What is your chickens’ favorite scrap treat?

[Marie2020]

Today my littles had their usual fermented feed with layers pellets and a quail feed that my battery girls love along wit goat yogurt...
The scraps were...
Curley kale
Mixed corn
Tiny bits of raw cauliflower
Cauliflower leaves chopped
Sardines
Free range chicken bits
Black fly soldier fly

The above was not in that order.

 

[Marie2020]

My chickens love dried grubs and pasta!

I might give that a try myself

 

[The-White-Elephant]

I know many of us give our chickens food scraps as a treat or part of their regular feed. (Not meal worms or scratch, actual scraps from the human kitchen!) It’s been interesting to me to see what my girls go right for as soon as they see it, and what gets left til later!

My girls LOVE:
Grapes
Winter Squash
Watermelon
Cucumber
Bell pepper cores
Cooked rice
Yogurt

They pick at all greens and cherry tomatoes next. There hasn’t been any produce they haven’t eaten but they all go for the “good stuff” first! They do not love raw turnips. I will try cooking them next time lol.

Ours have always LOVED Watermelon. They fight over it like crazy

 

[Marie2020]

Last year, the USDA was running that Farmers to Families program.

My church got a whole truck load of boxes loaded down with things like milk, Dannon yogurt and Daisy sour cream.


We offered it free to the community, and we had many takers, but we were still left with over a hundred boxes of food after the community came by to get the free food.


After the volunteers took what they wanted of the leftover food, there were STILL 28 unclaimed boxes.


Thinking about my chickens, I took them home.


I fed the chickens the milk first. I didn’t have enough refrigerator space for 28 gallons of 2% white milk. Who does?


So I loaded the yogurt, sour cream and cheese (mostly 1 pound blocks of cheddar cheese) and only a single gallon of the milk in my fridge.

But I began giving the chickens two gallons of milk a day - in bowls completely separate from their feed troughs or water buckets.

By the second day, mind you, this milk was no longer refrigerated (although it was commercially pasteurized).

The birds loved it, even in those first few days when it was still liquid.


But they loved it even more after it had aged a few days, and the curds began to separate from the whey.

They weren’t all that fond of the liquidy whey, but boy did they love the curds!

It was harder to get the creamy solids out of the plastic bottle (I literally had to cut the bottle open to free the creamy curds). It was messy! But the chickens couldn’t get enough of those old, unrefrigerated curds.

After all the milk was gone, I began to give them the sour cream and yogurt - one bowl for each of my two groups, each day.

They loved that, too.


But We were using the fridge for the human family’s food, too. So several of the yogurts and sour creams got pushed to the back, and were essentially lost for about a year or so.

I finally found them when I went cleaning the fridge out before preparing the Christmas meal.

They were over a year old, but I fed them to the birds - and they came back for days afterwards, hoping for more.

So, yes, chickens CAN eat//drink old milk, yogurt and sour cream.

So milk slightly off is okay? I never thought of this. My one girl seems too lack calcium.
If you confirm this I can add this to their treats
This old giant yogurt is working well

 

[Marie2020]

Our chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys go CRAZY for tomatoes. We had a garden break-in last year and the chickens almost completely wiped all the peppers and tomatoes out. They even ate the jalapenos!

Hot stuff

I wish we could get jalapenos here

 

[Marie2020]

The weirdest thing that they absolutely demolish is the wet cat food that the picky cats won’t finish! Cantelope, shrimp, pulled pork, rice, oatmeal, grapes, chicken noodle soup, you name… they come running every morning

The cat food I'm doubtful about besides the fact my cat would go spare. He had a munch of their raw cauliflower. There was one black furry chicken amongst them all today enjoying the scraps

 

[DebinCR]

My flock loves cooked rice, raw oatmeal and cantaloupe, also carrot peelings.

 

[ninja333pirate]

How do you make homemade yogurt? Would love to try that for the ladies!

You can make homemade yogurt in a crock pot, you can find how to do it on Youtube, its surprisingly simple.

 

[BirdsBeesTrees]

Kraft mac and cheese, lol. I throw it out for the outdoor cats if we don't eat it all, and the chickens go freaking bezerks over it.