Yes, chickens can eat goji berries, by my read. A ripe berry, fresh or dried, is a fruit treat like any other, as long as it’s plain and the serving stays small. The part of the plant I’d keep away from your hens is the leaves.
Here’s why. Goji is a nightshade, in the same family as tomatoes. And UC Davis tells flock owners not to feed hens the leaves of nightshade plants.
This page used to tell a story about a hen named Bessie raiding my goji bushes by the coop. I can’t back that story up, so it’s gone. So is most of the advice that came with it. I rewrote the page from the sources listed at the bottom. Two extension sheets, from Florida and Arizona, cover goji as a garden plant. Six more extension pages cover feeding hens and how a hen’s gut works. USDA’s FoodData Central told me what’s in a dried goji berry. And I read the one hen study I could find that put goji berries in the feed, from the University of Naples in Italy.
None of those sources fed plain goji berries to hens as a treat, though. So where something below is my own math or my own call, I’ll say so.
The short version.
- Ripe goji berries are fine as a treat, by my read. They’re a fruit, and they aren’t on Colorado State’s or UC Davis’s list of foods to avoid.
- About two tablespoons of dried goji is a hen’s whole treat share for a day, by my math. The quarter cup this page used to allow is more than that.
- Dried goji is nearly half sugar by weight, going by the label figures in USDA’s entry.
- Keep hens off goji leaves and stems, by my read. Goji is a nightshade, and UC Davis says nightshade leaves can be toxic.
- Arizona’s native wolfberry, also called rabbit thorn, is a different plant from the goji you buy. Arizona’s extension service doesn’t recommend eating it unless you know how to prepare it safely.
- Nothing mouldy, and pick up whatever the flock leaves.
Goji Is a Nightshade, Like Your Tomatoes
Goji berry is the common name for Lycium barbarum, a shrub native to China. UF/IFAS Extension lists a long string of other names for it, Chinese wolfberry and Chinese boxthorn among them. Left alone, it “can naturally reach 12 feet tall,” UF/IFAS says, though pruned garden plants usually stay at 3 to 6 feet. The stems carry thorns from 0.2 to 0.4 inch long.
UF/IFAS puts the family part plainly: “Goji berry belongs to the same family as tomato (Solanaceae),” and its growing needs are somewhat like a tomato’s. Arizona’s extension sheet agrees that goji is “in the nightshade family (Solanaceae) and related to tomatoes and peppers,” it says.
That family is why this matters to your hens. UC Davis’s guide for flock owners says to avoid feeding chickens “leaves from tomato, rhubarb, pepper, potato, eggplant, or nightshade plants” because they can be toxic. Notice it names the leaves. The ripe fruit isn’t on that list, and it isn’t on Colorado State’s either.
Our own food checker agrees on the berries. Ask it about goji berries and it says fine as a treat, under its general rule for fruit scraps. Ask it about goji leaves by name and it won’t rate them. Ask it about nightshade, though, and you get a hard no, but only for the leaves and stems, not the ripe fruit.
Birds go after the berries on their own, too. UF/IFAS tells growers that “Netting the crop can prevent birds or squirrels from foraging berries,” which means wild birds eat them. Wild birds aren’t hens, so I’d call that a hint and not proof.
What’s in a Dried Goji Berry
USDA’s FoodData Central has an entry for dried goji berries, with one catch. Most of its numbers are marked as a label claim, “back calculated from label by NDL staff” in USDA’s words. That means USDA worked them out from a product’s label, not from a lab test. So treat them as one brand’s numbers, not every bag’s.
Per 100 grams, USDA lists 45.6 grams of sugar. So going by that label, dried goji is nearly half sugar by weight. It also lists 14.3 grams of protein and 13 grams of fiber. There’s hardly any fat, at 0.39 grams.
Next to layer feed, that protein looks decent. Kentucky’s Jacquie Jacob says “Layer diets that contain 16% protein are more common,” and dried goji comes in at 14.3%. So on crude protein it’s close, gram for gram, by my math. But UC Davis says hens need “specific amino acids like methionine which are important for egg production,” and USDA lists just 0.087 grams of methionine in 100 grams of goji. That’s about a fifth of the 0.40% in the Naples team’s plain layer feed, by my math. Calcium is a different story. USDA lists 190 milligrams in 100 grams, which works out to 0.19%. Jacob puts laying mashes at 2.5% to 3.5% calcium. That’s 13 to 18 times what dried goji carries, by my math. Your hen needs that calcium for her eggshells, and she gets it from the feed, not the treat.
The salt number is worth a look too. USDA lists 298 milligrams of sodium in 100 grams. The University of Maine says salt goes into chicken feed “at the rate of about 0.15% sodium in the feed mix,” it says. So gram for gram, that bag of goji is about twice as salty as the feed. It sounds worse than it is. At 10 grams, a hen gets about 30 milligrams of sodium from her goji, and a day of feed at 0.15% gives her 150 to 225 milligrams. Both numbers are my math. And it’s a label number, so another brand could run lower or higher.
Fresh goji looks different on paper. UF/IFAS gives fresh berries 4.49 grams of protein and 9.12 grams of carbohydrate in 100 grams, against 14.26 and 77.06 for dried. So weight for weight, a fresh berry carries far less carbohydrate. If you’ve read my page on dried dates, it’s the same story. A dried fruit is a sweet treat, and the serving has to stay small.
How Much Goji a Hen Can Have
Colorado State Extension says treats “should make up no more than 10% of their daily diet,” and Alabama says a laying hen eats “between 100 and 150 grams of feed per day,” roughly a quarter pound. Put those together and one hen gets 10 to 15 grams of treats a day, by my math. That’s every treat added together, not just the goji.
Now the tablespoon. USDA weighs 5 tablespoons of dried goji at 28 grams, so one tablespoon is about 5.6 grams. USDA doesn’t say how full its spoon was, so take that as a rough guide. That makes a hen’s 10 to 15 grams about 1.8 to 2.7 tablespoons. Call it two tablespoons of dried goji, and that’s her whole treat share for the day. If she’s had other scraps, she gets less goji. My math, all of it.
The old page said “1-2 tablespoons per small chicken or 1⁄4 cup per larger fowl” a day. A quarter cup is four tablespoons, so about 22 grams of dried goji. That’s past the cap even for a hen that eats 150 grams of feed.
Why keep it that tight? Alabama warns, “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,” it says. UC Davis’s way of putting it is to “treat the scraps like a treat not like the main course” whenever you hand them out.
Feed them so they’re gone fast. Colorado State says not to give more than the flock eats in 5 to 10 minutes, so you don’t draw nuisance animals. Kentucky’s guide allows up to 20 minutes and adds that scraps shouldn’t be left to rot, “or botulism might result,” it says.
Fresh berries? The 10% rule doesn’t say whether it means fresh weight, so I’d hold fresh goji to the same 10 to 15 grams. That’s my call.
The One Hen Study I Found That Fed Goji Berries
The old page said “studies also show gojis may boost brain development and learning abilities in chickens” and called goji a superfood for the flock. I went looking for those studies. The closest I found is one trial from the University of Naples Federico II, published in the journal Foods in 2022. It’s a real study, and it’s small.
The team split 40 Lohman Brown Classic hens, 19 weeks old, into four groups, housed 10 hens to a cage, for 56 days. One group got plain feed. One got feed with 5% dried moringa leaves plus 10% dried goji berries, and another got 3% moringa plus 7% goji. The last got 15% moringa and no goji at all. So no hen in the study ate goji without moringa.
What they measured was the eggs. After eight weeks, yolk lutein was up 258.15% in the 10% goji group and 189.24% in the 7% group, against plain feed. The moringa-only group beat both, at 333.24%. The 7% goji group showed the biggest rise in β-carotene at four weeks (181.38%) and had the lowest yolk cholesterol, 44.12% to 47.08% under plain feed. For the 10% goji group, the paper reports “an insignificant decrease in cholesterol levels,” so that one doesn’t count.
Here’s what the study didn’t measure. The authors write that “other studies are required to evaluate the additional potential effects of this supplemented diet, including an evaluation of hen health, the rate of egg production” and how well the eggs keep. So it tells you nothing either way about whether goji is good for the hen herself. The paper’s discussion does say earlier work found goji berries in hen feed lowered cholesterol in the hens’ blood. I didn’t read that work, so I’ll leave it there.
One thing did jump out at me. A hen eating 100 to 150 grams of feed a day at 10% goji takes in 10 to 15 grams of dried goji, by my math. That’s the same as her whole treat share. The paper doesn’t say how much feed its hens ate. But if they ate what Alabama says a laying hen eats, the 10% group got about a treat share of goji every day for eight weeks, mixed into the feed. That’s my math too. The paper doesn’t say a word about how they did, good or bad.
The two other poultry studies I read are further from your kitchen bag. A 2020 study in Poultry Science fed broiler chicks Lycium barbarum polysaccharides at 1,000, 2,000 or 4,000 mg per kilogram of feed for six weeks. UF/IFAS says those polysaccharides make up about 5% to 8% of a goji berry’s dry weight. The chicks on 2,000 mg grew faster than those on plain feed, and that’s the level the authors recommend. That’s one part of the berry, fed to meat birds, not a berry fed to a laying hen.
A 2026 study, also in Poultry Science, split 600 Hy-Line Brown hens into three groups for 60 days. One got plain feed, and the other two got feed with 1% or 1.5% residues of black wolfberry, not the red berries. Yolk color went up at 1.5%. But at 60 days, eggs from both residue groups held less calcium and several other minerals, plus less vitamin D3. Neither one is a goji berry handed to a hen as a treat, so I wouldn’t read either study onto a handful of them. And I didn’t find a single study on goji and a chicken’s brain.
Hens Don’t Chew Them
The old page said a hen’s crop “acts kinda like a chicken’s stomach” and that crops “can break apart and digest even the tiniest little berry bits” with no problem. Kentucky’s guide to the bird’s gut tells it differently.
“Chickens do not have teeth, so they cannot chew their food,” writes Kentucky’s Jacquie Jacob. A swallowed berry goes to the crop first, but “very little digestion takes place in the crop—it is simply a temporary storage pouch,” the guide says. The grinding happens further down, in the gizzard, whose strong muscles “act as the bird’s teeth,” it says.
A goji berry is small, so I’d just toss them as they are. Arizona’s sheet puts the fresh berries at ½ to 1 inch. Jacob’s guide blames crop impaction on a hen gorging after going without feed, on tough fibrous plants, or on long pieces of string. A soft, fresh berry isn’t any of those, by my read. Dried ones are tougher, and I found no guide that names them either way. So I’d hand dried goji out a few at a time. That’s my call.
Growing Goji Near the Run? Keep the Hens Off the Leaves
If the bush is in your yard, the leaves are the part I’d worry about. UC Davis says the leaves of nightshade plants can be toxic, and goji is a nightshade, as both extension sheets say. Put those together and goji leaves fall under that rule, by my read.
I’ll be straight with you about the other side. UF/IFAS says “The plant’s leaves are edible as a potherb” in people’s cooking. And the Naples paper cites an earlier study, by Duru and colleagues, that fed hens goji berry leaves and got yolks lower in cholesterol. I couldn’t find that study to read it, so I can’t tell you the dose or how the hens did. A 2026 review of goji leaves as food says the safety evidence includes a short-term toxicology study of one roasted leaf extract, made from Lycium chinense rather than Lycium barbarum. It also counts pesticide measurements in bud tea. “Neither dataset establishes safety across all leaf-derived products,” it says.
So nobody I read says goji leaves are safe for hens, and the one rule that covers them says not to feed hens nightshade leaves. My call is to keep the flock off the bush. UF/IFAS suggests fencing to keep “rabbits and deer away from the leaves and young stem shoots,” and a fence works on hens too. Pick the ripe berries yourself and bring them over. The thorns are one more reason to keep hens out of it.
Same goes for prunings. Don’t toss them over the run fence, the same advice I gave for potato vines on my what not to feed chickens page. It’s the same split as elderberries, too, where the ripe berries are fine and the stems and leaves aren’t.
One more caution, about wild shrubs. Arizona’s sheet says there’s also “a native wolfberry” in northern Arizona, also called rabbit thorn. “References indicate wolfberry must be cooked to disperse poisonous compounds,” the sheet says. For that reason, Arizona’s Cooperative Extension “does not recommend eating the local wolfberry fruits unless you have knowledge of their safe preparation,” in the sheet’s words.
That’s advice for people, but I’d follow it for hens too. If a wild shrub with red berries looks like goji and you didn’t buy it as goji, don’t feed it. Take a sprig to your county extension office and ask. That’s my call.
Fresh or Dried, but Never Mouldy
Fresh goji berries “can be stored at room temperature for approximately one week or in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks,” UF/IFAS says. Dried ones keep “in a dark, dry, cool place for at least one year,” the same guide says.
Either way, check them before they go out. Colorado State says scraps for hens shouldn’t be salty or moldy. A bag of dried berries that’s gone fuzzy goes in the trash, not the run, and so does a fresh one that’s gone soft and furry.
Buy them plain, too. If the goji came in a trail mix with chocolate or salted nuts, it isn’t a hen treat. UC Davis puts chocolate on its avoid list, and Colorado State says no salty scraps.
The old page also had tips on freezing and canning goji, with storage times I couldn’t find in any source. So they’re out.
Sources
- Yujie Jiao & Guodong Liu, UF/IFAS Extension: Goji Berry, a Novel Nutraceutical “Superfruit” for Florida Master Gardeners (HS1391, October 2020, revised January 2024).
- Jeff Schalau, University of Arizona Cooperative Extension: Backyard Gardener #218, Gogi [sic] Berries (June 30, 2024).
- Maurice Pitesky & Nancy Reimers, UC Davis (UC ANR): Feeding your Flock.
- Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way, Disease Control and Feeding.
- Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913, August 2022).
- Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky: Feeding Chickens for Egg Production in Small and Backyard Flocks (poultry.extension.org).
- Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky, poultry.extension.org: Avian Digestive System.
- Anne Lichtenwalner & H. Michael Opitz, University of Maine Cooperative Extension: Salt is an Important Nutrient for Poultry.
- USDA FoodData Central: Goji berries, dried (SR Legacy 173032).
- Maisto et al., University of Naples Federico II: Effects of Fortified Laying Hen Diet with Moringa oleifera Leaves and Goji Berries on Cholesterol and Carotenoid Egg Content (Foods, 2022).
- Long et al., Foshan University & Hunan Agricultural University: Effects of dietary Lycium barbarum polysaccharides on growth performance … of broiler chickens (Poultry Science, 2020).
- Yao et al., Qinghai University: The effect of adding different proportions of black wolfberry residues to the diet on … laying hens (Poultry Science, 2026).
- Zou et al., Ningxia Medical University: Goji Leaves and Buds as Food Resources (Foods, 2026).
Sources checked November 3, 2026. The treat grams, the tablespoons and the quarter cup in grams are my math from the sources’ own numbers. So are the comparisons with feed (protein, methionine, calcium, sodium) and the goji a hen ate in the Naples feed. Treating goji leaves as nightshade leaves and keeping hens off the bush are my calls. So is skipping wild wolfberry. None of the sources fed plain goji berries to hens as a treat. 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
