Can Chickens Eat Beetroot Leaves and Stalks? Yes, Fed Fresh

Yes, chickens can eat beet leaves and stalks, raw or cooked, as a treat. Feed them fresh and keep it to a small handful. Just don’t count on them for eggshell calcium. Beet greens are the same species as chard, they’re loaded with oxalate, and most of their calcium stays locked up.

This page used to say beet stalks have more calcium than kale or spinach, and that hens lay more when they get beet pulp on the side. Neither holds up. USDA’s FoodData Central puts raw beet greens at 117 milligrams of calcium per 100 grams and raw kale at 254. The laying studies I found mixed beet root powder or sugar beet pulp into the feed, plus one small trial with dried beet leaves. So I rewrote the whole page around what the sources actually say.

I worked from 22 sources, all listed at the bottom. The plant facts come from Massey University’s poisonous plants database and three extension beet guides. The oxalate facts come from a review of oxalate in food, a review of oxalate poisoning in animals, a cooking study and an oxalate list kept for kidney patients. The nitrate facts come from the Merck Veterinary Manual and North Dakota State. The egg facts come from three hen trials, and the feeding rules from five extension and vet sources. Where something is my own math or my own call, I’ll say so.

The short version.

• Beet leaves and stalks are fine for hens as a plain treat, raw or cooked.
• Feed them the day you pick them. Toss tops that sat in a warm pile or went slimy.
• They’re the same species as chard and close kin to spinach, so treat them as a high-oxalate green.
• Don’t count them as calcium. Shell calcium comes from layer feed and oyster shell.
• A hen’s whole treat share is 10 to 15 grams a day. That’s a third to half of one beet leaf.
• Thinnings from your own beet row make a good treat. Keep the flock out of the bed, though.

Beet Greens Are Chard by Another Name

At the store, beets and chard look like two different crops. Botanically they’re one. Massey University’s poisonous plants database in New Zealand says “Beetroot and silverbeet are different varieties of the same species”. Silver beet is another name for chard. Wikipedia’s entry on chard lists it and says the common names overlap “because it is the same species as beetroot”. Illinois Extension calls the garden beet “closely related to Swiss chard”.

Massey’s description of the plant notes that the thick, colored root shows up in most varieties except silverbeet. So chard is basically the beet plant without the bulb, grown for its leaves and wide stalks instead. The leaves on top of your beets are close to chard leaves on a smaller plant.

Spinach is family too. S. C. Noonan and G. P. Savage of Lincoln University in New Zealand wrote a 1999 review of oxalate in food. It puts “Beta (beet, beetroot) and Spinacia (spinach)” in the same plant family, the goosefoot family. Illinois Extension even says young beet thinnings can be cooked as greens “similar to spinach”. That kinship is also why beet greens share spinach’s big drawback, which I’ll get to next.

Iowa State’s beet guide says “All parts of the beet plant are edible”. For your hens, that settles the yes. What’s left is how much, and in what shape.

The family tie matters for one practical reason. The oxalate list I use below has rows for chard and none for beet greens. Since they’re one species, I use chard’s numbers as a stand-in for beet leaves, and I’ll flag it each time.

Don’t Count Them as Calcium

On paper, beet greens look like a decent calcium source. FoodData Central lists 117 milligrams per 100 grams of raw beet greens. That beats raw spinach at 99 and raw chard at 51. It’s the kind of number the old version of this page leaned on.

The catch is oxalate. Noonan and Savage sort foods by their oxalate-to-calcium ratio, and beet leaves land in the top group, with a ratio above 2. Foods in that group bring “excess oxalate which can bind calcium in other foods eaten at the same time”. Their verdict on beet, along with spinach and rhubarb, is blunt. These foods “are not good sources of calcium despite their apparently high levels”.

Kale goes the other way. The Oxalosis and Hyperoxaluria Foundation keeps an oxalate list for people with kidney trouble. It puts raw kale at 10 milligrams of oxalate per 100 grams. Raw chard comes in at 657 for green chard and 1,167 for red. FoodData Central gives raw kale 254 milligrams of calcium per 100 grams, about twice what beet greens have. If calcium is your reason for handing out greens, I went through kale in the kale and spinach post.

Even a green with usable calcium is a drop in the bucket next to layer feed. Alabama Extension puts layer feed at “3% to 4%” calcium. That’s 3,000 to 4,000 milligrams per 100 grams of feed, so the feed carries 26 to 34 times what raw beet greens carry, before oxalate gets any say (my math). Protein goes the same way. Beet greens have 2.2 grams per 100 grams, and Alabama wants layer feed at “16% or more”. That gives the feed over seven times as much.

Shell calcium comes from the feed bag, plus a dish on the side. Colorado State Extension says to make sure your birds can get to “a calcium source like oyster shell or eggshells”. That’s the job beet greens can’t do.

How Much Oxalate a Hen Can Handle

Oxalate is the reason to keep beet greens small, so it’s worth putting a number on it.

Cows and sheep cope with it better than chickens do. M. M. Rahman and two colleagues at the University of Malaya reviewed oxalate poisoning in farm animals in 2013. They write that “Non-ruminants appear to be more sensitive to oxalate than ruminants”, because rumen bacteria break oxalate down. A chicken has no rumen.

The same review proposes rough safe levels. For ruminants it suggests under 2 percent soluble oxalate in the diet. For everything else, it says “<0.5% soluble oxalate may be acceptable”. The authors add that these levels “should be regarded as preliminary”. So I treat 0.5 percent as a line to stay well under, not a proven limit for hens.

Now the hen’s side of it (my math, with chard standing in for beet leaves). A 10 to 15 gram handful of raw leaves at 657 to 1,167 milligrams per 100 grams holds about 66 to 175 milligrams of oxalate. A hen eats 100 to 150 grams of feed a day, per Alabama Extension. That handful comes to roughly 0.04 to 0.18 percent of her daily feed. The chard figures are total oxalate, and only part of that is soluble, so the real share sits lower still.

To reach 0.5 percent, she’d need something like 40 to 115 grams of raw leaves in a day. That’s around 40 percent of her feed weight or more, all in one green. A handful tossed in the run won’t get anywhere near it. A bucket of beet tops dumped in a small coop day after day could.

Massey’s page adds one more caution. It says “Oxalate levels may be high in the leaves of mangel fodder and sugar beets”. Those are the field types, not the beets in your garden row. Still, it’s one more reason I wouldn’t let beet tops become a daily filler.

The Stalks: Less Oxalate, More Nitrate

The stalks are the part people wonder about, since they’re red and crunchy and a lot of cooks toss them. Hens can have them. I’d chop them into short pieces so nobody tries to gulp down a long one.

For oxalate, the stalks are the better half. Noonan and Savage write that the stems or stalks of plants, beet among them, “contain significantly lower levels of oxalates than do the leaves”.

Nitrate runs the other way. North Dakota State Extension’s guide to nitrate poisoning in livestock lists sugar beets among the plants that can pile up nitrate. It says “Plant parts closest to the ground (stalks) contain the highest concentrations of nitrates”, and “Leaves contain less than stalks or stems”. The Merck Veterinary Manual says the same of forage, with nitrate “found chiefly in the lower stalk”.

Most nitrate trouble in animals is a cow and sheep problem. Massey says “Sugar and fodder beet leaves have been known to cause nitrite poisoning in sheep and cattle” in New Zealand. It adds that “Dry periods followed by rain increase the likelihood of toxicity”. In those animals, rumen microbes turn nitrate into nitrite, the form that does the harm. Merck says “adult monogastric animals (except equids) are more resistant to nitrate toxicosis”, and a chicken is a monogastric animal. Merck doesn’t name chickens in that line, so I won’t stretch it further than that.

So the stalks are fine. The nitrate in them becomes a real worry once it turns into nitrite outside the bird, and that comes down to how you store the tops.

Feed Them Fresh, Not From a Pile That Sat

Merck says nitrate in plants “can be converted to nitrite” after harvest, when it’s warm and damp and microbes get to work. A heap of beet tops sweating in a bucket in the sun is pretty much that setup.

Nitrite that’s already formed doesn’t wait. Massey’s beet page says “When nitrite is ingested preformed, the effects are rapid”.

Hens aren’t immune to it, either. A 1989 Dutch case report by T. J. van der Rijt describes nitrite poisoning in a flock of layer parent stock. That nitrite came from ammonia in the hanging drinkers during hot, still weather, not from greens. It still shows what nitrite does to hens. Feed intake fell from 125 grams a bird to about 15, and laying dropped from 78 percent to 0.5 percent. Some hens died. The rest recovered completely.

Rot brings its own trouble. Jacquie Jacob of Poultry Extension warns “Make sure that the scraps are not allowed to rot, or botulism might result”. Colorado State says treats shouldn’t be salty or moldy, and no citrus.

My rule for beet tops is simple. Pick them and feed them the same day. A crisp leaf from the fridge is fine. A slimy one, a smelly one or anything that sat in a warm heap goes in the compost.

Colorado State also says not to put out more than the flock will finish in 5 to 10 minutes. That keeps leftovers from wilting in the run all afternoon.

What the Hen Studies Actually Fed

The old version of this page said hens lay more with beet pulp on the side. There is real research on beets and laying hens, and it’s more interesting than that line. None of it is a backyard handful of fresh tops, though.

The closest is a 2026 trial from Madda Walabu University in Ethiopia, by T. Amene and three colleagues. It split 144 Bovans Brown hens, 24 weeks old, into four groups. One got plain commercial feed, and the others got feed plus cabbage, spinach or beetroot leaves. The beetroot-leaf hens had the highest hen-day egg production of the four, at 74.1 percent. Egg weight, shell thickness and the Haugh unit (a measure of egg white quality) were “not significantly affected”.

I wouldn’t build a feeding plan on it, though. The leaves were air-dried under a shed and chopped before the hens got them, so they weren’t fresh greens. The paper gives the amount in ways that don’t match. Its summary says 300 grams of leaf added to the ration, and its methods say 8 grams a hen a day on a dry matter basis. It also credits 71.6 percent laying to the plain-feed group in one sentence and to the cabbage group in another. One small trial with a fuzzy dose is a reason to think beet leaves don’t hurt laying. It isn’t a serving size.

The other two trials used the root and the pulp. A 2025 study from Sylhet Agricultural University in Bangladesh, led by M. Ahmed, mixed beet root powder into the feed of 108 ISA Brown hens at 0.5 or 1 percent. At 1 percent, eggs got heavier and egg mass went up, “without altering hen-day egg production”. A 2020 study from the University of Menoufia in Egypt, by S. Selim and E. Hussein, put sugar beet pulp into the diet of 200 hens at 3, 5 or 7 percent. Egg production went up, along with egg weight.

Both of those are beet mixed into a measured ration, the way a feed mill would do it. Neither tells you what a pile of greens does. Jacob’s guide makes the opposite point about loose greens: “excessive table scraps and greens can adversely affect egg production”. The feed is balanced, and every handful of greens takes a little room from it.

How Much a Hen Gets

Colorado State’s rule of thumb is “Treats should make up no more than 10% of their daily diet”. With 100 to 150 grams of feed a day, that’s 10 to 15 grams of treats a hen (my math). That’s every treat together, not 10 to 15 grams of beet greens on top of the scraps and scratch.

FoodData Central weighs one beet leaf at 32 grams and a cup of beet greens at 38 grams. So a hen’s whole treat share is a third to half of one leaf. Chopped, it’s a quarter to a little over a third of a cup. For a flock of 10, that’s three to five leaves a day, total.

UC Davis puts it nicely: “treat the scraps like a treat not like the main course”. The Merck Veterinary Manual’s backyard poultry page says “birds should receive most of their diet from a balanced, nutritionally complete ration”. On a day the hens get beet greens, I’d skip the other greens.

Raw or Cooked

Either works. Raw leaves are fine chopped, and Illinois Extension says beet tops are “cooked or served fresh as greens”.

Cooking does pull some oxalate out. Weiwen Chai and Michael Liebman at the University of Wyoming tested nine vegetables in 2005. Boiling “markedly reduced soluble oxalate content by 30-87%”, while steaming cut 5 to 53 percent. The oxalate didn’t vanish. They found “approximately 100% recovery” of the lost oxalate in the cooking water.

The OHF list shows the same pattern for chard. Green chard drops from 657 milligrams per 100 grams raw to 335 boiled. Noonan and Savage note that silverbeet, like spinach, is one of the greens that “are generally eaten after being boiled”.

So if you cook them, pour off the water and give the hens the greens alone. Skip the salt, since Colorado State says treats shouldn’t be salty. Let them cool before they go out.

Thinnings From Your Own Beet Row

If you grow beets, you’ll have thinnings, and they’re about the best beet greens a flock can get. Iowa State explains why there are so many. What you sow as one beet seed is “actually a fruit that contains several seeds”, so beets come up in little clumps. Illinois Extension says to thin the seedlings to “1 to 3 inches apart”.

All three extension guides say the pulled plants are food. Iowa State says “you can use the thinned plants as greens”. Maryland Extension says “Thinnings can be used in salads”. Illinois says that if you wait until the plants are 3 inches tall, “those removed may be cooked greens, similar to spinach”. They come straight from the row to the run, which is just how I’d want beet greens to reach a hen.

What you don’t want is the flock doing the thinning. Deborah J. Benoit of the University of Vermont Extension says that once you’re ready to plant, “ban them from the garden”. She writes that “They’ll eat newly sown seeds and emerging seedlings”. And “In the blink of an eye, they’ll defoliate young plants”.

She also warns that garden chemicals “may be harmful to the chickens”. If you’ve sprayed your beets, wait at least as long as you’d wait before eating them yourself. When in doubt, those leaves go in the compost.

Purslane is another high-oxalate green, and Noonan and Savage list its family right alongside the beet’s. I went through it on the purslane page.

What I’d do

• Hand out beet leaves and stalks as a treat, raw or cooked, with the stalks chopped short.
• Feed them the day you pick them. Compost anything slimy or moldy, or anything that sat in a warm heap.
• Keep every treat together under 10 to 15 grams a hen a day. That’s a third to half of one leaf.
• Pick up what’s left after 10 minutes.
• If you cook them, pour off the water and skip the salt.
• Don’t count beet greens as calcium. Leave out layer feed and oyster shell for that.
• Give the flock your thinnings, and keep the flock out of the beet bed.

Our can chickens eat it checker rates leafy greens as a treat, and chard is on it. Beet greens aren’t listed by name, but since they’re chard’s own species, the treat rating fits. For the foods that never go in the run, see what you shouldn’t feed chickens.

Sources

• Massey University, Poisonous Plants: Beet.
• Wikipedia: Chard.
• Illinois Extension, Home Vegetable Gardening: Beet.
• Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, Yard and Garden: Growing Beets in the Home Garden.
• University of Maryland Extension: Growing Beets in a Home Garden (2023).
• S. C. Noonan and G. P. Savage: Oxalate content of foods and its effect on humans (Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition 8(1), 1999).
• Oxalosis and Hyperoxaluria Foundation: Vegetables Oxalate.
• M. M. Rahman and co-authors: A review of oxalate poisoning in domestic animals: tolerance and performance aspects (Journal of Animal Physiology and Animal Nutrition 97(4), 2013).
• Weiwen Chai and Michael Liebman: Effect of different cooking methods on vegetable oxalate content (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 53(8), 2005).
• Larry J. Thompson, Merck Veterinary Manual: Nitrate and Nitrite Poisoning in Animals.
• North Dakota State University Extension: Nitrate Poisoning of Livestock (revised 2025).
• T. J. van der Rijt: Nitrite poisoning in hens of medium weight laying parent stock (Tijdschrift voor Diergeneeskunde, 1989, in Dutch).
• T. Amene and co-authors: Effects of vegetable leaf supplementation on egg yield, quality and economic profitability of Bovan Brown chicken (Poultry Science 105(6), 2026).
• M. Ahmed and co-authors: Dietary inclusion of beetroot (Beta vulgaris): Impacts on egg production, egg quality, and physiological status of commercial laying hens (Veterinary and Animal Science 31, 2025).
• S. Selim and E. Hussein: Production performance, egg quality, blood biochemical constituents, egg yolk lipid profile and lipid peroxidation of laying hens fed sugar beet pulp (Food Chemistry 310, 2020).
• Jacquie Jacob, Poultry Extension: Feeding Chickens for Egg Production in Small and Backyard Flocks.
• Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way: Disease Control and Feeding.
• Wilmer Pacheco and co-authors, Alabama Cooperative Extension: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913).
• Maurice Pitesky and Nancy Reimers, UC Davis: Feeding your Flock.
• Yuko Sato, Merck Veterinary Manual: Management of Backyard Poultry.
• Deborah J. Benoit, University of Vermont Extension: Chickens in the Garden (2024).
• USDA FoodData Central: Beet greens, raw (FDC ID 170375), Kale, raw (168421), Spinach, raw (168462) and Chard, swiss, raw (169991).

Sources checked October 27, 2026. The treat share, the leaf and cup counts, the calcium and protein comparisons and the oxalate share of the diet are my math from these sources. Using chard’s oxalate numbers for beet leaves, feeding tops the day they’re picked, chopping the stalks short, the spray wait and keeping the flock out of the beet bed are my own calls. We aren’t vets. If a hen seems off after eating a lot of any green, call a vet who sees poultry.

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