The 10% Treat Rule - Weight or Volume?

"Thou shalt only give your chickens 10% of their diet in treats" is a pretty common refrain on these forums, to the point where it's become something of cannon.

I don't necessarily subscribe to the theory (which is fine...to each his own), but I did have a question.

Saying "10%" isn't very clear when talking about food - does that mean by weight or by volume?

Chicken feed has very low moisture content (by design). Food waste has more...ranging from a little more (breads and other carbs) to a LOT more (veggies, especially lettuces and the like).

So, how do you calculate your 10%? Or is the difference really not that big, so it's splitting hairs?
It's pretty meaningless really. There are so many variables. It's hard to believe that such advice comes from an unbiased source.
I remember reading this 10% advice first from a web site that was obviously sponsored by a feed company.
To make any sense one would have to define treats as a starting point.
 
Well, that's good to know! And like someone said, if they are free ranging, then obviously what they are getting while pecking and scratching and foraging all day is a darn sight more than 10% of what's in their feed bucket, which they barely touch sometimes. I can see battery hens needing a well-balanced commercial feed if that's all they get, but .... chickens that live in a wild buffet where they can pick and choose..? Humph. I'm going back to tossing them my good kitchen scraps, as long as it's stuff I know they like, so it doesn't end up drawing raccoons and other unwanted visitors.
 
I have a good size run, so I just keep the carbon levels up and don't worry too much about stuff they don't like or don't eat...with their constant turning, it quickly breaks down into rich compost.

I actually spent Saturday morning building a couple of rough raised beds around part of my run, then filling them with "dirt" from the run. I then hauled in some wood chips to take the place of the stuff I took out of the run, especially in the soggier part of the run.

Very nice management of nutrients in my opinion, especially since most of the stuff in the run was either fall leaves, food and garden scraps, straw, and chicken manure.

Of course, doing all this in July really kicked my butt....but I guess you could say it came with a free gym workout too! :lol::p
 
"Thou shalt only give your chickens 10% of their diet in treats" is a pretty common refrain on these forums, to the point where it's become something of cannon.

I don't necessarily subscribe to the theory (which is fine...to each his own), but I did have a question.

Saying "10%" isn't very clear when talking about food - does that mean by weight or by volume?

Chicken feed has very low moisture content (by design). Food waste has more...ranging from a little more (breads and other carbs) to a LOT more (veggies, especially lettuces and the like).

So, how do you calculate your 10%? Or is the difference really not that big, so it's splitting hairs?
Since there's no real way of telling who gets how much of a treat (except that our Miss Piggy tends to get the lion's share ... go figure ...) I just kinda eyeball it. My birds don't get treats everyday. I have a house full of teenagers and my cats & dogs are all mooches, so there aren't usually many "real food" leftovers :D! When the biddies do get a treat, it's usually a bit of scratch (bird seed or cracked corn, depending on the season) and/or my veggie trimmings - and they only get them often enough to make them curious to see if I have goodies or not. During the growing, mowing and harvest seasons, they get fresh chickweed (it thinks it belongs in my garden ... everywhere in my garden,) and any veggies and berries the bugs got to, first, pretty much every day. I don't regulate the chickweed at all. I figure that they'd eat it if they were free-ranging all day, so it shouldn't hurt them. Besides, there are a couple dozen of them and lanky chickweed can't be all that filling ...
 
Last edited:
I was just recalling my grandma having chickens when I was a kid. She didn’t worry about them, didn’t measure or weigh their food, didn’t try to figure out the percentage of treats or anything else. I spend a couple hours a day doing things for my chickens and cleaning the run - my grandma would crack up
 
It's always interesting to me to read everyone's experiences and perspectives.

I think of the 10% rule, as more of a rough guideline, that can be very useful in some circumstances, to not realistic at all, in others.

Take, for example, true, free-ranging chickens in a nutritionally rich environment. The "10% rule" is meaningless, particularly if you define treats as anything other than bagged chicken feed. Depending on the time of year, free-range chickens are probably getting 50 to 100% of their nutrition from what they are free ranging. They are living off of "treats" and I doubt if anyone would find that irresponsible chicken keeping or worry that the chickens didn't know enough to select appropriate food while free-ranging. Chickens clearly can and do thrive on things other than commercial food.

But take another example of someone keeping chickens in a coop with small attached run. I think the 10% rule is very useful here. If you were to put out heaps of cracked corn, white bread and meal worms every day, I think you might end up with some unhealthy chickens. They aren't exercising or moving around to get their treats, they are probably bored, and there is a good chance they are going to over-eat on something that is not nutritionally balanced. In that situation, you are probably better off keeping treats to a minimum, and being thoughtful of what kinds of extras you give. Give them a small handful of mealworms, maybe, and then some vegetable and fruit scraps, or hang a cabbage. This way they get some variety, but the mainstay of their diet remains nutritionally balanced. There may be cases of chickens thriving off of a hodgepodge diet of stuff thrown in their run, but it is not something I would do, or recommend to others.

In my situation, my chickens have access to a large, fenced yard, but it is not true free range. There are now enough greens, weeds, bugs and lizards in there so that in the spring and summer, I pretty sure that what they forage exceeds 10%. They have access to commercial feed all day as well. I am fairly generous with putting things like weeds, vegetable and fruit scraps out for them, although I do not dump too much of any one thing out there at a time. I generally only give them what they can clean up in 15 or 20 minutes, with the exception that they may get a couple of large squashes or pumpkin to work over in the fall. They usually get a block of sprouted fodder each day, particularly when forage dries up in the fall and winter. I've honestly never done the math on what percentage of their diet those things consist of, but I guess I really don't consider thinks like weeds and sprouted grains as treats, so much as part of the normal feed.

I do keep things like meal worms and scratch to a minimum -- maybe a handful when I great them in the morning, or need to herd them somewhere. I don't tend to generate a lot of "food scraps" as we are good left-over eaters in my house, but they occasionally get a little pasta/rice and the like. The above are the things that I consider "treats" in my house and it is considerably less than 10% of their diet.

When I first starting keeping chickens 6 years ago, they were in a bare yard (no forage) and were getting commercial feed almost exclusively. Over the years, the forage has grown in, and I have gotten more and more aggressive with supplementing their diet with fodder, weeds and veg/fruit. It was a gradual process as I learned more about nutrition and, most importantly, watched my chickens closely to see how they were doing on what I was giving them to eat. I honestly believe my chickens have better health and lay better -- both in terms of quality and quantity -- than when on 100% commercial food.
 

New posts New threads Active threads

Back
Top Bottom