Can Chickens Eat Black-Eyed Peas? Yes, if They’re Cooked and Plain

Yes, chickens can eat black-eyed peas, but cook them first and keep them plain. A black-eyed pea is a cowpea, and raw cowpeas carry lectins and trypsin inhibitors. Feedipedia, the big animal feed database, recommends processing cowpeas before they go to poultry. Three extension services I read go further and tell you to avoid raw beans outright. Then keep it small. A level tablespoon of cooked peas is about one hen’s whole treat allowance for the day.

I rewrote this page from 19 sources, and you’ll find every one listed at the bottom. Feedipedia and a University of Kentucky extension page cover cowpeas as poultry feed. A 2024 review and three feed trials show what raw and cooked cowpeas did to real birds. UC Davis, Colorado State, UF/IFAS and Alabama Extension cover treats. The Merck Veterinary Manual has the salt numbers and the warnings on fat and onions. USDA’s FoodData Central gave me the protein and sodium in each kind of pea. One thing nobody I read has measured is how many raw black-eyed peas it takes to hurt a hen. So I won’t guess at that number. And where the advice is my own reasoning, I’ll tell you.

The short version.

• Cook them. Soak dry peas, drain them, then simmer until they’re soft all the way through. No raw or half-cooked peas.
• Plain only. Scoop the flock’s share out of the pot before any salt, pork or onion goes in.
• About a tablespoon a hen a day. Treats are 10% of what she eats at most, and a tablespoon of cooked peas is about 11 grams.
• Canned is fine if it’s plain. Drain the can and rinse the peas, and skip the cans cooked with pork.
• Chicks stay on chick starter.

Black-Eyed Peas Are Cowpeas

Here’s the part that changes the advice. Black-eyed peas aren’t garden peas, and they aren’t kidney beans either. They’re cowpeas, Vigna unguiculata. Feedipedia lists black-eyed pea, crowder pea and southern pea among the plant’s names. It says the “black-eyed” part comes from the dark ring around the hilum, the little scar where the seed was attached to its pod.

Why does that matter? Because the FDA’s well-known raw bean warning is about kidney beans. Its Bad Bug Book chapter on bean lectin says phytohaemagglutinin “is found in many species of beans, but is in highest concentration in red kidney beans.” That chapter never names cowpeas. So you can’t just borrow its kidney bean numbers for black-eyed peas.

But cowpeas have their own problem. Feedipedia says they “contain antinutritional factors including lectins, trypsin inhibitors and tannins.” Jacquie Jacob’s cowpea page for the University of Kentucky explains what the inhibitors do. They “impair the activity of pancreatic enzymes such as trypsin and chymotrypsin.” Those are enzymes a bird needs to break down protein. And a 2024 review I read says taking the hulls off doesn’t remove the trypsin inhibitors or the lectins. It lists thermal treatment among the processing steps that cut them down.

Dry peas also look like a protein bargain on paper. USDA lists 23.5 grams of protein in 100 grams of raw dry black-eyed peas. That’s mostly because they’re dry, at about 12% water. Cooked, they’re 70% water, and the protein drops to 7.7 grams per 100. Keep that number handy, because it matters when we get to the serving size.

What the Feed Trials Found

Cowpeas have been tested in chicken feed for years, so there’s real data. A 2024 review by Mădălin Manole and colleagues in Archiva Zootechnica says cowpeas are still “the least researched” of the legumes in poultry feed, though. And what’s there is mixed.

On raw cowpeas, the review is fairly relaxed. It says raw cowpeas can stand in for soybean meal “at inclusion levels up to 200 g/kg,” which is 20% of the diet. It cites a 2022 trial by Ciurescu and colleagues where broilers ate up to 20% unprocessed cowpeas from day 1 to day 42 with “no negative effect” on performance. Another author it cites, Gumaa-Balaiel, recommended up to 10% untreated seed for broilers.

Feedipedia is more careful. It recommends processing cowpea seeds before poultry eat them. Its summary of the trials is that processed cowpeas work up to 15 to 20% of a broiler diet but are “deleterious at higher levels.”

Then there’s the newest trial I found. In 2025, Filomena Dos Anjos and colleagues raised 210 male Ross broiler chicks for their first 14 days. Some groups got cowpeas in place of soybean meal at 400 g/kg, so 40% of the feed. Some of those cowpeas were raw, and some were roasted at 120°C (248°F) for 45 minutes. The raw ones “induced an immune response in the duodenum,” the first stretch of the gut. That response wasn’t seen in the chicks on roasted cowpeas. By day 14, though, both cowpea groups had gained less weight than the chicks on the regular diet.

The authors are clear about the limits. Their trial covered only “the starter phase (0–14 days post-hatch)” and only male Ross broilers, which “may not reflect the responses of indigenous or dual-purpose breeds.” So it doesn’t tell you much directly about a laying hen in your run. But it’s the one study I read that looked inside the gut. It found a reaction to raw cowpeas that didn’t show up with roasted ones.

For laying hens, the best trial I found comes from Ethiopia. Kegne Yismaw and colleagues fed 135 Koekoek pullets for 23 weeks, starting at 22 weeks old, right at the start of lay. Their cowpeas were soaked for 15 minutes, sun-dried, toasted on a metal plate over a fire and dehulled. Those toasted cowpeas replaced toasted soybeans all the way up to 31.4% of the diet. The authors found no significant difference in egg production between the groups. Egg quality held up too, except for albumen height.

None of these levels is a treat amount, by the way. They’re whole diets that researchers mixed for a trial. Here’s how I read it all together. Processed cowpeas fed laying hens well for 23 weeks. Raw ones sometimes did fine in broiler feed, but they’re the ones that set off a gut reaction, and Feedipedia advises processing. Cooking a pot of peas costs you almost nothing. So cook them.

Soaking and Cooking

USDA’s fact sheet on dry black-eyed peas lays out the method. It says “Black-eyed peas should be soaked before cooking.” You can soak them overnight, for 4 to 12 hours. Or you can do the quick soak: boil the dry peas for 2 minutes, turn off the heat, cover the pot and let them sit about an hour. Either way, drain and rinse them. Then put them in a pot with new water, bring it to a boil, turn the heat down and cook about 1 hour.

Oregon State’s Food Hero recipe soaks them at least 6 hours and then simmers them “until the peas are tender, about 30 to 35 minutes.” So you’re looking at half an hour to an hour of simmering, depending on the peas. I’d go by feel, not the clock. Pinch one between your fingers. If it squashes soft all the way through, it’s done. Colorado State’s poultry page says to avoid “under cooked or dried beans,” so a pea that’s still firm in the middle isn’t ready for the flock.

What about a slow cooker? The FDA says “Slow cookers should not be used to cook these beans,” because casseroles in them “often reached internal temperatures of only 75°C or less.” That warning is about kidney beans, not cowpeas, and nobody I read tested black-eyed peas in a slow cooker. So I can’t tell you it’s a problem. But I’d still bring the flock’s peas to a real boil on the stove. The FDA says 10 minutes of boiling at 100°C destroyed the kidney bean toxin in one study, and it tells people to boil kidney beans at least 30 minutes. USDA’s hour for black-eyed peas is longer than both.

One more thing. Cook the flock’s batch without salt. You’ll see why in a minute.

One Tablespoon a Hen

Now the amount. Colorado State’s extension page says “Treats should make up no more than 10% of their daily diet.” Alabama Extension says a laying hen eats “between 100 and 150 grams of feed per day.” So by my math, her treats for the whole day come to 10 to 15 grams. That’s every treat together. It isn’t 15 grams of peas on top of the scratch grains and the kitchen scraps.

USDA weighs a cup of cooked black-eyed peas at 171 grams. Divide that by 16 tablespoons and one level tablespoon is about 11 grams. So a tablespoon of cooked peas is roughly a hen’s whole treat budget for the day. If you keep six hens, that’s six tablespoons, a little over a third of a cup.

Here’s why the limit matters with peas in particular. Alabama says layer feed should have 16% protein or more. Cooked peas have 7.7%. By my math, a tablespoon of cooked peas holds about 0.8 grams of protein, while the same weight of a 16% layer feed holds about 1.7. So if peas fill her up in place of feed, she gets less protein, not more. Alabama warns about exactly that: birds “will fill up on these incomplete feeds and not consume enough of the complete feed to sustain egg production or growth.” UC Davis puts it more simply: “treat the scraps like a treat not like the main course.”

Colorado State adds a rule I like, too: “Do not feed more than can be consumed in 5 – 10 minutes to not attract nuisance animals.” So scatter the peas where your hens can find them all, and don’t leave a pile sitting in the bedding.

Chicks are a different story. UC Davis says chick starter “should have a protein content of approximately 20%,” and every spoonful of peas waters that down even more. And the gut reaction to raw cowpeas in that 2025 trial was seen in chicks under two weeks old. So my own call is to keep peas out of the brooder and let chicks grow on starter. Our page on when baby chicks can eat fruits and veggies covers treats for young birds in general.

Hoppin’ John Leftovers

If you cook black-eyed peas for your family, the leftover pot is the one that tempts you. The peas in it are fine. What else went in the pot is the question. If yours has ham, bacon or onion in it, or it’s salted the way people like it, each of those has its own warning.

Fat comes first. The Merck Veterinary Manual’s chapter on backyard poultry says “Fat scraps should also be avoided, because they promote the development of fatty liver and acute death from liver rupture.” UC Davis says chickens “don’t require high amounts of fat, so avoid fatty foods.” Pork fat off a ham hock counts as a fat scrap in my book.

Onion’s next. UF/IFAS Extension in Holmes County, Florida, says “Large amounts of onions can damage red blood cells and may cause anemia in chickens.” It adds that “Small amounts are usually not harmful, but onions should not be a regular part of their diet.” Merck’s chapter on onion and garlic poisoning says it’s been reported in farm animals fed onions, and it lists cooked onion as well as raw. So a bit of onion in a spoonful of peas probably isn’t a crisis. But I’d still rather give peas that never met one.

Salt is the one I could put numbers on. Colorado State says to make sure treats “are not salty,” and UF lists “heavily salted leftovers” among foods to avoid. USDA lists black-eyed peas boiled without salt at 4 mg of sodium per 100 grams, and boiled with salt at 240 mg. Merck says 0.5% salt in a chicken’s ration is the recommended level, and “amounts > 2% are usually considered dangerous.” By my math, peas boiled with salt come to about 0.6% salt by weight. So a spoonful of salted peas isn’t poison. But it’s salt she doesn’t need, and I can’t tell you how much salt is in your own pot. Merck says too much salt shows up as watery droppings and wet litter, among other signs.

So here’s what I’d do. When the peas are soft and before anything else goes in, scoop out a cup for the flock. By my math that’s about 16 tablespoons, so 16 hen-days of treats. Let it cool, keep it in the fridge, and hand it out a tablespoon a hen at a time. If the whole pot’s already seasoned, it goes in the compost, not the coop.

Canned Peas

Canned black-eyed peas skip the soaking. USDA’s fact sheet for its canned peas says they “are precooked and do not require any soaking.” So the raw pea question is gone. The salt is what you check.

USDA lists plain canned black-eyed peas at 293 mg of sodium per 100 grams. By my math that’s about 0.74% salt by weight. That’s above Merck’s recommended 0.5% for a whole ration, but far under its 2% danger line. Canned peas with pork come in at 350 mg, about 0.89% salt. Home-cooked peas without salt have 4 mg, roughly 70 times less than the plain can.

Draining and rinsing helps. NDSU Extension says “Draining the liquid from the beans and rinsing them before adding them to the food reduces sodium by about 40 percent.” That’s beans in general, not black-eyed peas in particular. But by my math it would bring a plain can down to about 0.45% salt. So pour them into a colander, run cold water over them for a bit and shake them dry. I’d skip the cans with pork or seasoning.

UF’s Holmes County office goes further and lists canned foods among the salty things to avoid. If you’d rather follow that, home-cooked peas with no salt sidestep the question entirely.

Fresh Pods and Leaves

If you grow cowpeas, there’s more to the plant than dry peas. Feedipedia notes that people eat cowpea seeds fresh or dried, along with the pods and the leaves. USDA’s FoodData Central lists raw immature black-eyed peas and raw cowpea leafy tips as foods.

Nobody I read fed raw green black-eyed peas to hens, though. They’re the same seed as the dry pea, only younger, so I’d cook them the same way to be safe. That’s my reasoning, not a study.

The leaves have an actual hen trial behind them. B. K. Swain, writing in the Indian Journal of Animal Nutrition in 2018, fed 36 Vanaraja laying hens for 8 weeks. They were 25 weeks old and kept in wire-floored cages. One group ate 125 grams of layer ration a day. A second ate 75 grams of ration plus 75 grams of fresh cowpea leaves, and it laid about as many eggs as the first. A third ate 62.5 grams of ration with 125 grams of leaves, and its egg production dropped.

So a hen picking at cowpea leaves in your garden is eating something hens in a trial ate at 75 grams a day for 8 weeks with no drop in eggs. But look at that third group. When the leaves pushed out too much feed, eggs fell. It’s the same lesson as the tablespoon. Peas and greens are extras on top of a complete feed, never in place of it.

If you’re working through other legumes, our page on dried peas and lentils for chickens uses the same treat math. Frozen garden peas don’t need cooking, and our page on frozen peas for chickens explains why. Our list of what you shouldn’t feed chickens covers raw kidney beans and the other hard noes. For a quick answer on any other food, try our Can Chickens Eat It? food checker. And the Rhode Island Red feeding guide goes through the layer feed itself.

Sources

• Feedipedia: Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) seeds (INRAE, CIRAD, AFZ & FAO).
• Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky: Cowpeas in Poultry Diets (Poultry Extension).
• Mădălin Manole and colleagues: The use of cowpeas (Vigna unguiculata [L] Walp) in poultry diets, a review (Archiva Zootechnica 27(1), 2024).
• Filomena Dos Anjos and colleagues: Growth performance and gut health of broilers fed heat- and enzyme-treated Vigna unguiculata and Cajanus cajan diets (Frontiers in Physiology, 2025).
• Kegne Yismaw and colleagues: Effect of feeding processed cowpea as replacement of toasted soy bean on egg production and quality of Koekoek chicken (Livestock Research for Rural Development 33(4), 2021).
• B. K. Swain: Influence of Feeding Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) Leaves on the Performance of Vanaraja Laying Hen (Indian Journal of Animal Nutrition 35(3), 2018).
• US Food & Drug Administration: Bad Bug Book, Phytohaemagglutinin (kidney bean lectin) (second edition, 2012).
• Maurice Pitesky and Nancy Reimers, UC Davis: Feeding your Flock.
• Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way, Disease Control and Feeding.
• UF/IFAS Extension Holmes County: 10 Foods You Should Never Feed Chickens (May 25, 2026).
• Yuko Sato, Merck Veterinary Manual: Management of Backyard Poultry (reviewed November 2024).
• Carmen Jerry, Merck Veterinary Manual: Poisonings in Poultry (reviewed January 2024).
• Cristine Hayes, Merck Veterinary Manual: Garlic and Onion (Allium spp) Toxicosis in Animals (reviewed September 2024).
• Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913).
• USDA FoodData Central: Cowpeas (blackeyes), mature seeds, cooked, boiled, without salt (SR Legacy 173759; I also read the raw, salted, canned plain, canned with pork, immature seed and leafy tip entries).
• USDA Food and Nutrition Service: Black-Eyed Peas, Dry (USDA Foods fact sheet, January 2020).
• USDA Food and Nutrition Service: Black-Eyed Peas, Canned (USDA Foods fact sheet).
• Oregon State University Extension, Food Hero: Black-Eyed Peas (monthly).
• Julie Garden-Robinson, NDSU Extension: Steps to Reducing Sodium in Recipes (FN1688, reviewed August 2022).

Sources checked October 27, 2026. The treat grams, the protein and the salt percentages are my math from the sources’ own numbers. Cooking fresh green peas and boiling before any slow cooker are my reasoning, since no source I read tested either one. 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