they aren't. Other times they have a problem with waste and are going through more feed than they should be.

I think estimates of how much feed chickens need is most helpful in the planning stages of getting chickens. Sometimes people need to know how much their feed bill is going to be or how much they're going to need to sell their eggs or chickens for.

 

[Kung Foo Chicken]

I kinda feed mine what they will eat in a day. I feed in the mornings and if by the evening they have cleaned that out I give more. I add enough so that when I come in the morning and find some feed I know to cut back just a tad.

I don't leave food out at nights in this area as it attracts field rats so large the cats are afraid of them.