Balancing Pellets, Treats and Nutrition

Most of us with chickens aren’t experts in nutritional needs for ourselves, let alone for our chickens. Fiona and Hugh Osborne explain how they balance the nutritional needs of their breeding flock of Orpingtons.

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A STRONG CORE

The backbone of any nutritionally balanced diet for our flock is a good quality pelleted chicken food that is suitable for our mix of chickens. There are many quality brands on the market including Heygates, Allen & Page and Marriages amongst others; this list isn’t exhaustive. All of them have spent great amounts of money on both developing and quality controlling their feeds so they take the heavy lifting and guesswork out of the selection for us.

We mentioned that we also choose a food that is suitable for our mix of chickens. As breeders, this changes month by month. You might be surprised to hear that we do not use the most common pelleted food which is Layers Pellets. We like our chickens to have access to the entire free-range area. That means we have chicks with their broody hens mingling with the laying hens, mingling with the cock birds, all of which have different nutritional needs.

To allow the varied mix of chickens to run together, we select two mixes of food. The first is when chicks start hatching and we fill the communal feeders with food suitable for chicks. Essentially, we are feeding to the youngest flock member, after all, chicks can’t eat adult pellets (growers or layers) but adult hens and cockerels can eat chick food.