I couldn’t find anyone who has fed honey locust pods to chickens and written down what happened. What I did find is a 2009 Australian trial that offered laying pullets honey locust seeds next to their usual feed, and they didn’t eat any. Next to the layer feed you already buy, the pods carry about half the protein and about a tenth of the calcium, by my math. A USDA plant guide adds that the sweet pulp “is reported to be irritating to the throat and somewhat toxic”, though that line is about people. Your bigger worry is a different tree. Black locust looks a lot like honey locust, and it has poisoned poultry. My call: honey locust pods aren’t worth gathering for your hens. If a few blow into the run from a tree you’re sure of, rake up any moldy ones and watch what your flock does with the rest.
I rewrote this page from 16 sources, and they’re all listed at the bottom. For the chicken test, I read Ian Simons’s two-part 2009 study in Livestock Research for Rural Development. What’s in a pod comes from Feedipedia’s honey locust datasheet, with a line from the Forest Service’s Fire Effects Information System. The tree itself comes from two USDA NRCS documents, plus extension pages from North Dakota State and Utah State. For black locust I read Ohio State’s weed guide, Texas A&M’s rangeland plants site, a Cornell page on poisonous pasture trees and the 2025 NRCS plant guide. Feeding rules come from Alabama Extension and Colorado State Extension, with Kentucky’s Jacquie Jacob on the gizzard and the Merck Veterinary Manual on moldy feed. Where something is my own call, I’ll tell you.
The old version of this page leaned on a neighbor I can’t show existed. “My quirky neighbor Jebediah” brought over “bags and bags” of pods, the hens loved them, and he suggested grinding them “using his old feed mill”. It said the writer bought saplings online and “planted them near my chicken coop”, that “wild turkeys and ducks have joined my flock”, and “I order my dried pods online” at “$1-$2 per pound”. I can’t back any of that up, so it’s gone. So are its storage times, from “1-2 months” fresh to “2-3 months” dried, because no source I read gives them.
Some of the facts went too. It said “chickens absolutely LOVE munching on honey locust pods” and that they’re “totally safe and even healthy for chickens”. That one chicken test found pullets ignoring the seeds, which tells you nothing about the pulp, and nothing I read tested safety in hens. It said the pods are “high in protein”, but Feedipedia calls them “relatively poor in protein”. It listed five vitamins and called the pods “a real superfood cocktail”, and it promised “calcium for healthy eggshells”. None of my sources gives a vitamin figure for the pods, and the calcium numbers are in the layer feed section below. And it warned that moldy pods “can also contain aflatoxins”. I found no test of honey locust pods for that, but moldy food of any kind is out, and I keep that warning below.
A word on the photos. The lead photo is a honey locust trunk covered in thorns, by Dan Keck on Flickr. Brenda Loveless took the pods hanging on a tree, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service posted them on Flickr. Apdency took the split black locust pod, on Wikimedia Commons. All three chicken photos are Tamsin Cooper’s, on Flickr. I couldn’t find a free photo I’d trust of a chicken eating a honey locust pod, so none of them is eating one. Every credit links you to the photo’s own page.
The short version.
- No study I found fed honey locust pods to chickens. In the one chicken test, pullets offered honey locust seeds next to their feed ate none.
- Black locust is the danger. It has pairs of short spines at each leaf on young branches, and pods only 2 to 6 inches long. Honey locust has branched thorns and much longer pods. If you can’t tell which tree you’ve got, keep the pods away from your flock.
- A pod has about half the protein of layer feed and about a tenth of the calcium, by my math.
- Colorado State says all treats together should stay at 10 percent of what a hen eats, at most. By my math that’s 10 to 15 grams a day.
- Moldy pods go in the trash. Pick up what your hens leave before dark. That’s my call.
Start With the Thorns
Honey locust drops its leaves for the winter, and that’s when you can see the thorns best on a wild one. The NRCS fact sheet says “Large, red thorns are often found on the branches and trunk of wild trees”. It adds that “The thorns typically have 3 points, but may have more, especially those on the trunk”. North Dakota State says the native trees are often “laden with multi-branched thorns” 3 to 6 inches long, and Utah State’s range runs from 3 to 12 inches. Feedipedia warns of flat thorns up to 35 cm long, which by my math is close to 14 inches, that “may injure humans and livestock”. That trunk in the photo, at Ohio State’s Chadwick Arboretum by the photographer’s caption, shows you what a thorny one looks like.
Your yard tree may not have pods at all. North Dakota State says “Most cultivars are podless (seedless), though occasionally bear a few seed pods”. Utah State says “Thornless and fruitless cultivars generally are planted”, and the NRCS plant guide says of the cultivars that “most are both thornless and fruitless”. Feedipedia adds that thornless trees “are obtained through grafting”. My read: a smooth street tree probably won’t drop many pods on you, and a tree bristling with branched thorns is more likely the wild kind that does.
Pods take a while, though the sources don’t agree on how long. The NRCS plant guide says seed production begins at about 10 years, with the most seed at about 25 to 75 years of age. Feedipedia says a tree “may begin fruiting 3 years after planting”. They do agree on the season. In the plant guide, fruiting runs September to October, with pods “sometimes remaining on the tree through February”. Feedipedia says the trees shed them “from mid-September through the winter”. So if a honey locust hangs over your run, you’ll be finding pods on the ground for months.
First, Rule Out Black Locust
Before anything goes in front of your flock, make sure the tree is a honey locust. Black locust is a different tree, and Ohio State says the two look much alike, apart from the spines. It’s black locust that has a poisoning record in birds. Ohio State’s weed guide puts it plainly: “Black locust is poisonous to all animals if ingested.” Then it says “Cows, chickens, and sheep have also been poisoned.” Texas A&M’s rangeland plants site names the toxin. It says “The toxic agent of black locust is robin, a protein toxin”, that “All parts of the plant except the flower are toxic”, and it lists poultry among the animals that have been poisoned. Cornell’s page on poisonous pasture trees names a second toxic protein, phasin. It puts poultry on its short list of the livestock most often affected. The 2025 NRCS plant guide for black locust says “The seeds and bark are the most toxic and ingesting them can be fatal to horses”.
Not every source is that firm about birds. That same Ohio State page says it’s thought that birds can eat the seeds safely, along with rabbits and deer. And the NRCS guide mentions a 1902 account of people in California feeding black locust seeds to chickens. Simons didn’t test black locust at all. He lists it among the “obvious omissions” of a test built on seeds he could get easily. My call: a poisoning record in chickens outweighs an old account of someone feeding the seeds, so black locust stays out of the run.
Telling the two trees apart mostly comes down to spines and pods. Ohio State says black locust has “A pair of stiff spines” at the base of each leaf stalk on younger branches, 1/4 to 1 inch long, while honey locust’s “spines are unpaired and branched”. Texas A&M says black locust’s spines “resemble large rose thorns”. Black locust pods are short. Ohio State gives 2 to 6 inches, with 2 to 10 kidney-shaped brown seeds inside, like the split pod in the photo, which the photographer labeled as black locust. Its white flowers hang in long clusters in May and June, and Ohio State says they look and smell like sweet peas. If you can’t tell which tree you’ve got, my call is to skip the pods and take a twig and a pod to your county extension office. And if you landed here looking for the insect kind of locust, that’s a different page: what to know before your chickens eat locusts.
What’s Inside a Honey Locust Pod
The NRCS plant guide describes honey locust pods as flat and strap-like and dark brown when ripe. They hang down and are “usually twisted or spiraled”, with sticky, sweet pulp between beanlike seeds about 1 cm long. The guide puts them at 15 to 40 cm long, about 6 to 16 inches by my math, and Utah State says 12 to 18 inches. Where the name comes from depends on who you ask. The guide says “honey” is a reference “to the sweet pulp of the fruits”, and North Dakota State ties it to the pods’ sweetish, gummy insides. Feedipedia credits the flowers instead, as a source of nectar for bees. In the photo they’re still on the tree. They’re pale and twisted, with a thorny twig above them.
Here’s the line the old page skipped. According to that same guide, people once dried the pods and ground the pulp for a sweetener, “although the pulp also is reported to be irritating to the throat and somewhat toxic”. That’s about people, not hens, and it’s hedged with “reported”. I found nothing that tells you what the pulp does to a chicken.
Feedipedia gives you the lab numbers. It says “The pods are relatively poor in protein (7-13% DM)”, meaning 7 to 13 percent of the dry matter, and “The lignin content is high (7-18% DM)”. Sugar swings a lot, from 10 to 38 percent total sugars in one report, so Feedipedia says feeding them for their sugar “should be considered only after having analysed them”. They’re also rich in condensed tannins, 2.8 to 14.8 percent of the dry matter in its sources, and saponins have been found in them too. Inside, the seeds hold more protein than the pod, at 20 to 30 percent of dry matter. Some animals can’t digest them whole, though. Feedipedia says pods and seeds for cattle, horses or pigs “should be ground as the seeds are not easily digested”, and the NRCS guide says “Cattle do not digest the seeds, but sheep do.”
Plenty of animals eat them, so you can see how the old page got its hopes up. Feedipedia’s list of animals that readily eat the pods runs from cattle and goats to quail and starlings. The NRCS fact sheet calls the pods “a favorite food” of white-tailed deer and squirrels, and raccoons and opossums are on the same list. Feedipedia calls pods and foliage “a valuable fodder for all classes of livestock”. But its feeding notes stop at ruminants and rabbits, plus a pig entry that reads “No information found (2012)”. There’s no poultry section on the page.
The One Chicken Test I Could Find
Ian Simons ran seed choice tests on chickens at Helidon in Queensland, Australia. He wrote them up in two parts in 2009. His birds were Hisex ‘red’ laying pullets, and “90 birds were involved in the tests”. They always had commercial laying pellets with at least 16 percent crude protein, shell grit and a food forest to pick through. He made sure “a surfeit of other food was available”, because the birds had to be “under no coercion to eat tested seeds/fruits that would harm them”. Each seed sample was either about 5 grams or 90 to 100 seeds, depending on the seed. Whatever was left came out at sunset. He graded each sample from “ate avidly” down to “did not eat”, which he defines as “nothing eaten during the day”.
Honey locust is in Part II, in the table of seeds the birds didn’t favor, marked “Did not eat”. So were the soap pod tree, a cousin of honey locust, and carob. Of the 102 seed-producing species in that round, 16 landed in the preferred range and 86 didn’t.
Two cautions before you read much into that. It was seeds, not whole pods or pulp, so it doesn’t tell you whether a hen would pick at the sweet part. And Simons saw birds warm up to some foods over repeated tests. Broad-leaved privet berries went from untouched at first to “Ate avidly” later, and he wrote that “familiarity is a factor that has skewed the results”. In his list of things worth studying next, he noted that the seeds of bean-family perennials tend to be high in protein, “although their acceptance by chickens may be affected by components such as tannins, poorly digestible carbohydrates and anti-nutritional factors”. Feedipedia’s tannin numbers in the last section are for the pods, not the seeds, so I can’t tell you whether tannin is why these pullets passed.
My read: the test tells you honey locust seeds don’t tempt a well-fed pullet. It doesn’t say they’d hurt one. In the photo is a 12-week-old pullet, going by her photographer’s title, and she isn’t one of the test birds.
What a Pod Adds Next to Layer Feed
Alabama Extension’s table for a layer diet asks for protein “16% or more” and calcium “3% to 4%”. Feedipedia’s average fresh pod has 10.7 percent crude protein in its dry matter, and the pod is about 75 percent dry matter as fed. By my math that’s about 8 percent protein as your hen would get it, half of what her feed has. Forest Service numbers land close by. FEIS says ground seeds and pods “contained 16.1 percent crude fiber (as fed) and 9.3 percent protein”.
Calcium is a wider gap. Feedipedia averages 3.7 grams per kilogram of dry matter. By my math that’s 0.37 percent of the dry matter, or about 0.28 percent as she’d eat it, about a tenth of the low end for the layer feed you buy. So the old page had eggshells backward. Every bite of pod she fills up on is a bite of feed she didn’t eat, and layer feed is built to carry her calcium. Alabama makes the same point about any extra: “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 or growth.” It says treats “should be used sparingly or not at all”, and it compares them to ice cream at every meal for kids. If you’re counting on a hen for steady eggs, my page on how many eggs a Rhode Island Red lays shows what the sources expect from her.
There’s a budget, too. Colorado State says “Treats should make up no more than 10% of their daily diet.” Alabama says “A laying hen will consume between 100 and 150 grams of feed per day”. By my math that leaves you 10 to 15 grams a day per hen for every treat combined, about a third to half an ounce. In the photo, the white hen has a crumb of dirt stuck to her beak. For the foods that don’t belong in a hen at all, my list of what not to feed chickens sticks to what the vet books back.
If You Still Want to Try a Few
My call, if you want to see what your hens make of a pod: only pods from a tree you’re sure is honey locust, only a few, and only clean, dry ones. If you see mold, it goes in the trash. Colorado State’s line on kitchen scraps is “Make sure they are not salty or have citrus or are moldy.” According to the Merck Veterinary Manual, mycotoxins, the toxins some molds make, can form in crops before or after harvest, and “they are chemically stable and persist in the contaminated ingredient even through becoming a finished feed”. My read of that: cutting off the fuzzy patch doesn’t clean the rest of the pod.
Snap the pods into short pieces for your hens so they can get at the pulp. Jacob writes that “Chickens do not have teeth, so they cannot chew their food”. Her gizzard does the grinding instead, with “two sets of strong muscles that act as the bird’s teeth”. She also says hens on commercial feed alone don’t need grit, but chickens eating whole grains, or on pasture without enough small stones, typically need it. My call: if your flock is picking at hard seeds like these, keep grit out for them.
Then you clean up. Colorado State says “Do not feed more than can be consumed in 5 – 10 minutes to not attract nuisance animals.” Raccoons are on the NRCS list of animals that favor these pods. My call: pick up whatever your hens leave before dark, so pods don’t sit in the run overnight as bait for a predator. Those two young birds in the photo are seen past green leaves, with grass behind them, just the kind of spot where you’d lose a few leftover pieces. And for a quick answer on another food, try our Can Chickens Eat It? food checker.
Sources
- I Simons, Livestock Research for Rural Development 21 (7) (2009): Upgrading the scavenging feed resource base (SFRB) for scavenging chickens, Part I. Preferred perennial species.
- I Simons, Livestock Research for Rural Development 21 (10) (2009): Upgrading the scavenging feed resource base (SFRB) for scavenging chickens, Part II. Non-preferred perennial species.
- Heuzé and colleagues, Feedipedia (2018): Honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos).
- Guy Nesom, USDA NRCS Plant Guide: Honey-locust.
- R. Alan Shadow, USDA NRCS East Texas Plant Materials Center, Plant Fact Sheet: Honey locust.
- Janet Sullivan, USDA Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System (1994): Gleditsia triacanthos.
- Joseph Zeleznik, North Dakota State University Extension, F2227 (2024): Common Honeylocust.
- Utah State University Extension, Tree Browser: Honeylocust.
- Ohio State University, Ohio Perennial and Biennial Weed Guide: Black Locust.
- Texas A&M AgriLife, Plants of Texas Rangelands: Black Locust.
- Cornell Weed Identification: Poisonous Trees of Pasture.
- S. V. Belt, USDA NRCS Plant Guide (2025): Black locust.
- Pacheco and colleagues, Alabama Cooperative Extension, ANR-2913 (2022): Feeding the Laying Hen.
- Howard Enos, Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way, Disease Control and Feeding.
- Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky, poultry.extension.org: Avian Digestive System.
- Dulmelis Sandu, Merck Veterinary Manual (2023): Mycotoxicoses in Poultry.
Sources checked October 31, 2026. Reading a tree full of branched thorns as the kind that drops pods is my read, and so is reading Simons’s result as a lack of interest rather than harm. The calls on not gathering pods as feed, keeping black locust out, skipping pods from a tree you can’t name and raking up moldy ones are mine. So are small pieces, grit for a flock picking at hard seeds and picking up leftovers before dark. The protein and calcium figures are my math from the sources’ numbers, and so are the inches and the grams. We aren’t vets. If a bird looks sick, call a vet who sees poultry.
Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe
