Is Cheaper Chicken Feed Actually Making Your Eggs Cheaper?

🌱 This week at Red Ants Farm

The monthly egg number keeps telling me things I did not ask about.

It has turned into the most useful thing I do on this block, and also the most annoying, for exactly that reason.

This month it was feed. I have been reading the same conversation in every poultry group for months — feed is dear, so people are feeding wheat instead, or scraps, or fermented feed, or whatever the garden produced. And I have thought the same thing. Wheat is a lot cheaper than layer pellets and the hens go mad for it, so why wouldn't I feed more of it?

So I went and found out properly, rather than repeating what everybody says. Some of it confirmed what I assumed. Two things did not, and one of them is something I have been doing wrong in my own run, every afternoon, for about two years.

🐔 This week's topic

The whole thing turns on one question that sounds like word games and isn't.

"How do I feed my chickens more cheaply?" and "what is the cheapest way to feed my chickens that still keeps them laying?" are different questions. They have different answers. Almost everyone — me included — has been asking the first one.

If a cheaper diet takes a hen from five eggs a week down to two, the cost of each egg has gone up, even though every bag got cheaper. You would feel like you were saving money the whole time. The bag is the number you see; the egg is the number that counts.

1. The first thing I got wrong: scratch is not extra.

This is the one that stung. I have always tipped a scoop of scratch out in the afternoon on top of the layer pellets, in the belief I was feeding a good ration plus a treat.

I wasn't. Birds largely eat until their energy needs are met and then stop — Merck's line is that poultry have "an amazing ability to consume energy to requirement regardless of dietary energy concentration." Scratch is energy-rich and not much else. So it does not sit on top of the ration. It displaces it. Every handful of scratch is a handful of balanced feed she now won't eat.

I hadn't supplemented my hens' feed. I had watered it down — protein, calcium, vitamins, the lot.

Oregon State's extension service puts the sensible limit at 10 to 15 percent of daily intake. A hen eats around 110 to 120 grams a day, so that is twelve to eighteen grams a bird — for half a dozen hens, roughly one closed handful for the whole flock. It is nothing like what I was throwing. The easier version of the rule, if you don't fancy weighing scratch out: feed the proper ration first, and put out only what they clear in fifteen to twenty minutes.

2. The second thing I got wrong: grinding.

I had assumed grain wants to be cracked or ground so the birds can get at it, and that grinding must knock the goodness out of it, so I was picking between two bad options.

Both halves were off. A chicken has no teeth but it has a gizzard, which is a muscular mill and extremely good at its job. Whole grain is not a problem for a healthy bird with grit. So why is commercial feed milled and pelleted at all? Research at Massey — a New Zealand source, which was nice to find — has the answer, and it is not about digestion. Offer birds a mix of whole grain and mash and they eat the grain first and leave the mash behind. They sort it. Grinding makes a feed they can't pick apart.

Which turns the question inside out: you don't grind for the chicken, you grind for the mix. Feeding whole grain alongside a complete feed? Leave it whole. Mixing your own ration from several ingredients? Now particle size matters enormously — otherwise the ration you designed is not the ration they ate, and you will never know it.

3. And the calcium, which is the part I would ask anyone feeding grain-only to read.

A laying hen needs a diet around 3.25% calcium. Wheat is 0.05%. That is not a shortfall you can feed your way around — there is no quantity of wheat that closes a sixty-five-fold gap.

What makes it dangerous is that it doesn't look like anything for a long time. She keeps laying, because she makes up the difference out of her own skeleton — hens carry a bone reserve for exactly this, and it supplies an estimated 20 to 40 percent of each shell overnight, normally topped back up from the next day's feed. On a grain-only diet it never gets topped up. So the birds look fine for weeks. "I've been doing this six weeks and they're great" is not evidence the diet works. It is evidence the hen had reserves.

📖 The full guide

There was more than fits in an email.

It is written up properly on the site — what a laying hen actually needs, whether grain alone can do it, the scratch and scraps arithmetic, the grinding question, and which savings are real: What to feed laying hens: grain, scraps and the real cost of an egg. Free to read, no account needed.

It is the first of a run on poultry. Grit versus shell grit, chick and grower feeds, whole grain against pellets, what not to feed, and why production drops are all coming over the next few months. If there is one you want first, hit reply and say so — that is genuinely how the order gets set.

🥚 And the point of all this

Feed in, eggs out — and write down the date you changed something.

None of the above tells you what your eggs cost. That is the frustrating bit: the honest answer to "is wheat cheaper for me?" is that it depends on your birds, your season and your setup, and nobody on the internet can tell you.

But you can find out, and it is two habits. Write down what you spend on feed. Write down the eggs you collect. A few weeks of that and you have a number.

Then the important half, which I only worked out by getting it wrong: when you change something, write down the date. Change the feed, cut the scratch, add birds, start free-ranging — note the day you did it. Egg production moves over weeks, not days, and without a date you cannot tell a real improvement from the season turning. I have thrown away at least one useful experiment that way.

That is all the app is doing when it gives me a cost per egg. Feed in, eggs out, and the division. Change something, note the date, compare. You end up with a number instead of an opinion, which is the only way I know to settle an argument about chicken feed.

🛠️ What's new

One way to log eggs, everywhere — and feed purchases that stop duplicating themselves.

All of this is live on the web now, and in the phone apps too — update to 1.5.3 in the App Store or on Google Play if you use one.

• One way to log eggs, everywhere. Every quick route to eggs — the header +, the floating +, the Today's Brief tile, the Brief's own quick-capture row and the calendar day menu — now opens the same Today's eggs sheet, with every laying flock listed and today's counts beside each one. Some of those used to open the slower one-flock-at-a-time form.
• Feed logs can be edited — all four kinds. And if the purchase was linked to your Finances, editing it updates the same money row instead of quietly creating a second one, which is the bug that makes a cost per egg untrustworthy. Feed purchases also carry a supplier now.
• Deleting says what it keeps. Delete an animal, paddock or product and the confirmation lists what goes with it and what stays on file — money rows, jobs, treatments. No more guessing what a delete takes with it.

🔜 Still coming: a block biosecurity checklist with a quarantine countdown · a vet-ready PDF of an animal's treatment history · a NAIT-friendly movement log you can export · more poultry guides.

🗓️ On the block this month — spring

Written from Northland; most of it travels, the dates shift.

• Chooks: lay is climbing and it's broody season. If you're going to start a feed-in, eggs-out record, this is the easy month to start it — the numbers are moving, so you see the effect of a change quickly.
• New birds: anything joining the flock — a bought hen, a bird home from a show — gets its fortnight apart before it meets the others. Same principle as the sheep, smaller scale.
• Lambs: docking and tagging want doing young, the flystrike clock is starting, and if the first clostridial shot is done, the booster is the one that gets forgotten.
• Pasture: growth is accelerating. Watch the round, not the calendar — a rotation left on its winter setting a fortnight too long is how spring gets away on you. And decide now which paddocks you're shutting up, while you still have the choice.