Yes, chickens can eat alfalfa, whether it’s the growing plant, hay, or the meal and pellets sold for livestock. Think of it as a side dish next to your layer feed, never the meal. Turns out the best research I found on hens and alfalfa had them grazing it fresh. At Penn State, groups of hens spent two weeks on an alfalfa pasture with a ration of mash on the side. For most of what the team measured, their eggs came out no different from eggs laid on clover or grass. That runs against the old version of this page, which said never to feed fresh alfalfa at all. But fresh alfalfa is mostly water, so by my math a bite of it carries only about a quarter of the protein her feed should have. My call: let your hens pick at young, leafy alfalfa, or hand them a small chopped handful, and keep layer feed in front of them all day.
I rewrote this page from 10 sources, and you’ll find them all listed at the bottom. Most of the hen research is a 2010 paper by Heather Karsten and colleagues at Penn State, plus two Penn State news stories about the work. On the plant itself, I read Feedipedia’s alfalfa datasheet and Jacquie Jacob’s page on the national Cooperative Extension poultry site (she’s at the University of Kentucky). Terrell Spencer’s ATTRA guide to pastured poultry covers forage height and what happens to alfalfa as it ages. Feeding rules come from Alabama Extension and Colorado State Extension, with Gail Damerow’s chick feeding guide for Cackle Hatchery. And the sprout warning comes from the FDA. Where something is my own call, I’ll tell you.
The old page opened with a story I can’t back up. The writer bought “this huge 50 pound bale of alfalfa hay from the local feed store” and “dumped the entire bale right into their coop”. Then came the named hens. Buffy the Rhode Island Red “barely laid any eggs that week”, Betty the barred rock had “droopy wings”, and Ethel’s thin shells were fixed with alfalfa pellets. Henrietta “had watery poops for days”.
I can’t show you any of those birds existed, so they’re gone. So is the pellet brand it pushed, and its rule to use alfalfa “within 6 months”, because no source I read gives one.
The old page also said “Never feed chickens fresh, green alfalfa straight from the field”, since it “can harbor salmonella, E. coli and other hazardous bacteria”. I found no source that warns against hens eating the growing plant, and Penn State’s hens grazed it for two weeks at a stretch. It said “The drying process kills off any dangerous organisms”, which none of my sources says either. On chicks it went both ways. Alfalfa meal was “a good supplement for baby chicks under 4 weeks old”. A few sections later came “Don’t feed alfalfa to newly hatched chicks under 4 weeks old”. Its molt rule, to skip alfalfa “at least 1 week before and after chickens molt”, had no source behind it, and neither did its warning for days that “exceed 85°F”. Both are out. The warnings that do hold up have their own section below.
A word on the photos. Up top is an alfalfa flower by candiru on Flickr. On Flickr too, abbeyprivate posted the hen and rooster in clover. Both the irrigated field and the Nebraska pasture are U.S. Department of Agriculture photos, the second one by Ron Nichols. Thibault Lefort took the lanky plant gone to seed, on Flickr. Hans B. took the sprouts, on Wikimedia Commons. None of them shows a chicken eating alfalfa, because I couldn’t find a free photo of that I’d trust. Every credit links you to the photo’s own page.
The short version.
- Chickens can eat alfalfa fresh, as hay, or as meal and pellets. It’s a side dish, and layer feed stays the main meal.
- Fresh alfalfa is about 80 percent water. By my math, a bite of it has about a quarter of the protein your layer feed should have, and about an eighth of the calcium at the low end.
- Young and leafy beats tall and stemmy. In a table ATTRA reprints, alfalfa’s protein falls by more than a third from before the buds show to a mature plant.
- Colorado State says all treats together should stay at 10 percent of what your hen eats, at most. By my math that’s 10 to 15 grams a day.
- The FDA warning that names raw alfalfa is about sprouts, for people. I found no source that warns about hens eating the plant in a field.
- Cackle Hatchery’s guide says chicks get starter ration only for at least their first two weeks.
Yes, in Any Form, as a Side Dish
Alfalfa is a legume. Jacob says that lets it fix nitrogen from the air, which “results in a high-protein crop”. Outside the United States you’ll often see it called lucerne (same plant, different name). Jacob says “Most alfalfa is harvested as hay, although it can be grown as a pasture crop”, and it’s also sold dehydrated as a feed ingredient. Feedipedia lists the same uses and adds silage, meal and pellets, plus grazing it or cutting it fresh. So whether your hens get at it in a field, pick at a flake of hay, or eat it ground into a feed, it’s the same plant. In the photo it’s in bloom. That purple cluster is its flowers, with a stalk of buds behind it.
Here’s the catch for a chicken, though: fiber.
Jacob writes that its use for animals with one stomach “typically is limited by its high fiber content”. Feedipedia says dehydrated meal has “a low energy and protein content, and a very high fibre concentration” next to what poultry need. So it goes into poultry rations at low rates. Its main job there is color. Feedipedia says dehydrated alfalfa is “mostly used for pigmenting eggs and meat”, and Jacob calls it “a natural source of xanthophylls”, the pigments that turn yolks yellow. I’ve covered the dried forms on their own pages. There’s how to make alfalfa meal for chickens, and how to pick the best alfalfa for chickens walks you through reading a tag and judging hay. If what you’ve got is a bag from the rabbit aisle, my page on rabbit alfalfa pellets covers those. This page sticks mostly to the plant.
What Penn State Found When Hens Grazed It
Penn State’s work on this shows up in two places. A 2003 university story reported early results from the team. Heather Karsten and Paul Patterson, with an undergraduate helper, moved 25 chickens from grass to red and white clover and then to alfalfa, two weeks on each. They used a mobile coop on wheels that held food and water. According to that story, eggs from the alfalfa stint had 25 percent more omega-3 fats than the eggs from grass. Karsten added, as the story reports it, that in absolute amounts the gain wasn’t very big. So, a bump, but by Karsten’s own account a small one. The story doesn’t say whether this was the same trial the team published later.
Then came the paper Karsten and Patterson published in 2010. Seventy-five sister hens rotated through alfalfa, a red and white clover mix, and mixed cool-season grasses, two weeks on each. Every hen also got 70 grams of commercial mash a day. Another 50 sister hens stayed in cages on mash alone for the same six weeks. In the paper, the pasture made little difference. In the abstract, 17 of the 18 egg fatty acids they measured didn’t differ among the three pastures, and neither did vitamin A. Apart from that one fatty acid (the abstract doesn’t say which), vitamin E is the one gap it names. Eggs from the grass pasture had 23 percent more of it than eggs from clover.
Next to the caged hens, though, the pastured hens’ eggs did stand out. Karsten told the university news office that they “had twice as much vitamin E and long-chain omega-3 fats”. They also had “more than double the total omega-3 fatty acids, and less than half the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids”, in her words. Vitamin A was 38 percent more concentrated, but the total per egg didn’t differ. There was a cost, too. By the end, the pastured hens weighed 14 percent less than the caged birds, and their egg production averaged 15 percent lower. Patterson put it this way: “Pastured hens were lacking dietary protein and energy to match the intake of the commercial hens”. He added that “Supplementing the birds with additional mash, however, would likely result in reduced omega-3 fatty acid and vitamin A and E concentrations in their eggs”.
My read: in the published study, alfalfa showed no special gain over clover or grass. The bigger lesson for you is the trade-off. Per the abstract, pastured hens may weigh less and lay less “unless they are supplemented adequately to meet their dietary energy and crude protein needs”. So a green run is no reason to cut back on your feed. The old page said the opposite: if you feed alfalfa often, “reduce the amount of commercial layer feed so they don’t get too much protein”. In the photo, a hen and rooster walk through grass full of white clover, one of the two clovers in the study’s clover pasture.
Fresh Alfalfa Is Mostly Water
Here’s where the numbers come in. Feedipedia’s average for fresh alfalfa, the plant above ground, is 19.9 percent dry matter, so about 80 percent of it is water. In the dry part, protein averages 20.6 percent and calcium 19.4 grams per kilogram. By my math, that’s about 4 percent protein and 0.39 percent calcium in fresh alfalfa as your hen eats it. Alabama Extension’s table for a laying hen’s diet asks for protein “16% or more” and calcium “3% to 4%”. So fresh alfalfa has about a quarter of the protein level her feed should have, and around an eighth of the calcium at the low end.
In other words, it’s a snack, not a meal.
Hay is a different story, because the water’s gone. Feedipedia’s alfalfa hay averages 89.4 percent dry matter and 18.2 percent protein in that dry matter. By my math that’s about 16 percent protein as fed, right at Alabama’s line. Its calcium works out to about 1.5 percent by the same math (half of the low end, or less). And it’s still fiber-heavy, as Jacob warned. ATTRA’s guide says forages are poor sources of energy. It cites a figure of 129 to 246 calories for each pound of forage a chicken eats, next to about 1,632 for a pound of corn.
The calcium it does have is easy for a bird to use. ATTRA says “the calcium found in plants like alfalfa is highly bioavailable”, meaning a bird can use it about as well as limestone or oyster shell. It also says pasture can supply around 25 percent of the calcium layers need, but “it cannot serve as the long-term sole source of calcium”. So the old page’s line that alfalfa “provides lots of calcium, which chickens need for strong egg shells” oversold it. Your hens’ shells still lean on layer feed or a dish of oyster shell. ATTRA adds that good pasture with limestone or oyster shell on the side “will provide all the calcium the flock needs”.
Then there’s how much a hen eats from a pasture at all. ATTRA quotes livestock nutritionist Jeff Mattocks, who estimates “pastured poultry eat 5-20% (of their diet) from pasture”, depending on the birds and the forage. Penn State’s hens got 70 grams of mash a day on top of their grazing. Alabama says a laying hen eats 100 to 150 grams of feed a day, so by my math that ration was about half to 70 percent of a full one. My read: that shortfall fits Patterson’s explanation of the lighter hens. If your hens are laying less than you expect, my page on how many eggs a Rhode Island Red lays covers what takes eggs off the count and what keeps them coming, a full feeder among them. That’s a center pivot in the photo, watering a field of second-cutting alfalfa in Montana.
Young and Leafy Beats Tall and Stemmy
How old the plant is matters too. ATTRA reprints a 1966 National Research Council table on alfalfa as it ages, from the council’s book on dairy cattle. Crude protein runs from 21.7 percent before the buds show, to 19.9 percent at bud, 16 percent at half bloom and 15 percent at full bloom. A mature plant is down to 13.6 percent. By my math that’s a drop of more than a third. ATTRA puts it bluntly: “alfalfa’s nutritive qualities plummet after the blooming stage”. It gives two reasons. A plant near maturity pulls energy and nutrients out of its leaves and into its seeds. And its lignin, the woodiness, climbs as it gets close to seed, “especially in the stems”. In ATTRA’s words, “Plant stems become lignified faster than leaves, and rapidly become indigestible and unattractive to poultry”.
Height matters to the birds, too. ATTRA says “Poultry like their forages relatively short”, and it cites Virginia producer Joel Salatin, who wants them under four inches and ideally around two. Karsten made a related point about grass in that 2003 story. In her telling, the leafier the plant, the easier it is to digest, and grass that’s too mature and stemmy loses its value. In the 2010 study, Penn State mowed the pastures now and then to keep them at a similar stage.
Some alfalfa also just tastes worse. ATTRA says varieties “high in bitter tannins or saponins are less palatable” than ones with little of those. Feedipedia adds that saponins have “well-known depressing effects on poultry performance”, notably on how much hens eat and how many eggs they lay. It also notes “there are alfalfa varieties without saponins”. My call: if you’re planting a patch for your birds, ask about that at the seed counter. That plant in the photo has gone the other way, with long thin stems, sparse leaves, one flower cluster left and seed pods curling below it.
The Old Warnings, Checked
Honestly, the salmonella worry isn’t made up, but the FDA warning that names alfalfa is about sprouts, for people. The FDA says any produce can pick up harmful bacteria from the soil or water where it grows. Sprouts get a warning of their own because they “are grown from seeds and beans under warm and humid conditions”, and those conditions “are also ideal for the growth of bacteria, including Salmonella”. It tells people who are more vulnerable to food poisoning to “avoid eating raw or lightly cooked sprouts of any kind”, alfalfa included. That’s advice for people, about sprouts. I found nothing that warns about hens eating the plant growing in a field, and nothing that says drying it kills germs. Those are store-bought alfalfa sprouts in the photo, the food that warning is about.
The one line in my sources that ties alfalfa to Salmonella in hens points the other way. Jacob writes that high levels of alfalfa have been used in molting diets for laying hens, and “It has been reported that using molting diets high in alfalfa reduces the level of Salmonella excreted in the feces of hens”. She explains it as fiber feeding gut bacteria whose acids lower the pH in the gut. That’s a commercial molting diet, not a backyard treat, so it doesn’t prove anything about a handful of greens. But it doesn’t back the old page’s worry either.
On chicks, the old page contradicted itself, so here’s what a hatchery guide says. Damerow’s guide for Cackle Hatchery says “Feed only starter ration for at least the first two weeks”. After that, treats are fine in moderation, but not “more than 10% of the chicks’ diet by volume”, and her list of greens includes “Grass, clover, kale, etc.” She wants everything “chopped small enough to prevent choking”, too. And she says chicks that start eating anything fibrous need grit, which lodges in the gizzard and grinds fibrous foods. Alfalfa isn’t named in her guide, so my call is to treat it like those other greens. Wait until two weeks, chop it fine and keep it small. For another first treat, you can see my page on whether baby chickens can eat mealworms.
The old page was right that too much alfalfa is a bad idea, but most of its reasons had nothing behind them in what I read. That includes alfalfa that “expands in the stomach”, molting “due to protein imbalance altering hormones”, and both the molt timing and the heat rules.
One part of the molt worry does hold up, though. Jacob says “Research has shown that feeding alfalfa is equally effective as withdrawing feed” for putting a flock through a molt, and a molting hen stops laying. So a hen living on alfalfa instead of feed could quit on you. My read: the real limits on alfalfa are its fiber and saponins, plus that molt risk if it ever becomes the meal. My call: the treat budget in the next section should keep you well clear of all of it.
How I’d Offer It
Start with the budget.
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”. By my math, that leaves you 10 to 15 grams a day per hen for every treat combined, about a third to half an ounce. Since fresh alfalfa is about 80 percent water, 15 grams of it is only about 3 grams of dry plant. That’s a small chopped handful for a few hens, not a bale. Alabama’s warning covers every extra: “If these are given in excess, the birds will fill up on these incomplete feeds and not consume enough of the complete feed to sustain egg production or growth”.
My call on the plant, if you grow it or have a field nearby: snip the young, leafy tops before the flowers open, and chop them short so a hen can swallow the pieces. Skip anything moldy. Colorado State’s line on scraps is “Make sure they are not salty or have citrus or are moldy”. Hand it out next to your layer feed, never in place of it. Then pick up what’s left. Colorado State says “Do not feed more than can be consumed in 5 – 10 minutes to not attract nuisance animals”.
Grit is where my sources split. Colorado State says “Ensure your birds have free access to grit”, and that free-range birds “will pick up their own grit”. Alabama says the belief that chickens need grit added is “untrue if the feed being provided is already ground”, and “Backyard chicken flocks do not” need it. My call: if your hens live in a small run and eat a lot of greens, set out a dish of grit. Colorado State says a limited run needs “another grit source”, and Cackle ties grit to fibrous food for chicks.
If your birds roam a pasture with alfalfa in it, that’s fine too. Keep it short and leafy, the way ATTRA says poultry like it, and keep feed in the coop. In that photo, a Nebraska pasture’s alfalfa is already in bloom, with a couple of spent clusters going brown, so it’s past the stage I’d cut for hens. For more fresh greens, see whether chickens can eat fresh yarrow and barley grass for chickens. For foods to keep away from your hens, see my list of what not to feed chickens. And for a quick answer on another food, try our Can Chickens Eat It? food checker.
Sources
- H.D. Karsten and colleagues, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 25 (1) (2010): Vitamins A, E and fatty acid composition of the eggs of caged hens and pastured hens.
- Penn State News (2010): Research shows eggs from pastured chickens may be more nutritious.
- Joanna Lot, Penn State Research (2003): Pasture-ized Poultry.
- Terrell Spencer, NCAT ATTRA, IP453 (2013): Pastured Poultry Nutrition and Forages.
- Heuzé and colleagues, Feedipedia (2016): Alfalfa (Medicago sativa).
- Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky, poultry.extension.org: Alfalfa in Poultry Diets.
- Pacheco and colleagues, Alabama Cooperative Extension, ANR-2913 (2022): Feeding the Laying Hen.
- Howard Enos, Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way, Disease Control and Feeding.
- Gail Damerow, Cackle Hatchery: What to Feed Baby Chicks.
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration: Selecting and Serving Produce Safely.
Sources checked November 1, 2026. Reading the 2010 study as showing no special gain from alfalfa over clover or grass is my read. So is the view that the real limits are fiber and saponins, plus the molt risk, and that the mash shortfall fits Patterson’s explanation. The calls on letting hens pick at young alfalfa, cutting leafy tops before bloom, chopping them short and asking for a low-saponin variety are mine. So are treating alfalfa like other greens for chicks past two weeks, grit for hens in a small run on greens, skipping anything moldy and picking up leftovers. The figures for protein and calcium as fed are my math from Feedipedia’s and Alabama’s numbers, and so are the grams, the ounces and the share of a full ration. We aren’t vets. If a bird looks sick, call a vet who sees poultry.
Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe
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