What are you feeding your backyard chickens? More importantly, is what you’re feeding your backyard chickens good for them – and you? This is an important consideration when you’re raising egg-laying backyard chickens. What they eat, impacts the nutritional content of your food.
Here at Graywhale Farms, we are proud of our organic garden that features a variety of kale, brassica, and other root veggies. We grow these veggies to supplement the diets of our chickens at the hatchery.
This week we harvested both turnips and beets and have put that harvest to good use for both us and our chickens.
What Do We Normally Feed Our Backyard Chickens?
Generally, we feed our gorgeous hens, chicks, and beautiful pullets with a hearty meal supplemented with 22% protein for our rare bird species and 28% protein for the game birds like the Bruges Fighter. Because of the lack of specific minerals here in Door County, we also supplement their diet with Selenium, Calcium, and Vitamin E.
For your backyard flock, 16% is perfect for layer eggs. Because we’re a hatchery we feed our rare breed designer chickens protein levels to ensure the health of the babies. It’s really a wonderful thing.
They say that man cannot live on bread (carbs) alone, it’s the same for chickens. Beets have a great source of nitric oxide and turnips have Vitamin C and protein! How neat is that?
Turnip & Beet Backyard Chicken Feed Recipe
When mixed, we distribute about ¼ cup per chicken. We have a much larger flock as a hatchery. So that is a good rule of thumb.
If your beets aren’t quite ready, put your turnips in a bucket of sand in a cool, dry place for 7-10 days.
- Clean and chop beets and turnips in equal amounts.
- Separate and save the leaves for later.
- Put the roughly chopped turnips and beets in your food processor as it allows. You don’t want to burn out your motor.
- Mix the beets and turnips together and add back the chopped leaves for the chickens.
- Serve the same day.
You may even consider creating an ant farm to encourage the chickens to eat the leaves as they naturally forage.
Enjoy!!