What Can You Feed Your Chickens?

Can I feed my chickens cooked eggs? What about chickens? How about fruit and meat, dairy, onions.......? These are some of the questions that I often get from viewers and that I had myself when I first started raising chickens. During the last few years of owning chickens I have been able to come up with some of my own opinions on this topic that I thought I would share.

First, here are a few resources that I found handy and you might also. They go through some of the chicken feeding no no's (although I don't really agreed with them all). They do act as a good guideline and it is great info that every chicken owner should read.

http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/chi... - this is where I started, I actually used to have this printed out and kept in our kitchen.

http://www.fresheggsdaily.com/2013/02... - this is a blog article that goes through basically the same thing everyone else on the web has about toxic treats for chickens. I swear it is almost like everyone that has a blog just copies and pastes the same info into their site and calls it their own, sillyness....

I am not going to go into the main grain feed we give the chickens in this article as that is a whole different discussion. We use a antibiotic free non-organic feed of varying brands. I will eventually create my own feed for them from local sources but for now we buy the bags from our local farm supply store.

We have a partnership with our chickens, each day we provide them with food, water, and our table scraps and in turn we collect 6 healthy eggs from them. It is a pretty cool deal if you ask me but what should you feed them from your kitchen?

There are many lists of dangerous and toxic things that you should not give your chickens. I will talk about a few of the top ones here and give my experience. Avocados, apple seeds, citrus, potatoes, onions, dried beans, coffee, tea, candy, salty food, dairy, chicken, cooked eggs, and tomato,/potato plants.

Avocado - the main concern here is the peel and the pit, would you eat the peel or the pit? Then don't feed it to your chickens!
Citrus - This is not supposed to be good for chickens however if they get a little bit in your scraps it is not a bid deal. Same goes for apple seeds. We are in the habit of composting all of this type of waste.

Potatoes/ potato plants - We feed cooked potatoes to the chickens in our food scraps all the time with no issues. Would you eat a potato peel? Then don't feed it to the chickens! As far as the potato plants, I have heard that these are bad for chickens so you should probably avoid feeding them piles of potato plants. However this is supposed to be the same thing for tomato plants and last year I dragged all of our plants with green tomatoes on them into the coop and let them go to town. They are all still alive.....

Onions - We feed them cooked onions all the time I our food scraps with no issues

Coffee - no reason to feed this to chickens, great for compost. same goes for tea and anything with caffeine - Supposedly not good for them.

Dried beans - Ok, these are supposed to be bad for them, but would they really eat dried beans anyway? seems like it would be hard for them to swallow. Anyway - cooked and raw beans from the garden or in food scraps seem to be fine.

Candy/Salty Foods - surprise! Candy and salty food isn't good for chickens either. I am sure many of our scraps are salted and we do feed them the end of the tortilla chip bad and that seems to be fine.

Dairy - Supposedly they don't digest this well but they get cheese and milk quite often in our scraps and they all seem to be healthy and digesting it just fine.

Cooked Chicken - This is a controversial one. We don't feed our chickens cooked chicken often but they do get some in tables scraps from time to time in small doses. It is not unhealthy to feed them chicken but some people don't agree with the morality of the process. Our dog gets most of the chicken scraps.

Cooked eggs - Many people aren't comfortable with this one either, that is fine but technically I can't find anything unhealthy about the practice. Also, feeding cooked eggs will not encourage them to eat their own

I follow a simple rule, if I would eat it or feed it to my kids then it is probably safe for the chickens in small doses. Food scraps are not their main source of food, they get only a small amount each day or every other day.

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