What to feed laying hens: grain, scraps and the real cost of an egg

🐔 The short version

Cheap feed per kilo is not the same thing as cheap eggs.

Almost every feed shortcut compares the wrong number. A bag of wheat is cheaper per kilo than a bag of layer pellets, so the wheat looks like a saving. But you do not eat feed. You eat eggs.

If a change in diet drops a hen from five eggs a week to two, the cost of each egg has gone up even though the feed got cheaper. So the useful question is not "how do I feed my chickens more cheaply?" It is "what is the cheapest way to feed them that still keeps them laying?" Those are different questions with different answers, and the second is the one worth your time.

📋 The basics

What does a laying hen actually need?

Six things, and it helps to hold them separately rather than thinking about "feed" as one lump.

• Energy. Mostly from cereal grain. This is the part grain is genuinely good at — which is why it looks like a complete answer when it isn't.
• Protein, and the right protein. The headline percentage matters less than which amino acids it contains. Lysine and methionine usually run out first in a home-made diet.
• Calcium and phosphorus. A laying hen's calcium demand is unlike anything else on your block, for reasons in the next section.
• Vitamins and trace minerals. Small amounts, easy to overlook, and the reason a commercial ration carries a premix.
• Clean water, always available. An egg is about 78% water, and hens drink roughly twice as much water as feed by weight — around a cupful a day each. Even a relatively short interruption in water supply can reduce laying, particularly in hot weather. Our guide to stock water requirements covers the wider picture.
• Grit, depending on what she eats. The gizzard does the grinding, and birds on whole grain usually need small hard stones to do it with. That is a different product from shell grit, which is a calcium source — the two get mixed up constantly, and it deserves its own guide.

For scale: a laying hen eats around 110–120 g of feed a day, and published reference figures put her requirement at roughly 15% crude protein and 3.25% calcium at a 100 g intake. Those percentages rise if she eats less, because what matters is the daily total rather than the concentration.

Treat those figures as a floor rather than a target — they rest on research from 1962–1989, and modern breed guides set amino acids higher. Growing birds and birds that are not laying have genuinely different requirements, particularly for calcium, which is a topic in its own right.

🌾 The big question

Can laying hens live on grain alone?

No. Grain is a good energy feed and a poor complete ration. It falls short in several areas at once — protein quantity, amino acid balance, calcium, phosphorus, and the vitamin and mineral fraction. Calcium is simply the easiest shortfall to demonstrate, so it is the one worth walking through.

From the FAO's feedstuffs tables, maize runs 9.3% crude protein and 0.02% calcium, wheat 12.7% and 0.05%, barley 11.6% and 0.08%.

Put wheat next to the requirement. A hen eating 100 g a day needs a diet around 3.25% calcium. Wheat is 0.05% — roughly a sixty-five-fold gap, and no quantity she can physically eat closes it.

That calcium has somewhere to go: research puts it at about 4 g eaten in a day, of which around 2 g ends up in the shell of a single egg. Shells form largely overnight when the gut is empty, so to bridge the gap she draws on medullary bone — a reserve inside her long bones that exists for the purpose, supplying an estimated 20–40% of each shell's calcium before being replaced from the next day's feed.

Protein is short too, though less dramatically: 12.7% in wheat against roughly 15% needed. But the percentage alone does not tell you enough, because amino acid balance decides how much of it the bird can use — and the FAO notes lysine is the first limiting amino acid across cereal grains. A 12% grain diet and a 12% formulated diet are not the same feed.

Scratch mixes sit in the same position. As University of Georgia Extension puts it, scratch "does not have a complete balance of any of the nutrients a chicken needs to live."

⚠️ The common mistake

What about scratch grain and kitchen scraps?

This one catches people who are doing everything else right, because it looks like generosity rather than a mistake.

The setup: you buy a good layer ration at 16% protein, and you also throw the birds a scoop of scratch every afternoon plus whatever came out of the kitchen. You believe you are feeding a 16% diet plus extras. You are probably feeding something meaningfully weaker than 16%.

The reason is how birds regulate intake. As Merck puts it, poultry "have an amazing ability to consume energy to requirement regardless of dietary energy concentration." A hen eats largely until her energy needs are met, then eats less of everything else. Scratch and most scraps are energy-rich and nutritionally incomplete, so what they mainly do is displace balanced ration rather than add to it. You did not supplement the feed. You diluted it — protein, calcium, vitamins and all.

Oregon State University Extension is direct about it: scratch should be "about 10 to 15 percent of their total daily food consumption" because grains "tend to dilute nutrient levels in carefully formulated diets." On a 110–120 g intake that is only about 12–18 g per bird per day — for half a dozen hens, roughly one closed handful for the whole flock, and usually far less than people throw.

None of this makes scraps bad. It makes them a treat with a cost, paid in the ration they displace. Which particular foods are safe, risky or merely rumoured to be dangerous is a bigger question than it looks, and one I will come back to separately rather than half-answer here.

⚙️ Whole or ground

Does grain need to be ground?

Two questions get tangled together here, so take them apart.

Does the chicken need it ground for digestion? No. A chicken has no teeth, but it has a gizzard, which is a muscular mill and very good at its job. Whole grain is not a problem for a healthy bird with access to grit.

So why is commercial feed milled and pelleted? Because of what birds do to a mixture. Research at Massey University notes that birds offered a mix of mash and whole grain "will tend to eat the whole grain first and leave behind the mash," because the larger particles are easier to pick up and preferred. Grinding produces a homogeneous feed the bird cannot sort.

So: you do not grind for the chicken, you grind for the mix.

• Feeding whole grain alongside a complete feed? No need to grind it — there is nothing to sort out of a single-ingredient feed, and the dilution rule above governs how much to give.
• Mixing your own ration from several ingredients? Particle size matters a great deal, because otherwise the birds pick out the grain and leave the protein and mineral fraction in the bottom of the feeder — and the ration you formulated is not the ration they ate.

There is more to this — what whole grain does to the gizzard, how mash, crumble and pellets compare, and what milling means for storage — but that is a subject of its own and deserves a proper guide rather than a paragraph.

💲 The payoff

Does cheaper feed actually mean cheaper eggs?

Sometimes — but the savings that survive contact with reality are mostly not the ones that get posted about.

A complete layer ration is not expensive because someone is profiteering. It is expensive because it contains what cereal grain does not: supplementary protein with the right amino acid balance, calcium, phosphorus, salt and a vitamin and trace mineral premix. Strip those out and you have not found a cheaper feed — you have found a different feed that does a different job.

Where the real savings are:

• Keep production up. The big one, and the whole argument of this guide. A well-fed hen spreads her feed cost across more eggs; anything that quietly reduces lay raises the cost of every egg you do get.
• Waste less feed. Feed flicked out of a feeder into the litter is pure loss and easy to underestimate. Avoid overfilling, put out smaller amounts more often, and raise feeders to about back height. Pellets spill less than mash.
• Keep scratch and scraps in proportion. Cutting back to a genuine 10–15% often raises feed cost per kilo and lowers cost per egg.
• Buy in quantities you can store. Milled feed is generally recommended to be used within about four weeks to two months, less in a warm humid summer. A cheap bag that goes stale or mouldy is the most expensive feed there is.
• Know which birds are producing. A hen past her productive life eats the same 110–120 g a day as one laying five a week. What you do about that is your business — plenty of us keep them anyway — but it should be a decision rather than an accident.
• Let them range where you can. Pasture and insects do offset feed, but unpredictably. Good spring pasture contributes real protein; a bare dirt run in July contributes very little. A real saving, just not one you can budget against.

📲 Finding out

Finding out what your eggs really cost.

Everything above is general. What your birds cost you is specific — and knowable, which is the useful part.

It takes two habits: write down what you spend on feed when you buy it, and write down eggs collected. Feed in, eggs out. After a few weeks that division gives you a number, and the number turns every argument in this guide into something you can test on your own birds.

The other half is dates. If you change the feed, cut the scratch back, add or remove birds, start free-ranging or change how you feed, write down the date. Egg production responds over weeks rather than days, and without a dated note you cannot separate a real improvement from the season turning.

That is what My Block Hand does here: log feed costs and daily egg numbers against a flock and it works out your cost per egg from your own records. Change something, note the date, compare.

Track what goes in, track what comes out, and the next time someone tells you their feed trick is cheaper, you will have a number instead of an opinion.

🚧 Where this guide stops

What this guide cannot do for you.

This is general information for lifestyle-block keepers. It is not veterinary advice and it is not a feed formulation.

Formulating a complete ration from raw ingredients is genuinely technical — amino acid balance, the calcium-to-phosphorus ratio and the vitamin and trace mineral premix are not things to approximate. If you want to mix your own, talk to a poultry nutritionist or your feed supplier rather than working from a table on a website, this one included.

Talk to your vet about birds that are unwell, a sudden drop in lay, or persistent shell problems. The figures quoted here are published reference values, not a prescription for your flock.

📚 Further reading

Where the information on this page comes from.

• National Research Council — Nutrient Requirements of Poultry, 9th rev. ed. (1994): the underlying reference for the protein, calcium and amino acid figures. Not free to read; the two sources below reproduce the relevant tables.
• USDA NRCS — Feed and Animal Management for Poultry (PDF): the layer requirement table at 80, 100 and 120 g daily intake, citing NRC 1994 — the source of the 15% protein / 3.25% calcium figures and of the point that the percentages rise as intake falls.
• Purdue Extension — Protein and Amino Acid Requirements for Poultry (PDF): lysine and methionine requirements, and the note that NRC 1994 rests on research published 1962–1989.
• FAO — Feedstuffs (Chapter 8): the protein and calcium content of maize, wheat and barley, and lysine as the first limiting amino acid in cereal grains.
• Carrillo et al. (2020), Frontiers in Veterinary Science: the daily calcium budget — roughly 4 g consumed, about 2 g deposited in the shell.
• Sinclair-Black et al. (2023), Frontiers in Physiology: medullary bone supplying an estimated 20–40% of the calcium for each shell.
• Merck Veterinary Manual — Osteoporosis / cage layer fatigue: absent medullary bone, fracture mortality, and osteoporosis as a major cause of death in high-producing flocks.
• Merck Veterinary Manual — Protein, amino acid and energy deficiencies: birds consuming energy to requirement regardless of dietary energy concentration.
• Oregon State University Extension PNW 477 — How to Feed Your Laying Hens (PDF): scratch at 10–15% of daily intake, and grains diluting nutrient levels in formulated diets.
• poultry.extension.org — Feeding Chickens for Egg Production: the 15–20 minute rule for scratch, and feed storage limits.
• University of Georgia Extension C954 — Nutrition for the Backyard Flock: scratch not constituting a complete feed.
• Singh, Y. (2013) — Whole Grain Inclusion in Poultry Diets, PhD thesis, Massey University (PDF): birds selectively eating whole grain and leaving mash behind, and grinding as the means of producing a homogenised feed.
• University of Kentucky Extension ASC233 (PDF): daily feed intake, the water-to-feed ratio and roughly a cup of water a day, egg water content of 78%, and reduced lay following a shortage of water.
• Merck Veterinary Manual — Management of backyard poultry: daily intake and the 1.5–3.5:1 water-to-feed range.
• University of Kentucky — Feed wastage and feed deprivation: overfilled feeders causing wastage, and feeding smaller quantities more often.
• Penn State Extension — Raising a small flock of laying chickens: the four-week feed storage recommendation.