Have you ever wondered how much food a chicken can eat in a day? This can be an important thing to know so that you can calculate the cost of your eggs.
The amount of food that your chickens eat can vary depending on a few different factors. If you have bantams, the quality of the feed, or if your chickens don’t free-range then some of the answers may be different for you. We will look at all the different factors that can affect the amount that your flock will consume.
A normal size hen-
A normal size hen can eat up to a 1/4 lb. of food a day whether if she is laying or not.
A normal size rooster-
A normal size rooster will generally eat more then the hens do, but that can very greatly. I would say that a rooster can eat around a 1/3 lb. of food a day.
If you are free-ranging your flock you don’t have to worry about them becoming overweight, so you can just let them have food whenever they want, but if your flock doesn’t have access to free-ranging you may need to keep an eye on them to make sure that they aren’t gaining too much weight. Before we were able to free-range our flock we still let them have access to food whenever they wanted and we didn’t really ever have a problem with them eating too much, so just keep an eye on your flock and adjust their food accordingly. When you free-range your flock they might eat less than flocks that don’t free range. This is because they can forage and look around for their food!
A bantam-
Bantams will eat like half the amount of the average size chicken. So that would be around 1/8 lb. of food a day.
The quality of the food-
The quality of the food you feed them will affect the amount that they eat. For instance, if you feed them a cheap low-quality food they will actually consume more of it which isn’t really saving you any money. So buy a good high quality feed and you will have better eggs and chickens! We like to use an organic high quality feed and we get amazing eggs and we have healthy chickens.
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about raising chickens!
The 1912 Homestead 