Feeding chickens cheaply in the UK

The honest feed maths

A typical adult hen eats around 110–130g of layers pellets a day, that's 3.3–3.9kg a month. At 2026 UK prices (£15–£22 for a 20kg bag of decent layers pellets), you're looking at £2.50–£4.30 per hen a month in feed alone. Add bedding, grit, oyster shell and the odd supplement, and a realistic monthly figure is £4–£6 per hen.

Three hens at £5 each comes to £15 a month, against roughly 16 eggs a week once they're properly laying. Work it through and the eggs come out cheaper than supermarket free-range over a year. But not dramatically so. The real value of a back-garden flock was never the cost-per-egg maths. It's the welfare, the freshness, the kitchen pleasure, and what it teaches the kids.

That said, there's genuinely £1–£2 per hen a month to be saved with sensible supplementing.

Where to buy

Skip garden centres for your staple feed. The markup runs 30–60% above a feed merchant. Better options:

• Local agricultural feed merchant. Cheapest per kg, freshest stock, often delivers locally. Search "feed merchant" plus your town; CountryStore, Mole Valley Farmers and Carrs Billington (in the north) are all reliable names.
• CountryWide / Farm & Country Supplies. Chains with dependable stock and decent prices.
• Online specialists (Smallholder Range, Allen & Page, Marriages) . Competitively priced, useful if there's no merchant nearby.
• Garden centres. Fine for convenience, but expect a 30–60% markup.
• Pet shops. Usually worse value than a garden centre.

Always check the bag date. Layers pellets older than 3 months from manufacture lose vitamin content, and a "bargain end-of-line" bag is often close to that date.

Kitchen scraps. The rule that's strictly enforced

UK law (rules of EU origin, retained in UK law) bans feeding poultry any food that's passed through a kitchen where meat is cooked or stored. And that includes an all-vegetarian household if meat-eating guests ever visit. The rule exists to stop disease spreading, and APHA takes it seriously.

In practice, for a typical UK back garden:

• Allowed: produce straight from the vegetable garden, prunings, windfall apples and pears, anything prepared on a chicken-only chopping board kept outside the kitchen, or picked straight from the growing area.
• Not allowed: anything from the main kitchen if meat ever enters it. Even bread crusts, salad leftovers, vegetable peelings.

Annoying, but unambiguous. If you want to feed scraps, set up a small outdoor chopping area, or grow crops specifically for the hens, chard, lettuce, courgettes. Straight in the garden.

Cheap supplements that work

• Garden greens. Chard, kale, bolted lettuce, nasturtium leaves, comfrey, dandelion. Throw them in whole; the hens shred them themselves.
• Sprouted grains. Wheat sprouted in a jar over 3 days boosts enzyme activity. A handful per hen daily, on top of (not instead of) layers pellets.
• Fermented feed. Soak a day's pellets in water for 24–36 hours. Fermentation multiplies the B-vitamins and cuts feed intake by 10–20%. Worth the extra kitchen rhythm if you're watching costs closely.
• Garden bugs. Turn over the compost heap or a log near the run and let the hens do the rest. Free protein, free entertainment.

Treadle feeders. The rat fix

A standard hopper feeder feeds everyone: rats, sparrows, jackdaws, crows. Wild-bird theft alone can eat up 20–30% of your feed cost in a typical UK back garden. And it raises avian flu risk too.

A treadle feeder (roughly £40–£70) stays shut unless a hen's standing on the treadle. It takes them 2–3 days to learn, and it pays for itself within 6–12 months by cutting out rat and wild-bird theft, DEFRA actually recommends them during housing orders, as they meaningfully cut avian flu exposure.

A treadle feeder is the rare bit of chicken kit that saves you money year after year without costing the birds anything on welfare.

False economies that cost eggs

• Swapping pellets for wheat or mixed corn. Drops protein below the 16% hens need to lay, and production crashes with thin shells close behind.
• Feeding bread as a staple. Empty calories, bloating, weight gain. A crust now and then is fine; bread every day isn't.
• Skipping oyster shell. Saves pennies now, costs you broken eggs and internal laying problems within months.
• Watering feed down. Pellets that go mushy ferment fast and draw flies. Not a saving.

The honest cheap-feeding strategy is good staples bought in bulk, sensible supplementing from the garden, and keeping the rats out. Push it any harder than that and it shows up in lower laying or worse health within months.