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Raise Healthy Chickens on a Tiny Budget

Keeping chickens healthy and laying eggs for many years requires that you give them nothing less than high quality feed. You can feed your flock using one or more of several methods, each having their positives and negatives. One way is to give your chickens the freedom to hunt for their own food. However, this approach will cause their egg production to decrease due to filling their stomachs with protein-lacking grasses instead of high-protein grains or fish meal and calcium-rich oyster shells. As alternatives you can use a premixed vegetarian diet, a prepackaged diet with animal protein or a self-mixed diet.

There are pluses and minuses to each of these methods. But before we begin our discussion about chicken feed, I must mention that shelter is almost as important as food, which typically comes in the form of hen houses. Hen houses have many other names such as chicken coops, chicken sheds or chicken pens, but regardless of the terminology, they are all the same thing, poultry housing. The reason they are mentioned in this article about chicken feed is because poultry houses will actually play an important role when it comes to feeding your birds, as you will soon discover.

There are many options when it comes to feeding your chickens. First of all, you can always follow the leader, the mass chicken producers, who typically feed their flocks an "all vegetarian" diet. But there are a couple of things that you need to know before selecting this diet. There are latent animal diseases that are sometimes found in poultry feed. If a single chicken gets infected with a virulent disease, it can quickly spread and cause the destruction of an entire flock of thousands. This is one of the reasons why mass producers have turned to the all vegetarian diet, to eliminate this risk. However, this strict diet has its drawbacks.

The biggest downside to strictly vegetarian-fed chickens is that they are potentially undernourished. Chickens need a certain amount of animal protein, and getting that protein can be tricky with a vegetarian diet. Fortunately, small backyard chicken farmers do not need to worry as much about the latent animal diseases. They can let their birds rustle up a portion of their own protein by letting them scratch around the chicken coup for bugs and insects, which is usually a very healthy thing to do.

Another feed alternative is simply to buy it prepackaged. This is certainly the easiest approach, because the feeds are formulated to give all breeds of all ages the nutrients they need in the proper amounts. The negative is that this is the most expensive way to feed your chickens. To save money you can mix your own feed. It is easy to locate good recipes online that describe mixtures containing all of the grains, proteins, calcium and other nutrients needed. You will have to do a little extra homework, and you will have to purchase these ingredients individually, but the end result will be healthy and productive chickens with less money spent.

Free ranging is another option. By allowing your chickens to roam around the chicken coup they will hunt down their own protein as bugs and insects and their own weed seeds or grasses. However, the downside is that it is possible for them to eat too many plants and get too little protein this way. The amount of eggs they lay will diminish. The best solution is to allow them to free range for a part of their meals, while feeding them premixed or self-mixed feed for the other part.

Portable poultry houses have two parts, a house and an attached outdoor section. Being inside a protective chicken coup will keep your chickens safe from predators, while also limiting the amount of free range food they have access to. Every so often, once the chickens have overgrazed a spot of land, all you have to do is drag the portable chicken coup to a new area. Because you are moving your hen houses to new areas, the older areas will be given time to recover and grow back their plants. Using poultry housing of this sort can give your pullets what they need to continue laying productively for many years.

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