I’ve been reading about chicken nutrition for a long time, in my reading I came across fermentation of feed. Since I know how healthy fermented foods are for humans, I decided to give fermenting a try for the chickens. My chickens have been on my own homemade chicken feed for six months now and they’re all thriving.



I noticed a few changes when I started my chickens on fermented feed. For starters, the yolks on their eggs are much bigger than they used to be. They also have much smaller poop, oh yeah, and it doesn’t stink like it used to. I’m not really surprised by this, the same thing happened when we put our pets on raw food.



Not only are they healthy and happy, they’re still laying like champs. I’m getting 12-15 eggs per day from my 18 layers, some of which are older ladies.



I mix grain from a local grain mill, mostly wheat and oats that are fermented for 5 days in a big bucket by the wood stove in the kitchen. The chickens LOVE the fermented grain, the ducks to too, so do the guineas, and the pigs. Everyone gets fermented grains.



This feed is local and organic, I also love that it’s soy, corn and GMO free. The best part is that it’s 85% cheaper than the organic layer feed I used to purchase. It even costs me less than conventional chicken feed would, about 50% less than that, you can’t beat that. Healthy chicken and more money in my wallet! If you have chickens and want to know all about it, I’ll be recording a podcast about this as well and writing a post about it soon.

Have you ever heard of fermenting chicken feed?