Your hens can eat barley grass, and they’ll likely clean it right up. The catch is that it won’t replace their feed. Long, stemmy barley can also tangle into a crop problem, so cut it young.
The short version.
- Yes, hens can eat it. Hens offered sprouted barley ate all of it and laid as well as hens that got none.
- Feed it young, and chop it short before you toss it in. Long blades can ball up in the crop, and the bristles on a ripe barley head can hurt a bird’s mouth.
- A fodder tray doesn’t make more food. Sprouting burns off part of the seed, and on one farm the eggs dropped every time fodder replaced feed.
- Toss anything moldy. Never sprout treated seed.
- Barley grain is a treat. A hen’s share for every treat combined is 10 to 15 grams a day, about one level tablespoon of dry barley.
- Chicks get starter only for their first two weeks. If a hen acts off after eating something, call a vet who sees poultry. We aren’t vets.
Yes, and Hens Will Clean It Up
Laying hens given sprouted barley on top of their regular feed, up to 45 grams a hen a day for six weeks, ate nearly all of it in week 1, leaving 0.3 to 2.4 grams on average, and finished every bit from week 3 on. Those were 120 Lohmann Brown hens, 46 weeks old when they started.
Your egg basket doesn’t suffer for it. The hens laid just as many eggs, and egg weight and body weight held steady.
Hens on the full 45 grams did tend to eat less of their regular feed, 116 grams a day against 142 for hens that got none. Counting dry matter, those two groups came out almost even at 125 and 126 grams, so the sprouts were taking the place of some of their feed.
By day 42, shells from every sprout-fed group were weaker than shells from hens on feed alone, though all of them still beat the 3.5 to 4.5 kgf that’s acceptable for table eggs. Time on the diet seemed to matter more than how much barley they got.
Sprouted barley is a treat your hens will eat, and a modest amount didn’t hurt laying. The hens on the most sprouts were trending toward less of their real feed, though, so keep an eye on that. It’s one 6-week look at one breed, too.
Keep It Short: Long Blades and Awns Are the Trouble
Barley is a leafy grass, with leaves broader than other cereals and a high share of leaf to stem. The young green stage is the barley grass you want.
The trouble starts when you let it get long. Crop impaction usually starts when fibers tangle together into a mass too big to pass. It’s more common in free-range birds and in birds with access to long grass, and hay bale twine can do it too.
Birds that went all winter without fresh greens are more likely to overdo plant matter such as grass clippings. So if you’re cutting barley for the run in spring, go easy on that first batch.
The fix is boring. Keep grazing areas cut short, mow often enough to keep plants tender, and give your birds grit. If you’re cutting barley by hand, cut it young and chop it short.
Then there are the awns, the long bristles on a barley head. Awned varieties can cause irritation and a sore mouth in poultry as well as in horses and cattle, so the awns should come off before poultry eat the grain. Some hay barleys have rough or barbed awns that can damage the mouth, and the fix is to cut well before the awns develop. So if you grow your own, cut it before it heads out.
If you think a bird has a stuck crop, check first thing in the morning before anyone eats. A normal crop is empty then and hard to find, and an impacted one feels hard like a golf ball. A healthy crop usually empties in 2 to 4 hours. A bird that’s still full and hard in the morning needs a vet who sees poultry.
A Fodder Tray Makes Less Food, Not More
Sprouting barley in trays, called hydroponic fodder, gets sold as a way to stretch your feed bill. The numbers say otherwise. Sprouting loses 7 to 47% of the seed’s dry matter over 6 to 7 days, mostly to respiration, so you’re paying for seed that burns its own stores to grow.
It costs more too. Sprouted barley fodder has run 3.4 times the cost of the original grain per kilo of dry matter, and fodder in general costs 2 to 5 times what the grain does.
Then there’s the water. Fodder can be about 85% moisture, so 10 grams of it holds about 1.5 grams of actual food. The rest is water, and you’ve already got that in the waterer.
On one Indiana farm, egg production dropped every time fodder went up and bagged feed came down. When they stopped the fodder and went back to bagged feed, laying recovered. Fodder wasn’t an adequate replacement for bagged feed in that laying flock.
The farm’s broilers didn’t even want barley fodder alone. The farm ended up adding 50% field peas to the mix and sprinkling bagged feed on top to get them to eat.
The sprouted barley that laying hens cleaned up was 51.30% dry matter, much drier than the fodder the broilers turned down, and it came on top of full feed, not in place of it. If you want to grow barley sprouts, do it that way. They’re a treat that rides on top of the feed, never a replacement for it.
Moldy Trays and Treated Seed Stay Out of the Run
If you grow fodder, mold is your big headache, more so at higher temperatures and humidity.
The sweet spot is 60 to 65°F with 60 to 75% humidity. Above that, mold moves in, so a tray in a warm summer shed or a steamy kitchen is asking for it.
Nothing moldy goes to the flock, and fodder is no exception. A tray with any mold on it goes in the trash, the whole mat.
The seed matters as much as the tray. Use clean, untreated seed of high quality, and never treated seed barley. Buying feed barley directly from a producer might be the cheapest way to get it.
Barley grain can carry a field disease too. Fusarium head blight brings a toxin called deoxynivalenol, which lowers egg production in hens. You can’t see a toxin, so buy grain sold as feed, and skip any bag that’s damp or moldy.
The Grain: About a Tablespoon a Hen
You can feed plain barley grain, in treat amounts. Hulled barley has 12.48 grams of protein per 100 grams, against 9.42 for yellow corn, so it beats corn. It’s still short of the 16% or more protein in layer feed, and of the 3% to 4% calcium. Hulled barley has 33 milligrams of calcium per 100 grams, about a hundredth of what a layer ration carries.
It’s a fiber-heavy grain, too. Corn’s carbohydrates run 11% to 14% fiber, while barley grains typically have 60% starch and 22% fiber.
Treats should be no more than 10% of a hen’s daily diet, and a laying hen eats 100 to 150 grams of feed a day. That makes her whole treat share 10 to 15 grams a day, every treat combined. So one level tablespoon a hen is the whole day’s treats, barley or anything else.
Two tablespoons comes to 23 to 25 grams, about double.
There’s a reason to hold that line. Treats are ice cream, and with too much of it, egg production is likely to suffer. Scratch shouldn’t be overfed, and birds should get most of their diet from a complete ration. So don’t mix barley right into the layer feed.
Barley is held to 20% of poultry diets when a whole feed is being formulated, with every other nutrient balanced around it. Older birds can handle diets with 20-30% barley without hurting growth, but the litter suffers above 20%. In your run, all treats together stay at 10%, so that 20% never comes into it.
Don’t put out more than they’ll eat in 5 to 10 minutes, so you don’t draw nuisance animals. Grain left in the run overnight is a dinner bell for rats and the odd raccoon. Our pages on horse oats and buckwheat run the same treat math, if you’ve got those in the feed room too.
Sticky Droppings, and Why Chicks Wait
Barley has a quirk corn doesn’t. Its beta-glucans bind with water in the intestine and form gels, so the gut contents get thick and gluey. That can cause sticky droppings and more cases of pasty butt.
You’ll see it in the bedding first, as sticky droppings and wet litter. In laying hens, those droppings can stick to the mesh and mark the eggs as they roll away, and hens on barley-based diets lay more dirty eggs. That’s at feed-mix levels, though. A tablespoon a day is a long way from a barley-based diet.
Young birds have it worse. High barley rates have long been known to hurt their growth, and unsupplemented barley shouldn’t go into starter diets at all.
So chicks wait. They get only starter ration for at least the first two weeks. After that, treats should stay under 10% of their diet by volume, with everything chopped small enough to prevent choking. Given what barley does to a young gut, leave it out of your brooder entirely and save it for grown birds.
Pearl Barley, Cooked or Dry
Pearl barley from your grocery store is fine for hens. It’s dehulled barley that has been steam-processed to remove the bran. Raw pearled barley has 9.91 grams of protein per 100 grams and 15.6 grams of fiber, against 12.48 and 17.3 for hulled. So pearling costs a bit of both.
Dry pearl barley follows the same rule as any grain: about one level tablespoon a hen, and that’s the day’s treats.
If you cook it, you’re mostly serving water. Cooked pearled barley is 68.8 grams of water per 100 grams, and a cup of it weighs 157 grams.
Serve it plain. Scraps shouldn’t be salty or fatty, and a treat stays a treat, not the main course. The barley out of your beef soup stays on your side of the fence.
A handful or two mixed into a warm winter mash is far more than one hen’s tablespoon, and free choice in the run is how a treat turns into the main course.
Malted Barley and Brewer’s Grain
Malting is sprouting with a stop button. A steep of about 2 days takes the grain from 8-12% moisture up to 42-48%, which starts it growing. Germination runs about 3 to 5 days at high humidity. Then a kiln of about 24 hours dries it down to about 4% moisture.
Plain malted grain is pretty much still barley, so if you’ve got some, it fits in the same tablespoon.
Brewer’s grain is the leftover after brewing, and it’s a real poultry feed. Spent grains carry about twice the protein of the original grain, and twice the fiber, and the dried kind can go into poultry diets at 10% to 20%. It’s usually fed dried, and older broilers and laying hens tolerate it better. At 10% of the diet it didn’t depress egg production in laying hens, but levels over 30% hurt performance.
If a homebrewing neighbor offers you a bucket of wet grain, use it fast. Wet brewers grains are 75 to 80% water and spoil quickly, in 2 to 5 days in warm weather and 5 to 7 in cold, and only grain that hasn’t spoiled should go out. At that much water, 10 to 15 grams of wet grain holds just 2 to 4 grams of dry matter, so it fills a hen up without feeding her much. That 10% is a share of the whole diet, not a top-up on full feed, so in your run it still counts inside the treat share.
Sources
- Victoria Sandilands and colleagues, SRUC, Poultry Science: the effects of providing a sprouted barley supplement to laying hens on egg production parameters and feather cover (2025 research note, open access).
- Lisa Burke, Farming Engineers LLC, SARE: Hydroponic Fodder in an Organic Pastured Poultry System (FNC13-902, read with its final report).
- Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky, eXtension: Barley in Poultry Diets.
- Feedipedia: Barley grain.
- Feedipedia: Barley forage.
- M.P.S. Bakshi and colleagues, Feedipedia: Hydroponic fodder production, a critical assessment.
- Feedipedia: Brewers grains.
- Susan Kerr and colleagues, Oregon State University Small Farms: Fodder for Forage.
- Penn State University, The Poultry Site: Crop disorders of chickens I, crop impaction (2024).
- Jon Moyle and colleagues, University of Maryland Extension: Common Crop Issues in Backyard Chickens (EBR-60).
- Cackle Hatchery: Crop Impaction in Chickens.
- Montana State University Barley Breeding Program: micro-malters.
- USDA FoodData Central: hulled barley (SR Legacy 170283), raw pearled barley (170284), cooked pearled barley (170285) and yellow corn grain (170288), with their cup weights.
- Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way.
- Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen.
- Maurice Pitesky and Nancy Reimers, UC Davis: Feeding your Flock (PDF).
- Yuko Sato, Merck Veterinary Manual: Management of Backyard Poultry.
- Cackle Hatchery: What to Feed Baby Chicks.
- Chicken Rise: Can Chickens Eat It? checker, our own tool, checked for barley, barley grass and pearl barley.
Sources checked October 29, 2026. If a hen acts off after eating something, call a vet who sees poultry. We aren’t vets.
Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe
