Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens (28 page)

Never feed anything that contains caffeine or alcohol.

Avoid feeding anything that is high in fat, sugar, or sugar substitute.

Above all, don’t overdo any single item. The resulting nutritional imbalance can cause slow growth, reduced laying, and poor health.

Depending on how your chickens are managed, they may need supplemental grit, calcium, phosphorus, or salt. Flax seed is an additional supplement used to boost the omega-3 content of eggs.

Grit,
in the form of small pebbles and large grains of sand pecked up and swallowed by a chicken, lodges in the bird’s gizzard. When grains and fibrous vegetation pass through the gizzard, muscular action breaks them up by grinding them together with the grit. In short, grit serves as a chicken’s teeth.

Chickens that eat only commercially prepared rations need no grit, since the rations are sufficiently softened by the bird’s saliva. Range-fed chickens need grit to grind up plant matter. Any chicken that eats whole grains and seeds needs grit. And since grit eventually gets ground up and passed through the digestive system, it needs to be constantly replenished.

Yarded or pastured birds pick up natural grit from the soil but may not get enough. Granite grit, available from any farm store carrying poultry rations, should be offered in a separate hopper and available at all times.

Calcium
is needed by laying hens to keep eggshells strong. The amount of calcium a hen needs varies with her age, diet, and state of health; older hens, for instance, need more calcium than younger hens. Hens on pasture obtain some amount of calcium naturally, but illness may cause a calcium imbalance. In warm weather, when all chickens eat less, the calcium in a hen’s ration may not be enough to meet her needs, and a hen that gets too little calcium lays thin-shelled eggs. On the other hand, a hen that eats extra ration in an attempt to replenish calcium gets fat and becomes a poor layer.

Eggshells consist primarily of calcium carbonate, the same material found in oyster shells, aragonite, and limestone. All laying hens should have access to a separate hopper full of crushed oyster shells, ground aragonite, or chipped limestone (not dolomitic limestone, which can be detrimental to egg production).

Phosphorus
and calcium are interrelated — a hen’s body needs one to metabolize the other. Range-fed hens obtain some phosphorus and calcium by eating beetles and other hard-shelled bugs, but they may not get enough. To balance the calcium supplement, offer phosphorus in the form of defluorinated rock phosphate or phosphorus-16 in a separate hopper and make it available at all times.

Salt
is needed by all chickens but only in tiny amounts. Commercially prepared rations contain all the salt a flock needs. Range-fed chickens that eat primarily plants and grain may need a salt supplement. Salt deficiency causes hens to lay fewer, smaller eggs and causes any chicken to become cannibalistic.

FEEDING STATION

Loose salt (not rock salt) should always be available to range-fed chickens in a separate hopper. Iodized salt is suitable, although either a trace-mineral salt mix or kelp will supply your chickens with many other necessary minerals in addition to salt.

How often you feed your chickens is yet another matter of choice. Some chicken keepers like big feeders that needn’t be filled often. I prefer smaller feeders that hold too little for the feed to get stale. Also I collect eggs at least twice a day, and checking the feed and water while I’m there anyway is no big deal.

I feed in the morning after breakfast and in the evening after dinner. Other chicken keepers feed first thing on rising and last thing before retiring. Still others feed once a day. How often you feed is not as important as making sure the feed and water never run out.

However, you don’t want feed to sit long enough to get stale, as it loses nutrients and become unpalatable. Additionally, feed left in the open overnight attracts rodents, raccoons, and other pilfering critters, thereby increasing your feed bill.

Feed left where rain can get in eventually will become moldy — a definite health hazard to chickens. On the other hand, most chickens love moistened feed once they get used to it. Moistening the ration is a good way to encourage eating on hot summer days, and crumbles moistened with warm milk or water is a real treat on cold winter days. But moist feed should be eaten up in half a day or less, and the feeder must be scrupulously cleaned to prevent moldering feed from lurking in the corners.

The amount a chicken eats varies with the season and temperature, as well as with the bird’s age, size, weight, and rate of lay. Since chickens eat to meet their energy needs, the amount of a particular ration a bird will eat depends also on
the ration’s energy density. A chicken fed the same ration year-round will eat more during cold weather, because it needs more energy to keep its body warm. As some extremely general guidelines, expect to feed:

Each mature bantam about ½ pound (0.25 kg) of feed per week

Each mature light-breed chicken about 2 pounds (1 kg) of feed per week

Each mature midweight dual-purpose chicken about 3 pounds (1.5 kg) of feed per week

Each mature heavy-breed chicken about 4 pounds (2 kg) of feed per week

Each meat bird about 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of total feed to reach mature butchering age

A chicken that doesn’t get enough to eat won’t grow or lay well. A chicken may eat too little if it goes through a partial or hard molt, if it’s low in the peck order, if the weather turns hot, or if it finds its ration unpalatable. Birds can be particularly fussy about texture. They don’t like dusty or powdery mash. They also don’t like (and shouldn’t be fed) moldy or musty rations.