Homemade Chicken Feed

I love keeping our egg-laying hens, but feeding chickens add up to quite a considerable cost over time.

Chickens are one of the homestead ‘gateway drugs’ that make you crave a more wholesome and simple life. We personally keep our chickens for eggs and have 15 hens that we feed. During the snow free months we free-range our hens on a 3 pasture rotation around our garden. This helps to reduce feeding costs a lot and our chickens offer bug and weed control, healthier eggs, and happier chickens. It’s also fun having your own chickens as you can raise chickens that lay beautiful blue eggs that the kids love.

No matter where you live, you can make your own homemade chicken food to offer your chickens better nutrition.

Best Homemade Chicken Feed

Although bags of layer mash, grain or pellets can be easier, making your own homemade chicken feed can be rewarding and offers higher nutrition.

Would you prefer to eat dusty bags of mash or healthy green fodder, fermented grains that fill the tummy and fresh mealworms?

There are a few ways you can have your own chicken food:

Sprouting grains or seeds
Fermenting
Growing a patch of grain

Growing a chicken garden
Buying bulk and mixing your own feed
Creating grazing boxes
Growing mealworms

Kitchen and Garden Scraps for Homemade Chicken Feed

There are many kitchen waste items that chickens can eat. Our kids left over oatmeal or bread ends always go to our hens, as do many leafy tops or veggie scraps instead of the compost. If you’re wondering what scraps are safe for chickens to eat 104 Homestead has this list of chicken safe plants. We give our hens more scraps during the winter months because they don’t have any fresh food to eat because there’s no free-ranging available with all the snow. I grow extra greens in our unheated greenhouse and harvest once we have winter thaws. The chickens definitely appreciate the fresh scraps!

Homemade Chicken Feed Posts

Sprouted Barley Fodder from the 104 Homestead
Fermenting Chicken Food from the 104 Homestead

4 Easy Steps to Fermenting Chicken Feed from Timber Creek Farm
Sprouting grains for poultry fodder from Attainable Sustainable
DIY grazing boxes to reduce chicken feed costs from Attainable Sustainable
Homemade chicken feed recipe from the Prairie Homestead

Organic homemade chicken feed from the Elliot Homestead
Make your own mealworms from WikiHow

Other Ways to Reduce Chicken Feeding Costs

If you decide against making your own homemade chicken feed, you can reduce the feeding costs by other means.

Raise Your Chicken Feeder

With a raised feeder the chickens can’t swish their beaks and heads and make a huge mess. Our hens were so bored with out long winters they were making an extra large mess. As soon as raised the feeder the amount of bags of feed we saved was amazing.

Free-Range Chickens

We can’t all live in nice open areas, but if you can create a larger chicken roaming area for them that reduces the feeding costs as they scratch up for bugs and nibble on plants. They’ll even eat things like snakes!

Grow a Chicken Garden

Growing plants with your chickens in mind is a great way to reduce the amount of grain you have to buy. There are many plants from your vegetable garden that you can give them. We toss bug infested kale, radish tops, left over cabbage leaves, squash that didn’t ripen in time. You can grow grain if you feel ambitious, or just give them fresh veggies. Our greenhouse is always full of invasive chickweed in the winter months, but the hens welcome it mid-winter when there’s nothing green to eat.