Feeding Chickens for Better Health and Better Eggs

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New chicken keepers tend to overthink feeding. They buy expensive supplements, specialty feeders, and bags of products they’ll never finish. The only three things your chickens need are food, water, and shelter.

You don’t need a fancy gravity feeder. Just a dish that is deep enough to stay upright and keeps birds from walking through it. Chickens are simple creatures. There is no need to get fancy. But simple doesn’t mean dump a bag of commercial feed and forget it. And actually, you might only use commercial feed to supplement their diet and not be the main factor.

Those rich orange yolks that people associate with farm-fresh eggs don’t come from grain pellets alone. They come from a varied diet of greens, insects, kitchen scraps, and yes, some commercial feed when the season calls for it. What your chickens eat shows up directly in the quality of their eggs and their long-term health.

Five Dietary Essentials

Chickens are natural foragers, and when left to roam, they’ll eat insects, worms, grass, seeds, and just about any green thing they find. As a chicken parent, your job is to mirror that variety, even if your birds spend most of their time in a run.

Five categories cover what every laying hen needs to stay healthy and to continue producing eggs worth eating.

• Protein
• Greens
• Grass and hay
• Dried grains and corn
• Calcium

Protein

Egg production runs on protein. Free-range chickens get plenty from worms and insects while foraging. When foraging isn’t an option, especially in winter, you’ll need to fill the gap. Mealworms and crickets are a great alternative. Fish oil and fish meal are good year-round supplements. If you garden, chickens love those big, fat, green tomato worms you pick from your plants during the summer.

One thing to avoid is feeding your chickens raw meat, as it can trigger cannibalistic behavior in the flock.

Greens

One of the best-kept secrets to great-tasting eggs is greens—lettuce, kale, beet greens, carrot tops, whatever leafy scraps come out of your kitchen. Grocery stores and farmers’ markets often toss produce that’s wilted but still fine for chickens. Ask around. We have arrangements with some of the restaurants close to us to save their vegetable scraps for our girls.

Neighbors with gardens are another good source. The more greens your flock eats, the richer and more nutritious the eggs.

Grass and hay

We keep one of our compost piles inside the chicken run. Our birds do half our work by turning it while eating bugs and plant matter from the pile. Standard composting takes close to a year. Chickens cut that to 4 to 6 months, and they mix their own fertilizer in as they go. It’s free labor and good nutrition at once.

Dried Corn and grains

Use these as a supplement, not a main course. A little whole corn adds richness to the yolk. Scatter a handful in the yard and let the birds scratch for it. It doubles as a treat and a way to keep them active.

We feed our chickens a small handful of corn or grains every other day, keeping it less than 10% of their diet. Since corn and grains are high in energy but low in protein, overfeeding may cause reduced egg production and obesity in your birds.

Calcium

Laying hens burn through calcium fast. If a hen doesn’t get enough, she will produce thin, brittle shells, and her health will suffer over time. Oyster shells from a feed store work, but eggshells are a free and natural alternative. More on that below.

Water Matters More Than Feed

This is the feeding topic most articles skip. A chicken that doesn’t have clean water won’t eat. A chicken that doesn’t eat stops laying. And since about half of an egg is water, egg production drops or completely stops. Eggs become smaller with weak or soft shells, and prolonged dehydration can cause permanent damage to a hen’s laying cycle.

Chickens need a lot of fresh water, so keep it available all day, every day. In winter, move the waterer inside the coop to prevent freezing. I keep a waterer inside the coop and one outside year-round. In summer, check it twice a day. Birds dehydrate fast in heat. During the summer, we buy our girls watermelon. They love melon, and it helps ensure they stay hydrated.

How to Feed Eggshells to Your Hens

Feeding eggshells back to your flock is a practice that goes back centuries. If your hens eat mostly table scraps and foraged food rather than calcium-fortified commercial feed, they need extra calcium. We have a large flock, so we freeze-dry any eggs we don’t sell or give away. You can find out more about my home freeze dryer on The Prepper’s Basement.

Will it turn them into egg eaters? Probably not. In the 20-plus years of raising chickens and feeding eggshells, I’ve had only two hens that ate their own eggs. If eggshells caused that habit, every hen in the flock would be doing it. The more common reason hens eat eggs is that they’re not getting enough calcium in the first place.

There is a process for prepping egg shells for your hens.

Collect and store

As you use eggs, crush the shells roughly and toss them into a bucket. I keep mine in the pantry.

Bake

When the bucket is about half full, spread the shells on a baking sheet and bake at 350°F for 8 minutes. The heat kills bacteria and dries out the inner membrane, which makes the shells easier to crush.

Crush

Break the toasted shells into small pieces, roughly the size of glitter. Small enough that they don’t look like eggs. You don’t want a powder. You want tiny chips that a hen can pick up and eat.

Serve separately

Put the crushed shells in their own dish rather than mixing them into the regular feed. Chickens know when their body needs calcium. They’ll eat from the shell dish on their own schedule. If you mix shells into their feed, hens that don’t need calcium will pick around them, and the shells go to waste.

Eggshells don’t spoil. You can stockpile them. Early on, you may not have enough and will need to buy oyster shell or calcium-enriched feed to bridge the gap. Ask friends and neighbors who use your eggs to save their shells for you. It adds up fast.

One personal rule is that I only use shells from my own flock. Store-bought eggs come from chickens whose diets and health histories are unknown. That’s a choice each keeper makes for themselves.

Choosing Commercial Feed

When you do buy bagged feed, buy good feed. Cheap feed saves money in the short term and costs you in egg quality and vet bills later.

Inspect every bag when you get home. Chickens have sensitive lungs. Moldy or dusty feed will stress their respiratory system and open the door to disease. If the bag is bad, call the supplier. Most will replace it.

Once your hens are laying well on a certain brand, stick with it. Different brands have different formulas, and switching can change egg quality or output. If production drops and the feed is the only variable, then try a different brand. Your local feed supplier can point you in the right direction.

Winter is when commercial feed matters most. Green grass is gone. Bugs are scarce. The natural buffet your chickens relied on all summer has shut down. A high-protein feed with balanced vitamins and minerals keeps your flock healthy through the cold months. Table scraps help, but they’re not enough on their own from November through March.

A Note on Treats

Chickens love treats, and mixed corn is a favorite. Scatter a couple of handfuls around the yard and watch them scratch and dig for every kernel. It keeps the birds active and entertained. Corn also works as a herding tool. Scatter a trail from the yard into the coop at dusk, and the flock will follow it right to bed.

The Bottom Line

What your chickens eat determines their health and the quality of their eggs. Feed them a mix of greens, protein, and quality commercial feed. Keep water fresh and available at all times. Store feed in sealed containers away from moisture and pests. If you have a local bakery or food processing plant, you may be able to get the empty product containers free or at an extremely low price. These are great for storing chicken feed because they are made of food-grade plastic and seal tightly. By following these tips, your flock will reward you every morning at the nesting box.