Can Chickens Eat Acorn Squash Seeds? Yes, Raw and Unsalted

Yes, chickens can eat acorn squash seeds. Raw and whole is fine, right out of the squash. You don’t need to roast them or chop them first. What you do need to watch is how many you hand out, and whether the squash tasted bitter. By my math, a hen’s whole treat allowance is about 30 to 45 seeds a day. That’s every treat she gets, not just the seeds. And no, they won’t clear worms out of your flock. A Swiss trial fed hens with real worm infections pumpkin seeds every day for a month and found no effect on the worms.

I rewrote this page from 14 sources, and you’ll find every one listed at the bottom. USDA’s FoodData Central gave me the seed numbers. UC Davis and Illinois Extension sort out which squash is which. Two hen trials, one from Switzerland and one from Romania, tested pumpkin seeds on laying hens. Kentucky’s Jacquie Jacob explains how a hen grinds food with no teeth. Colorado State and Alabama set the treat limits. The Merck Veterinary Manual covers salt and mold, plus how vets check for worms. The bitter squash warning comes from the National Capital Poison Center. Where the advice is my own reasoning, I’ll say so.

The short version.

• Raw and whole is fine. No roasting, no chopping.
• Never salted. A salted roasted seed carries about 140 times the sodium of a plain one.
• About 30 to 45 seeds a hen a day, and that’s all of her treats together.
• If the squash tasted bitter, nobody eats any part of it. Hens included.
• Moldy seeds or a squash that’s gone soft and rotten stay out of the run.
• They won’t deworm your flock. A fecal test through your vet tells you if there are worms.
• Other squash seeds and pumpkin seeds follow the same rules.

An Acorn Squash Seed Is a Pumpkin Seed, Near Enough

Acorn squash and the classic orange pumpkin are the same species. UC Davis’s vegetable center lists acorn squash as Cucurbita pepo. Its winter squash sheet says winter and summer squash “are relatives of pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo var. pepo)”. Same species, different variety.

USDA doesn’t even split them up. Its seed entries are filed as “pumpkin and squash seeds”, one set of numbers for both. And the Swiss trial I’ll get to below used Cucurbita pepo seeds, the acorn squash’s own species. So what the research says about pumpkin seeds for hens is about the seed you just scooped out of your squash.

That’s handy, because none of the hen studies I found names acorn squash.

What’s Inside the Seed

Here’s USDA’s breakdown per 100 grams. Its only whole-seed entry is roasted with no salt, so that’s the one I used. Whole seeds have 18.55 grams of protein and 19.4 grams of fat. They’ve got 18.4 grams of fiber too. Shelled kernels have 30.23 grams of protein and just 6 grams of fiber. Their fat jumps to 49.05 grams. So most of the fiber sits in the shell, and the kernel inside is about half fat.

That fat is one reason I keep seeds small. Merck’s backyard poultry page says “Fat scraps should also be avoided, because they promote the development of fatty liver”. A seed isn’t a fat scrap. But at half fat inside, it isn’t diet food either.

The old version of this page called the seeds an excellent source of vitamin A. USDA doesn’t agree. Whole seeds have 3 micrograms of vitamin A per 100 grams, and kernels have 1. Even the squash’s own flesh only has 18.

It also said the calcium would help your hens’ eggshells. That one runs backwards. Alabama Extension says the shell is “around 96 percent calcium carbonate,” and a laying hen’s diet should carry 4 to 7 parts calcium for every part phosphorus. USDA’s numbers put more phosphorus than calcium in the seed, whole or shelled. In the kernel, by my math, it’s about 27 times as much. So the calcium for her shells has to come from her layer feed. Alabama names oyster shell as another source.

Raw and Whole Is Fine. Salted Isn’t.

A hen doesn’t need you to crack or roast anything. Jacob, writing for the extension’s poultry team, says birds “do not have teeth.” The gizzard does that work instead, with “two sets of strong muscles that act as the bird’s teeth.” UC Davis’s flock guide adds that since “birds don’t have teeth,” grit “helps mechanically break down food.” A whole seed in its shell is exactly the kind of thing a gizzard is built for.

Grit is the one thing to check. Jacob says “Chickens fed only commercially prepared feed do not need grit.” But chickens that eat whole grains, or birds on pasture that don’t pick up enough pebbles, “typically require a supplementation of grit.” My read is that whole seeds put your flock in the same boat as whole grains. So if they’re getting seeds and scraps, keep a dish of grit out.

The old page told you to roast the seeds at 250°F for 20 to 30 minutes. None of the guides I read asks for that, and USDA’s kernel numbers barely move when they’re roasted. Fat stays at 49.05 grams either way.

Salt is where roasting goes wrong. The seeds people make for themselves usually get salted, and USDA’s numbers show what that does. Plain roasted whole seeds have 18 milligrams of sodium per 100 grams. Salted ones have 2,541. By my math that’s about 6.5 percent salt. The Merck Veterinary Manual says adding “0.5% salt (NaCl) to the ration of chickens and turkeys is recommended,” and that “amounts > 2% are usually considered dangerous.” A salted seed sits at more than 3 times that danger line all by itself. Colorado State’s treat rule says the same thing in plain words: “Make sure they are not salty.”

So if you roasted a batch for yourself with salt, those are yours. Give the hens the raw ones you scooped out first.

How Many Seeds a Hen Gets

Seeds are a treat, so they live inside the treat limit. Colorado State says “Treats should make up no more than 10% of their daily diet.” Alabama says “A laying hen will consume between 100 and 150 grams of feed per day”. That leaves 10 to 15 grams of treats a hen a day, counting every extra you give her.

USDA says 85 seeds weigh an ounce, 28.35 grams. That makes one seed about a third of a gram. By my math, a hen’s share comes to 30 to 45 seeds. USDA counted roasted seeds, though. Fresh ones straight from the squash are wet, so I’d guess each weighs a little more. I’d call it about 30 and not lose sleep over it. For six hens, that’s around 180 seeds. If they had kitchen scraps or scratch that day too, cut the seeds back.

I know, it sounds stingy. Here’s why it matters anyway.

Alabama compares treats to ice cream. Offer kids ice cream at every meal and they’ll eat it with gusto. Birds do the same, and Alabama says they “will fill up on these incomplete feeds and not consume enough of the complete feed to sustain egg production or growth.” UC Davis says it shorter: “treat the scraps like a treat not like the main course.”

The research hens got far more seed than that, and in a ration balanced by scientists. A Romanian team fed 80 laying hens a diet that was 9 percent pumpkin seed meal for 6 weeks. Those hens ate less feed, 106.76 grams a day against 118.75 in the first three weeks. The paper found “no significant effect on other performance parameters.” Laying held up. Their eggs picked up more polyunsaturated fats, and yolk cholesterol dropped 11.31 percent. That’s a seed meal mixed into a ration, not a handful tossed in the run, so I wouldn’t promise you different eggs from 30 seeds.

Colorado State has one more rule I like: “Do not feed more than can be consumed in 5 – 10 minutes to not attract nuisance animals.” Scatter the seeds where your hens will find all of them. A seed lost in the bedding is a snack for whatever visits the coop at night.

Will Squash Seeds Get Rid of Worms?

Pumpkin seeds have a name as a natural dewormer. The best test I found says they don’t earn it.

A team from FiBL and the University of Bern, both in Switzerland, published it in Veterinary Research Communications in 2023. Their hens were naturally infected with Ascaridia galli, a roundworm. Merck calls it “by far the most common” worm in commercial poultry. The pumpkin hens got 10 grams of Cucurbita pepo seeds a bird a day, mixed into their feed, for 29 days. That’s about a hen’s whole treat allowance, every day for a month. The paper’s conclusion: “The present study revealed no evidence of anthelmintic effects of pumpkin seeds”.

The worm counts didn’t move. The one thing that changed was feed. The pumpkin hens ate 123 grams of feed a day against the control hens’ 142, and used 1.9 grams of feed per gram of egg against 2.2. So the seeds didn’t hurt them. They just didn’t touch the worms.

To be fair, the paper cites earlier work that looked better. One study found pumpkin extracts worked about as well as the drug fenbendazole. Another saw a moderate effect from pumpkin seeds next to a real dewormer. But when this team fed the seeds to hens that really had worms, nothing happened to the worms.

So if you’re worried about worms, skip the guessing. Merck says “Detection of worm eggs by fecal flotation or sedimentation allows for the reliable confirmation of the presence of worms.” It also warns that eggs are “shed intermittently,” so one clean sample doesn’t prove your flock is clear. And it says treatment should go to birds with a severe infestation that show signs of disease. That’s a call for a vet who sees poultry. Take them a fresh dropping and let them pick the treatment.

If the Squash Tastes Bitter, Nobody Eats It

This is the one part of the page where I drop the jokes. Squash can make a chemical called cucurbitacin, and a lot of it makes people sick. The National Capital Poison Center says these squashes “look and smell normal but taste very bitter.” Its list of symptoms in people starts with diarrhea and nausea. Cooking won’t fix it either: “The toxin is not inactivated by heat.”

The center explains where the bitterness comes from: “Plants produce cucurbitacin as a defense mechanism against insects and animals that feed on them.” A plant under stress makes more, from heat or drought for example. Its tips also say “Do not eat wild squash that you did not plant in your garden.” I’d count the surprise vine that pops up out of the compost pile as one you didn’t plant.

And the fall decorations are out. The center says decorative squashes such as colocynths “are not edible since they contain high concentrations of cucurbitacin.”

That page is written for people, and no source I read tested bitter squash on chickens. But a defense chemical aimed at “animals that feed on them” isn’t something I’d bet a hen on. My rule: if the flesh tastes bitter when you cook it, the whole squash goes in the trash. Seeds too. Our page on bitter melon for chickens covers a different bitter plant, and its seeds are a no as well.

Moldy Seeds and Rotting Squash Stay Out of the Run

Colorado State’s treat rule ends with “or are moldy,” and it means it. Merck’s page on mold toxins in poultry says “Exposure to mycotoxins can occur via ingestion of contaminated feed or bedding material.” Once they form, it says, the toxins “are chemically stable and persist in the contaminated ingredient”. So I wouldn’t count on drying or roasting moldy seeds to make them safe.

That matters for squash seeds because they’re wet when they come out. My own advice is simple. Hand them over the day you cut the squash. A bowl of wet seeds left on the counter for a few days is a bowl I’d throw out. The same goes for a squash that’s gone soft or leaky, and for the jack-o’-lantern that sat on the porch since Halloween.

Pick up whatever the flock leaves after 5 or 10 minutes. Our page on sweet potato skins for chickens walks through the same mold rule for another kitchen scrap.

Other Squash and Pumpkin Seeds

Illinois Extension’s winter squash page names the common ones:

• Acorn
• Butternut
• Hubbard
• Spaghetti

Seeds from any of them follow the same rules here. Raw and plain is fine. Keep to the treat limit. Nothing moldy, and nothing from a squash that tasted bitter. The poison center’s own case was a bitter spaghetti squash, and its list of plants that can carry cucurbitacin covers pumpkins and zucchini as well as winter squash.

Pumpkin seeds don’t all come from one species, either. The Romanian trial used Cucurbita moschata. The Swiss one used Cucurbita pepo, the acorn squash’s species. Both fed laying hens with no harm to laying.

Melons and cucumbers are different plants. UC Davis lists them as relatives of squash, under their own Latin names. The old page told you to avoid bitter seeds from cucumbers and melons. The poison center’s bitter test does cover cucumbers, so a bitter cucumber goes the same way as a bitter squash. For melon seeds I found no rule at all. Our page on watermelon for chickens looked hard for a rule on melon seeds and found none either way.

For the feed side of the day, our Rhode Island Red feeding guide covers the layer feed that should fill the rest of a hen’s diet. Our list of what you shouldn’t feed chickens has the hard noes. If you’ve got chicks, our page on baby chicks and fruits and veggies has their rules. And for a quick answer on any other food, try our Can Chickens Eat It? food checker.

Sources

• USDA FoodData Central: whole roasted pumpkin and squash seeds without salt (SR Legacy 170188). I also read the salted entry (168601), the kernel entries (170556, 170557, 169415) and acorn squash, raw (168472).
• UC Davis Vegetable Research and Information Center: Squash, winter (Home Vegetable Gardening).
• University of Illinois Extension: Winter Squash (Eat. Move. Save.).
• Anna L. Rodenbücher and colleagues: Pumpkin seeds, lemongrass essential oil and ripleaf leaves as feed additives for Ascaridia galli infected laying hens (Veterinary Research Communications 47, 2023).
• Petru Alexandru Vlaicu and colleagues: Effect of dietary pumpkin (Cucurbita moschata) seed meal on layer performance and egg quality characteristics (Animal Bioscience 35, 2022).
• Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky: Avian Digestive System (Small and Backyard Poultry, Extension).
• Maurice Pitesky and Nancy Reimers, UC Davis: Feeding your Flock.
• Howard Enos, Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way, Disease Control and Feeding (reviewed August 2025).
• Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913).
• Yuko Sato, Merck Veterinary Manual: Management of Backyard Poultry.
• Carmen Jerry, Merck Veterinary Manual: Poisonings in Poultry.
• Rüdiger Hauck, Merck Veterinary Manual: Helminthiasis in Poultry (last updated May 2025).
• Dulmelis Sandu, Merck Veterinary Manual: Mycotoxicoses in Poultry (last updated September 2024).
• National Capital Poison Center: Toxic squash syndrome: If it’s bitter, it’s not dinner (reviewed February 2, 2026).

Sources checked October 27, 2026. The treat grams and seed counts are my math from the sources’ own numbers, and so are the salt and phosphorus figures. Grit with whole seeds is my reasoning. So is feeding them the day you cut the squash, and so is binning a bitter squash with its seeds. No source I read tested any of that with squash seeds. We aren’t vets. If a hen looks sick, call a vet who sees poultry.

Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe