Yes, chickens can eat dried peas and lentils, as long as you cook them first. Lentils and split peas are the easy part of your pantry. They don’t need soaking, and they go soft in 5 to 30 minutes. The dried beans on the shelf beside them are another story, and they’re the reason so many feeding lists tell you no.
I rewrote this page from 14 sources, and you’ll find every one at the bottom. I started with three extension guides to feeding a backyard flock and the University of Kentucky’s pages on legumes in poultry feed. Then I read Feedipedia (the big animal feed database) on lentils, peas and beans, along with the FDA’s chapter on the toxin in kidney beans. For the cooking times I used extension cooking guides, and for the numbers, USDA’s food data.
A word on the photos. The orange discs at the top are split red lentils. The market sacks are in Vietnam, and the hens come from a USDA visit to a farm in Oklahoma.
The short version.
- Lentils and split peas: yes, cooked soft in plain water, with no salt or onion.
- Dried beans, kidney beans above all: never raw, and never from a slow cooker. Soak them, pour off the water and boil them for at least 30 minutes.
- A bag that mixes lentils with beans: cook the whole bag the bean way.
- How much: it’s a treat. All your treats together should stay around 10 to 15 grams a hen a day, by my math from two extension guides.
- Protein: cooked lentils are about 70 percent water, so a bite of them carries less protein than a bite of layer feed.
- Green peas, fresh or frozen: fine as they are, in the same small amounts.
- Canned beans: already cooked, but salty. Drain them and keep it to a spoonful.
Peas and Lentils Are the Easy Ones
Dr. Jacquie Jacob at the University of Kentucky wrote the legume pages on the Cooperative Extension’s poultry site. Her overview says lentils have “a relatively high protein content and few digestive inhibitors”. Field peas are the dried peas grown as a crop. For those, she says spring-seeded peas “have low levels of trypsin inhibitors, so they can be included in diets without being roasted”.
Trypsin inhibitors are one of the compounds in raw legumes that get in the way of digestion. I found Feedipedia’s lentil entry a little more careful than Kentucky. It says raw lentils do carry several of them:
- protease inhibitors (trypsin inhibitors are one kind)
- lectins
- phytic acid
- saponins
- tannins
It adds that they’re there “in moderate amounts”, and that heat can ease their effects. So peas and lentils aren’t a risk the way kidney beans are. Nobody has studied them much in chickens, though. Kentucky’s own lentil page says “There is very little research available on the use of lentil seeds in poultry feeds”.
Cook them anyway.
It’s cheap insurance when the trials are this thin, and Feedipedia says heat helps with peas and lentils both. You also end up with something soft that you can hand out a little at a time.
Beans Are Why the Warning Exists
Colorado State’s flock feeding guide has a short list of foods to keep from your hens. It says to avoid “under cooked or dried beans”, and it puts onions and rhubarb in the same sentence. UC Davis lists raw beans too, right next to avocado. I couldn’t find lentils or split peas on either list.
The trouble is a lectin called phytohaemagglutinin. The FDA’s Bad Bug Book says it’s found in many kinds of beans, but it’s highest in red kidney beans. Raw kidney beans carry 20,000 to 70,000 units of it, and fully cooked ones carry 200 to 400. White kidney beans have about a third as much as red ones, and broad beans have 5 to 10 percent. In people, the FDA says, “As few as four or five raw beans can trigger symptoms”.
That’s people, not hens. For chickens, I went to Feedipedia’s page on common beans, which gathers the feeding trials. Common bean is the species behind kidney beans and navy beans, among others. Feedipedia says “Poultry species are sensitive to antinutritional factors contained in raw common beans”, though less so than pigs.
In the studies it cites, birds fed raw beans ended up with heavier intestines and lighter livers. Their livers showed dead and degenerating cells, and their kidneys were badly congested. Feedipedia’s advice is to process raw common beans before you feed them to poultry. It also notes that in poultry trials, cooking the beans in water did better than toasting them.
Here’s where your pantry can trip you up. If you buy a soup mix or a bag from the bulk bin, read what’s in it. Once there’s a kidney bean or any other bean in the bag, I’d cook the whole bag the bean way. Beans are on our list of what not to feed chickens for this same reason.
How to Cook Them
Start the same way every time. Iowa State’s lentil guide says to spread the lentils on a baking sheet and pick out any small stones or bits of dirt, along with withered ones. Then rinse them in a colander.
Use plain water. Colorado State says scraps for hens shouldn’t be salty, and onions are on its avoid list, so keep the seasoning for your own pot.
Here are the times I found in the extension cooking guides:
- Split red lentils: no soaking, and 5 to 7 minutes (Iowa State).
- Whole lentils: no soaking, 1 cup to 3 cups of water, and about 15 to 20 minutes at a simmer (Iowa State).
- Split peas: no overnight soak, 2 cups of water per cup, and about 30 minutes (NDSU). A cup of dry split peas makes about 2 cups cooked.
- Whole dried peas: soak them overnight, then cook them for 35 to 40 minutes (NDSU).
Beans get the FDA’s method, which comes from British studies. Soak them for at least 5 hours and pour the water away. Then boil them in fresh water for at least 30 minutes. In one study, 10 minutes at a full boil destroyed the toxin, but the FDA asks for 30 to make sure your whole pot gets hot enough, for long enough.
Don’t use a slow cooker for dried beans. The FDA says casseroles cooked in one often reached only 75°C (167°F) or less, and that’s not hot enough to destroy the toxin. Illinois Extension goes further. It says slowly heating raw kidney beans “may increase the toxicity of the beans”. So half-cooked beans from a slow cooker may be worse for your flock than raw ones.
Let everything cool before it goes out to the run. If you’re cooking lentils for your own supper, you can scoop out a little before the salt and onion go in. Iowa State says cooked lentils keep 4 to 5 days in the fridge, so one scoop covers a few days of treats.
How Much, and Why It Isn’t a Protein Boost
Lentils have a name as a protein food, and dry, they earn it. USDA’s FoodData Central puts raw lentils at 24.6 grams of protein per 100 grams. Kentucky’s legume page says legume seeds have twice as much protein as grains.
But you’re cooking them first, and that changes the numbers a lot. Boiled without salt, the same lentils are 69.6 percent water, with 9.02 grams of protein per 100 grams. Boiled split peas come out about the same, at 69.5 grams of water and 8.34 grams of protein.
Now set that beside what your hen is meant to eat. Alabama’s guide to feeding laying hens says layer feed should have 16 percent protein or more. That’s the bag you buy at the feed store. The same guide says a hen eats 100 to 150 grams of feed a day. Colorado State says treats should be no more than 10 percent of her daily diet. Put those together and I get about 10 to 15 grams of treats a hen a day, with every treat counted.
Here’s my math on what that means. Fifteen grams of boiled lentils carry about 1.35 grams of protein, while fifteen grams of a 16 percent layer feed carry 2.4 grams. So when lentils take the place of feed, she gets less protein, not more. Alabama warns that hens given too many treats “fill up on these incomplete feeds” and don’t eat enough of the complete one to keep laying.
The feed trials point the same way. Kentucky says field peas can make up as much as 40 percent of a layer ration, though 10 percent is a more practical level. That’s peas built into a formulated ration, though, not a side dish. Feedipedia says peas are short on the sulfur-containing amino acids. And for lentils, it reports that adding them to layer diets cut egg production “even at low inclusion rates”.
So keep it small. Colorado State’s other rule helps here: give no more than your flock can finish in 5 to 10 minutes, so nothing’s left in the run to draw nuisance animals. UC Davis puts it best, I think: “treat the scraps like a treat not like the main course”. For the main course, our guide to feeding Rhode Island Reds from chick to hen walks you through the feed tags.
Fresh and Frozen Green Peas
Green peas from your garden or freezer are the same plant as field peas. Feedipedia says field and garden peas used to be counted as separate species. Now they’re seen as varieties or subspecies of one, Pisum sativum. Picked green, they’re mostly water. USDA lists raw green peas at 78.9 grams of water per 100 grams, with 5.42 grams of protein and 5.7 grams of fiber.
None of the guides I read asks you to cook green peas for hens. Kentucky’s note that field peas don’t need roasting is about dried peas in feed, but it’s the same plant, so I’d give fresh or frozen peas as they are. They still count toward the same 10 to 15 grams a hen.
If you’re raising chicks, starter feed comes first, and our page on baby chicks and fruits and veggies explains why.
Canned Beans and Chickpeas, Plus Sprouts
Canned beans are the shortcut. Illinois Extension says “Canned kidney beans are safe to use without further boiling since they are already precooked before processing”. The catch is the salt. USDA lists canned red kidney beans at 256 milligrams of sodium per 100 grams, counting the liquid in the can. Lentils boiled without salt have 2 milligrams. If you use canned beans, drain off the liquid, rinse the beans and keep it to a spoonful.
Dried chickpeas, like the ones above, need cooking too. Kentucky says “Most of the antinutritional factors in chickpeas can be deactivated by heat treatment”, so cook them until they’re soft. Feedipedia rates chickpeas a better poultry food than lentils, for what it’s worth. Our page on sweet potato skins lands on the same rule for another pantry food: cooked, and never moldy.
Sprouted legumes are the open question. Feedipedia lists germination as one of the treatments that can remove anti-nutrients from common beans, alongside ensiling and others. But I didn’t see it say that sprouting alone makes raw beans safe, and none of the backyard guides I read gives you a rule for sprouts. So I’d cook sprouted beans the same as dry ones. With sprouted lentils or peas, a quick cook costs you almost nothing.
For other foods, our Can Chickens Eat It? checker gives you a quick answer, and it has dried beans and peas in it too.
Sources
- Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way (disease control and feeding).
- UC Davis and UC Cooperative Extension: Feeding Your Flock (PDF).
- Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913).
- Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky: Legumes in Poultry Feed (poultry.extension.org).
- Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky: Field Peas in Poultry Diets.
- Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky: Lentils in Poultry Diets.
- Feedipedia: Lentil (Lens culinaris) seeds (INRAE, CIRAD, AFZ and FAO).
- Feedipedia: Pea seeds.
- Feedipedia: Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) seeds.
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration: Bad Bug Book, second edition (the phytohaemagglutinin chapter, PDF).
- University of Illinois Extension: Kidney Beans and Slow Cookers (Lisa Peterson, February 29, 2024).
- NDSU Extension: Using Split Peas in Your Recipes (FN1741, reviewed April 2024, PDF).
- Iowa State University Extension, Spend Smart. Eat Smart.: Lentils.
- USDA FoodData Central (SR Legacy: lentils raw 172420 and boiled 172421, split peas raw 172428 and boiled 172429, green peas raw 170419, canned red kidney beans 175195).
Sources checked October 26, 2026. The gram math is mine, from Colorado State’s 10 percent and Alabama’s feed numbers. The protein math uses USDA’s food data. 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
