There are many benefits to raising chickens, but it can be an expensive endeavour depending on your setup.
However, there is no reason that feeding your chickens should break the bank. I'm outlining 25 ways you can cut down on chicken feeding costs. And these are practical, actionable things that you can get started with immediately.
Let's face it — most of us would keep chickens regardless. And the benefit of the healthiest eggs and meat I can get (I certainly can't buy the same quality I can raise myself) outweighs anything else. But that doesn't mean I'm going to waste money. Becoming more frugal in my habits is something I've been cultivating for a while and the way I go about feeding my chickens is an extension of that mindset.
After all, I'm the peasant's daughter.
Shop Around! Call Every Feed Mill & Inquire About Costs
You may be surprised to learn that costs can vary drastically from one mill or store to the next.
Make a thorough list of every feed store in your vicinity — call them.
Then go ask online chicken groups about where they're buying their feed and what deals they know about. Many farms and feed stores have terrible websites or none at all, and finding them online can be a serious hassle — so ask people, this is how I found my whole grain soy-free feed.
Look Into Bulk/Volume Discounts
Many times, the more bags of feed you buy, the more you save.
And if you're set up for bulk totes this can be an even greater way to save.
Consider splitting the costs with other small-flock keepers to get these discounts if you cant buy or store too much feed at once.
Mix Your Own Feed
This is hit or miss. Again, ask other chicken-keepers and you may be surprised to find the creative lengths people will go to.
With the popularity of keeping chickens, there are an absolute plethora of online chicken groups local to you that are a wealth of information about just this sort of thing.
Buy A No-Waste & Rat-Proof Feeder
Chickens love to waste feed by scattering it around, trampling it, making a mess on it.
Rats and mice also love to get into chicken feed — make it hard or impossible.
Buy a feeder that will eliminate or at least drastically reduce this.
Ferment Your Chicken Feed
Fermenting chicken feed carries so many healthful benefits! Fermenting unlocks more of the nutrition stored away in grains by making them bioavailable. Your chickens will also eat less of it as a result.
Fermenting chicken feed is easy. You need buckets and water. That's really all there is to it.
Pasture Your Chickens
Pastured chickens eat waaaay less commercial feed. I describe how we pasture our chickens (alongside 3 other easy methods) here. I also go into how you can cut down on costs for your pastured chickens during winter in another article.
When your chickens are allowed to forage and hunt, they will find an endless supply of plants and insects to their liking. This will drastically reduce your feed bill and you will notice that immediately.
(I'm very excited to see exactly how much it is going to cost us to feed our Red Ranger (Rustic Ranger) chickens we got for the first time this year. If you're curious, I'm detailing the weekly results of my experiences and a thorough cost breakdown in this article: Raising Red Ranger Chickens on Pasture For Meat.)
Grow A Chicken-Friendly Lawn Or Pasture
And if you are raising your chickens on pasture, consider growing a lawn that will have a variety of nutritious and delicious grasses for those chickens too. Instead of a boring, ugly monoculture of just grass — consider growing something that will benefit your chickens as well as other species, like pollinators and insects.
You can mix your own seed at mills or buy premixed lawn seed like this specifically designed for chickens.
By the way, you can easily do this on a smaller or more sporadic scale too in your suburban backyard or in trays inside — perfect for winter.
Grow A Garden For Your Chickens
If you're growing your own vegetable garden, why not plant one for your chickens too?
You can plant all sorts of leafy greens, herbs, squashed, pumpkin etc. and you can do this in a much less planned and curated way.
We have a large out-of-the-way patch behind our sheep pasture that I'm considering for just these purposes.
Make A Simple Chicken Hanging Bucket Maggot Feeder
Whether your chickens are enclosed in a run or left to free-range, a hanging bucket maggot feeder makes lots of sense and provides a lot of free protein.
The idea is that you get a bucket (or another container, perhaps something prettier) with a lid, drill holes in the bottom, put some food scraps inside, and then hang it in a tree or wherever. Flies will be attracted to the bucket with its rotting food and will subsequently lay eggs inside. The maggots that eventually hatch will drop through to the ground due to the holes and your chickens will feast as a result.
Stop Feeding Free-Choice
I learned this lesson very quickly with my own chickens — feed left out all day and constantly replenished makes for lazy, free-loading, birds.
(Actually, people are much the same now that I think about it.)
But if you only feed once or twice per day (and you have pastured free-ranged birds obviously) you will find that the birds will happily get full from the abundance of nature.
We feed our chickens only once daily during the summer months, just before they put themselves to bed in their coop for the night. In the morning I scatter some seeds or feed in their coops to get them active, but they spend the whole day searching for food.
It works.
Feed Surplus Eggs
Spring and summer bring an abundance of chicken eggs. Too many eggs really, depending on your flock size. And I say this as someone who eats multiple eggs daily.
But I love preserving eggs to last me through the winter months when the chickens naturally take a break from laying with the shorter days.
Why not preserve some for your flock too? Warm scrambled eggs are a weekly treat here for the chickens, and during the winter months, it happens even more often to give them a protein boost during the frigid winter days.
Scrambled eggs are also good to feed back to your birds during periods of moulting, illness, or stress.
Plant Calory-Dense Root Vegetables
You may not plant a separate garden just for your chickens, but that doesn't mean you can't dedicate some space n yours for them.
If space is an issue, focus on nutrient and calory dense root vegetables and squashes.
Sweet potatoes and pumpkins are great examples.
Grow Your Own Grains
The cost of feed is going up. Inflation and oil prices alongside many other factors are driving the costs up regularly. We recently placed a bulk order — and thank God we did — because just a couple of weeks later the costs went up to $3 more per bag.
And I doubt they will come down any time soon.
If you've ever considered growing your own crop of corn or field peas or whatever else for your chickens and other livestock, now may be the time to seriously do it.
Sprout Seeds & Grains
Sprouting seeds can make the nutrition more readily available and easier to digest. Seeds are soaked in water for 24 hours before being rinsed and soaked again. This process is repeated until the seeds begin to sprout.
Grow Fodder
Fodder is just sprouted seeds that have been allowed to grow to about 4+ inches. This is a wonderful winter treat for sheep, ducks, and geese, but chickens will eat it too. There is some debate as to fodder potentially causing impacted crops, so if this is a concern for you, stick to sprouting.
Compost
You can compost directly in the chicken run, or have a separate area entirely. We keep our compost separate but our chickens know where to find it and they will make a beeline every day to the compost heap to pick out tasty food and also the bugs and worms that are attracted to compost.
Feed Kitchen Scraps
Alongside my kitchen compost bin, I keep a bowl of tasty kitchen scraps too, including meat scraps that I don't put in the compost bin. Every morning as I go to let the chickens out and give them water, I bring my bowl of scraps and they come running to me.
Feed Leftover Whey & Milk
Do you make milk and yogurt? I do. And the sheer amount of leftover whey is astounding. We do use the whey as well for our family, but any leftover is given to the chickens. You can also add the whey to your bucket of fermented checked feed. Similarly, any surplus milk or homemade yogurt or other dairy that is souring or getting to a point where we don't want it is given to the chickens.
In France, the famous Bresse chicken is fattened on corn and whey before slaughter. We actually did the same thing with our own flock of Bresse last year.
Feed Yard & Garden Clippings
Bring the pasture to your chickens.
Take the grass clippings, weeds, and vegetables that are kinda mushy to your chickens. If they are kept in a run, they will benefit from this, especially if your lawn has things like clover growing in it.
Ask Restaurants For Their Kitchen Scraps
Call your local restaurant. Ask them if you could bring them a bucket (with lid) to collect food waste and scraps for your chickens. Set up a schedule and make it easy and hassle-free for the restaurant.
Raise Mealworms or Black Soldier Fly Larvae
I'm not ready for this, I prefer the hands-off approach of my hanging maggot bucket feeder, but many people have started growing their own mealworms, grubs, and other creepy crawlies to feed to their chickens.
Choose Specific Breeds For Eggs & Meat
We raise heritage-breed Orpingtons and Bresse chickens. The benefits of heritage-breed dual-purpose chicken breeds like this are many, but there are significant cons too — like taking longer to start laying and longer to reach a good weight for slaughter. The solution is to choose breeds that are specific to each of these tasks. That is why we are adding Rustic Rangers for meat to our homestead for the first time this summer alongside Azure Blues and Olive Eggers for eggs.
Also See: Chicken Breeds That Lay Blue Eggs.
Consider Bantam Breeds
There are Bantam chickens which are smaller versions of a larger counterpart (I have a few listed in my Black Chicken Breeds article) and then there are true Bantam chicken breeds that have no large breed counterpart. The benefit of a smaller breed of chicken is obviously going to be that they require less feed.
Call Fruit & Vegetable Wholesellers For Deals On Produce Going Bad
My grocer sells bananas going bad at a greatly reduced price. Occasionally there are other things sitting in the warehouse. But you'll never know until you call and ask. We throw away so much good food in this country because it is ugly or near spoiling, it would make so much more sense to feed it back to our chickens and other livestock.
Cull Unproductive Birds
When your laying hens are past their prime and the frequency of their egg production has decreased, it may be time to make soup. Or Coq Au Vin, but with a hen instead of an old rooster. You can also feed them to your dogs and cats if you have any and if you feed raw.
See: 15 Chicken Recipes That Won't Bore You To Tears
The Ultimate Guide to Homestead & Backyard Chicken Keeping
Learn More About Chickens:
- Feeding Chickens Cheese & Dairy Products
- 15 Surprising Benefits Of Backyard Chickens
- 13 Rare & Beautiful Chicken Breeds
- Black-Skinned Chickens: The 5 Fibromelanistic Breeds
- 18 Best Egg-Laying Chickens: Which Breed Is Right For You?
- Can Chickens Eat Tomatoes?
- What To Feed Chickens During Winter
- Can Chickens Eat Grapes? Grape Safety & Nutrition
Browse ALL The Chicken Articles ➳
Recommended Books on Raising Chickens
Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens. This is a classic that everyone should have if they are planning on raising chickens. This book technically has everything you need within the pages. That being said, if you are looking for more organic and natural approaches to chicken-keeping, I recommend this book alongside something that will serve that purpose too.
The Small-Scale Poultry Flock: An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers This is my favourite. The most comprehensive guide to date on raising all-natural poultry for the small-scale farmer, homesteader, and professional grower. The Small-Scale Poultry Flock offers a practical and integrative model for working with chickens and other domestic fowl, based entirely on natural systems.
Gardening with Chickens: Plans and Plants for You and Your Hens. This unique book is a must for the gardener and chicken keeper, especially if you want to combine the two in harmony. Start by planning your garden and learning strategies and tips for keeping your plants safe while they grow. Plant with purpose, choosing from a dozen plans for theme gardens such as Orange Egg Yolks or Nesting Box Herbs.
[…] also recommend you look through 25 Ways To Save Money on Chicken Feed because there are some great ideas in there that we utilize very […]