Do you guys/gals all rely on chicken feed? how much do you use per chicken in an average month?

We feed around a hundred lbs a month, for around a dozen and a half eggs a day(not sure how many hens), plus broilers, ducks and geese. That's either whole corn or scratch grains---no laying pellets. We could get by this time of year without feeding any grain (we have before), but then it seems like molt comes early and hard.

Last year my chickens were mostly free range, except winter. Winter I would buy (about) 50 lbs cracked corn, 50 lbs scratch, 50 lbs lay ration a month. I went heavy with the corn since the girls don't have heat or light, less on the lay ration. I was still getting 4-6 eggs a day from 16 hens.

Now it's just lay/scratch, about 50 lbs each every 6 weeks. I can't let them free range because the garden is so close to them this year. I do let them out around 6 in the evening, they tend to stay closer to "home" and not get into trouble then. I get between 8 and 14 eggs a day. Oh, they also get some table scraps and things that would otherwise be composted.

I hope to cut the feed back even more if I can ever get a chicken tractor built, or a fence around the garden. I would love to grow my own grain for them, but that project will have to wait at least until next year.

Carla

I think chickens will eat most anything that doesn’t eat them first – ours had greasy tortillas last night, something you wouldn’t want on the compost pile. The more stuff you cook from scratch the more chicken feed you have – not many trimmings from a TV dinner. We try to move the big pen daily, though I made it too heavy and need to add wheels. I may try letting some of the cockerels out to range since they are getting pretty big.

Like everything else, we Yanks are used to grain fed young cooped birds. Certainly grain fed layers will lay more and younger meat birds may be tenderer but if you try to match the factory you are bound too lose, money wise.

Having said that, I inherited a 500-pound bag of some kind of nondescript feed mash when we bought the place, woo-hoo! But before I found that and after a bag of store-bought chick starter, I was feeding them some of the milled cattle feed (12% protein) with the larger pellets screened out. In the past I’ve fed everything from cat food to weeds.

Ideally, if you could match your herd size to your table scraps, bug population and weeds, you’d have garbage in and eggs/meat out!

Here’s another basic chicken link: http://www.i4at.org/lib2/chickens.htm

Well, right now our feed bills are enormous - actually, not quite that bad, but we're spending more than I would like, because I have 11 week old babies who are almost adult sized, but haven't yet started laying. That being said, we have 27 adults (24 hens, 3 roosters), and 47 "babies." I'm also feeding two adult mallard male ducks, and eight 1 & 1/2 month old ducklings. So, I'm feeding a total of 82 birds - almost all, adult sized, and the majority large breed birds.

We buy corn, laying mash, and chick starter, and during the non-gardening time of year, this and table scraps is what they mostly eat. The adults have eaten on average about 50 lbs of corn and 50 lbs of laying mash in a month. (I say "eat" - but much is scratched into the ground to be found later), before we got the chicks and ducks. Chick starter and scratch grain have been added to our bill since the little ones came along. With the addition of the babies, our food bill has almost tripled (well, so has our flock, so that makes sense). This time of year, though, I also supplement their food with garden trimmings and weeds, and of course, all year long they get table scraps.

The chickens also get all the extra food that my parrots throw in the floor . Parrots are the "harvesters of the rain forest" because they throw just about as much food as they eat (hence, the reason they have their own room in my house lol). The chickens love the sunflower seeds, kibbles and other goodies that the parrots toss out. And, it saves me money on the food bill, because they're getting something that would otherwise be composted or trashed. I have 4 large parrots, 3 lovebirds, and 5 parakeets, so it does add up.

On a side note, we moved the chicken run in the last several months when we built a new shelter and run. In the spot where the old run was, I have 4 squash or melon plants coming up where the chickens had buried a seed.

I'm hoping, starting this year, to produce more of the food my chickens, ducks and parrots eat. I've planted at least 150 sunflower plants, am planting grain sorghum for the grain, and have been offered (and will get) all the grain from another sorghum grower that I can haul about August or September. That will help our food bills substantially.

I worry about being dependent on someone else for buying my food for my animals, and hope to be much more self-reliant in the future where their food is concerned.
K

So, in your opinion is this going to pay ??
vs store bought .. You have ..

the cost of the birds
the cost of the feed
the cost of fencing/housing
the cost of loss to predation

Triff ..

If you can grow your own chicken feed and bolster it with scraps and garden pickings it would be worth it.

Worth it economically? Well, at this point, perhaps not completely. However, I do sell every extra egg my chickens produce, and with the exception of the next few months (until the babies start producing eggs as well), I expect the chickens to pay for most, if not all, of the food they eat. I've only been tracking my expenditures vs. income on my chickens since December last year, but until last month (when my food bill went up because of the babies), the chickens paid for their own food each month.

I fully expect the sales from the additional eggs I'll soon be receiving will also offset much of the increased cost of food.

As for the cost of the birds - I have 82 birds, and my total purchase price for 79 of them was $48.00 (the other three were purchased as adult birds for $7 each - and were the first three chickens I bought when I set up my new henhouse). This $48 is a one-time cost. I fully expect many of my laying hens to also set eggs in the next few years, replacing babies that we may cull.

So far with our new flock, knock on wood, we have not lost a single bird to a predator. I have kept chickens off and on for more than 15 years, and can only think of a handful of times when I have had predator problems. Each time, it was not a ground animal, but a hawk or an owl. Covering the chicken run with wire has prevented this problem, and I haven't lost a single bird to a predator in more than 2 years.

Housing? Yes, that can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. We've built an 8x16 chicken house with tin roof, glass south windows, glass insert doors (so I can look in on the birds without disturbing them), with two roosting areas, a 16-hole nest box, and ceilings 7 feet high. It's spacious, easy to clean, and will be easy to add to or remodel, as we need to. Attached to the henhouse is a 24x32 ft. covered-top run for the chickens and a separate 8x32 run for the ducks. One end of the duck run is blocked off for new mothers and their babies. It's a relatively good set-up, but I hope to expand the run area further as funds permit. How much did we spend? Total, about $200.00. Only that much, because we were pressed for time, and had to buy some materials new. Much of the material was traded, bartered, given to us...scrounged . You can build a henhouse and run cheaply if you're willing to pull a few old rusty nails.

Even if it doesn't add up economically (and so far it generally has), for me, there's a larger issue. I know what my birds eat, how they live, how they are treated, and that they are generally happy healthy birds. Factory farmed animals, on the other hand, have a miserable existence in often un-healthy environments. For me, it's the whole garbage-in-garbage-out argument. You are what you eat. So, I prefer to try to eat as much from scratch, home produced food - both meat and vegetables - as I can.

For me, it's definitely worth it.
K

Is it worth it?

Depends on whether your can count on chickens more that corporations.

In the best case, having a hand in your own food supply and a hobby that actually returns something is good.

In the worst case, garbage to meat and eggs is better.

Does anyone know a good vegetable/grain source of calcium? I know chickens need it to make the egg shells hard but dont' know a good source.

Collard greens are a good source of both calcium and protein (as much protein as milk). Collards grow during both cool and warm weather, and are very hardy, and tasty for humans too.

Regarding the "does it pay" question - Store-bought chicken and store-bought eggs are cheaper than home-grown unless you grow your own chicken feed, but store chicken and eggs are grown in a horrible manner with much suffering to the birds. It's really heartbreaking what these birds go through. I'd rather spend double or more to produce humane eggs and chicken.

90% of chickens have cancer by the time they get to the slaughter house. If you believe you are what you eat... Its almost the same with pigs.

I am trying to figure out how much feed it would take to feed two chickens. then figuring out the price I hope to be able to see how that compares with the cost of feed etc.

There are intangibles you can't include such as not having as much garden and yard waste (cause the chickens will eat it up) and good manure for methane production or garden use. during the peak time your basic barn year chickens average 2-4 eggs a day but that's from memory, can someone confirm that for me?

AFAIK it's one egg per chicken per day. Someone did calculations on another forum I went to and they figured it cost 6 pence (10 cent=euro) per day to feed their chickens.

UE,
There are lots of things you can give chickens to increase the calcium they receive. As Ludi said, greens are always good, they love them, and they're pretty easy to grow.

You can also buy bags of ground oyster shell very cheaply. I keep a small bowl with dispenser filled all the time, free choice to the chickens when they want it. As they eat what's in the bowl, it refills itself. The dispenser is still about half full. Since November 2004, with 29 adult birds, I've used one and a third 50 lb (I think) bags. The bags are small because it's concentrated weight, but I think they're 50 lbs each.

You can also feed your chickens their own cooked egg shells, ground up. I put mine in a small toaster oven to dry and cook. Again, they love them.

Finally, if you have dairy animals, you can feed the chickens the whey from your cheesemaking, and even give them spoiled milk. They love it, and it attracts flies - they'll eat them too . Happy chickens .

Kathy

I don't know a good botanical source, we used ground snail shells. These days if I ever take over the old house from Dad and get back into chickens I will just take a sack to the local beach, the zebra mussel shells wash ashore and are scraped into piles at the ends by the park service so that swimmers don't cut their feet.

Also one of the old tricks my dad used was to let the grass on one side of the property grow until it seeded, then bag the clippings and dump it in the coop yard. Between kitchen waste and grass clippings we would raise 50 chickens each year and slaughter 30-40 of them in the fall. One thing I learned growing up, you don't want much more than 50 chickens in the same coop and yard, the ones low on the pecking order get too beat up in a larger flock. We actually split the flock when we got 100 one year because the higher order were actually causing bloodloss and even a few deaths on the low end of the pecking order.