Chicken food consumption observation

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 12 October 2010 in chickens | 2 comments

(Just a note to myself really – but if anyone has had a similar experience/any advice/thoughts, I’d love to hear about them.)

Our four girls get through 20kg of layers pellets a month. For the first few months, we got the same each month (Farmgate, I believe) then last month, we got some different stuff, from a different shop (“Golden Yolk” – not sure if that was the make). This month, they’ve moved onto a third sort (Crowthers) – from the same feed shop as the second one but more like the first ones in appearance.

The Golden Yolk pellets were green in colour, like the grass nuggets for feeding to sheep and goats at hands-on educational farms. I remember someone saying at some point in my chicken learnin’ that chlorophyll makes the yolks extra yellow, so that makes sense – food packed with green bits = golden yolk. In an “exactly what is says on the tin” manner, the yolks were very rich in colour – but the chickens ate considerably more per day (20g per day extra) than they did the previous stuff — and they pooped a lot more too.

(She’s alarmed because I’m talking about her poo on the internetz.)