Organic Homemade Chicken Feed

Your chickens need a quality feed to maintain good health and to produce the best eggs. You have decided to raise chickens; shouldn’t you want the best homemade organic chicken feed? Most pre-mixed commercial feeds are made from crushed and pulped ingredients. These can contain fillers, in some cases even ground animal byproducts. Would you want that in the eggs you will be consuming?

Guide to building coops and raising chickens - click here

Here is information about homemade organic chicken feed benefits and how to make your own feed. Ground feed loses much of its nutrients the minute the grains are processed. Also, the bulk feed can sit around for weeks or even months before it reaches its distribution center and you purchase it. If it spills, or gets damp it’s wasted and must be thrown away. Never feed molded or spoiled feed to chickens!

Benefits of homemade organic chicken feed are:

The grains are kept in their natural state and retain all their nutrients
Organic chicken feed is fresher than commercial
Small batches last longer and are controlled by you
Savings are enormous- by buying the ingredients wholesale or in grocery bulk you save money

Chickens are natural foragers. They are constantly pecking the ground looking for food and grit to eat. Chickens forage and eat grass, bugs, pebbles (grit), worms, food scraps or even your vegetable garden!

If your chickens are free-range over a large yard you will only need to supplement their diet with an organic chicken feed depending on the nutrients in their area. If your chickens are kept indoors or in a pen you will want to provide a high protein, highly nutritious diet to get the best eggs and keep the chickens healthy.

Feed the homemade organic chicken feed in the morning, and provide a second meal of scratch as a treat. Chicken scratch is available as a commercial feed and is safe to buy and include in your homemade organic chicken feed diet. It typically is a mix of cracked corn and wild bird food.

Chickens also love treats of fresh fruit, fruit or vegetable peels, leftover food scraps and whole vegetables. However, they will not eat garbage, make sure any scraps are not spoiled or contain highly processes foods.

There are many opinions about what ingredients and which ratios to use. We include what we think is a balanced grain to protein ratio, including calcium which helps the egg shell strengthen.

Mix:
65% of grains (wheat, oats, barley, corn, milo (sorghum), brown rice and millet.
10% Alfalfa meal or ground hay
20% of fat/protein (oils seeds like sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, plus flax seeds, dried peas, lentils, cooked soybeans or soybean meal)
5% hydrated lime for calcium egg formation
1% trace mineral salt

Expect a temporary drop in egg productions when you switch from a commercial feed to a homemade organic chicken feed. The birds will adjust and the egg production will return with abundance.

Be sure to include plenty of grit. You can provide a trough or bowl of ground oyster shell or commercial grit. Chickens don’t have teeth, and have a gizzard that uses grit to grind their food.

Water is the most important nutrient to chickens. Make sure their water trough is in a high-traffic area where they spend time. When they are indoors, make sure there is plenty of fresh clean water always available.

Here are the plans I settled on:

They really worked for me and I got the chicken coop I wanted within my budget and my building skills. I highly recommend you check out Building a Chicken Coop.

This is the ultimate guide to planning and building your own coop in your backyard. In includes drafts of plans, dimensions, materials lists and sources to everything you need to build a sustainable chicken coop.