Yes, your hens can have sweet potato skins. There are two catches, though. Cook them first, and never hand over a skin with mold or rot on it. And keep the amount small, because it comes out of the same treat allowance as everything else.
The skin itself was never really the problem. I couldn’t find a single study that fed kitchen peels to backyard hens (I looked). What I did find is decades of feed research on sweet potatoes in poultry and pig rations, plus the scrap rules the extension services publish. So that’s what this page is built on, with every source named at the bottom.
If you’re at the counter with some other scrap in your hand, the free Can Chickens Eat It? checker gives you a yes or no and tells you where that answer comes from. It also works out how much your flock can have today.
What’s Actually in a Sweet Potato Peel
Mostly water. USDA’s food database puts a raw sweet potato at about 77 percent water. And Feedipedia (a feed database run by French agricultural research groups together with the FAO) says fresh peelings are over 75 percent water, with “little protein (about 6% DM), crude fibre (4% DM), and lipids (4%)”. DM means dry matter, so those numbers are for what’s left once the water’s gone.
You’ll see pages claim the skin is too fibrous for a chicken, or that hens don’t make the enzymes to break it down. I didn’t find a source that says either. By crude fiber, the standard feed measure, Feedipedia’s tables put peelings at 3.9 percent of dry matter and the whole tuber at 3.8. That’s about the same. One single lab sample did measure a lot more total cell-wall fiber in the peel, so it isn’t identical. But nothing I read says it’s too tough for a hen.
The closest thing to a peel trial is in pigs. An FAO review reports that peeling made the protein and fat in sweet potatoes easier for pigs to digest (the fiber too), with no effect on the energy they got out of them. That’s pigs, not chickens. And Feedipedia’s poultry trials on sweet potato by-products used distillery waste and starch pulp, never kitchen peels. So nobody has measured this in hens, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Cook It First, Because Raw Sweet Potato Fights Her Feed
This is the part most pages skip. Raw sweet potato carries trypsin inhibitors. Trypsin is one of the enzymes that break down protein, and Feedipedia says the raw tuber’s inhibitors are “still sufficient to decrease protein digestibility in diets”. The amount also swings a lot from one variety to the next, so you can’t tell what you’ve got by looking.
The FAO review has numbers on it. Raw sweet potato blocked 78.8 percent of trypsin’s activity, close to raw soybeans at 89.5. Cooked sweet potato blocked 16.7 percent. Their conclusion was blunt. Cooking sweet potato is “necessary”, they wrote, for the starch and for those inhibitors.
Feedipedia adds that moist heat above 80°C (176°F) gets rid of the inhibitor activity. So boiling or steaming is the safe bet. Peeling raw sweet potatoes for your own recipe? Simmer the peels in plain, unsalted water until they’re soft before they go out to the run. And the skins left over from sweet potatoes you baked soft for dinner have already been cooked.
There’s a starch side to this too, but it matters less for grown hens. Raw sweet potato starch was only 74 percent digestible in young birds, while older birds reached 97.4 percent. So for your laying hens, the trypsin inhibitor is the reason that holds up. For chicks, both reasons do.
Moldy or Rotten Goes in the Trash, Skin Included
This is the real danger, and the skin is the first place to look. Feedipedia says tubers that are “mouldy, rotten, or injured can be contaminated with fungi that produce toxic metabolites (ipomeamarone, 4-ipomeanol) that may cause serious health problems, particularly respiratory ones, in livestock”. Its advice is to not feed moldy sweet potato by-products to farm animals at all.
Most of the hard evidence is from cattle. The Merck Veterinary Manual describes a lung illness in cattle that eat moldy sweet potatoes infected with the fungus Fusarium solani, and Feedipedia says cattle can die a few days after eating sweet potatoes infected with another mold. I didn’t find a single poultry study on these toxins. So I can’t tell you what a moldy peel does to a hen. What I can tell you is that Colorado State says scraps shouldn’t be moldy, and UC Davis says no rotten food. That’s two extension services against it and nobody for it.
A plant disease bulletin from the University of Hawaii (the photo above is from the same series) explains why the skin is where to look. Rot gets in “through wounds in the tuberous root periderm (i.e., the ‘skin’)” and through broken tips. It usually works in from one end or both, and dark grey to black fungal growth can show up on cut ends. An infected sweet potato can be completely decayed within three to five weeks after harvest. The same bulletin says several of these rots look alike and can turn up on the same sweet potato, even in the same spot. So you won’t know which mold you’re looking at, and it doesn’t matter. If you see any of these, the whole sweet potato goes in the trash, skin included:
- black or dark grey patches on the skin
- dark grey or black fuzzy growth, especially on a cut end
- a wrinkled, shriveled end
- brown or black flesh when you cut it open
One more thing. Feedipedia says wet sweet potato by-products don’t keep, because “moulds and bacteria develop readily”. Peels are over 75 percent water. So don’t save them up in a bucket all week. Cook them and feed them the same day, or toss them.
A Sweet Potato Isn’t a Potato
This is where a lot of the scary advice comes from. NC State Extension says the sweet potato is in the morning glory family and “only distantly related to potato (Solanum tuberosum), which is in the nightshade family”. Different plant, different problems.
The warnings about peels are about white potatoes. NC State says the green parts of a potato plant contain solanine, “the green skin of the tuber” included. Colorado State says to be cautious with potato peelings because of it. And UC Davis lists “green areas of potatoes” and potato leaves among the things to avoid. Sweet potato isn’t on Colorado State’s list of foods to avoid, and it isn’t on UC Davis’s either.
So if you’ve heard “no potato peels for chickens,” that’s about the white ones (and green skin especially). It isn’t about sweet potatoes. For white potatoes, our page on seasoned potatoes goes through it. For the orange flesh of the sweet potato, see can chickens eat sweet potatoes.
How Much a Hen Can Have, and How to Put It Out
Colorado State caps treats at 10 percent of a hen’s daily diet. Alabama Extension says a laying hen eats 100 to 150 grams of feed a day. So her whole treat allowance is 10 to 15 grams a day (my math), and that’s for every treat she gets, not just this one.
Here’s what that looks like in sweet potato, worked out from USDA’s weights:
- Mashed: a cup of mashed sweet potato weighs 328 grams. So one hen’s share is about half to three quarters of a tablespoon.
- Peels: a survey in Uganda found the peel made up 30 percent of the fresh root’s weight. A 5-inch sweet potato is about 130 grams raw, so that’s around 40 grams of peel, or two and a half to four hens’ whole allowance.
- A baked one: a medium sweet potato baked in its skin gives about 114 grams of flesh. That covers roughly 8 to 11 hens for the day.
The reason is protein, mostly. Alabama Extension says layer feed should be 16 percent protein or more, and USDA has raw sweet potato at about 1.6 grams per 100 grams. That’s around a tenth. Complete feeds “are designed to be the sole source of nutrients”, in Alabama’s words, and the Merck Veterinary Manual says birds should get most of their diet from a balanced ration. UC Davis puts it best: “treat the scraps like a treat not like the main course”.
The feed trials point the same way. In layer diets, Feedipedia says to keep sweet potato meal to 10 to 15 percent of the ration. At 20 percent, one trial saw egg production drop 11.6 percent. That was dried meal mixed into a balanced ration by people who do this for a living. Peels piled on top of the feeder are a different thing, but it’s not a reason to go big.
When it goes out:
- Plain. No salt, no butter. Colorado State says scraps shouldn’t be salty, and UC Davis says to avoid fatty foods.
- Only what the flock cleans up in 5 to 10 minutes, then pick up the rest. Colorado State gives the reason as not attracting nuisance animals.
If you grow sweet potatoes, the vines have their own spot in the research. The FAO review says dried vine meal has been used in poultry rations, and that “the xantophyll of sweet potato vines is a good pigmentation agent for egg yolks”. That’s a dried meal in a mixed ration, though, not an armful of fresh vines tossed in the coop.
Whatever you give comes out of that same 10 percent. The chicken feed calculator works out the feed side for your flock, and our cheese page shows how fast the treat allowance fills up.
Updated October 2026: rewritten from the sources below and checked line by line. The old version told stories about one keeper’s own flock of 25 hens and 5 roosters and a hen named Henrietta. It also said potato peels made that keeper’s Rhode Island Reds sick. Those are gone. So are its claims that sweet potato skins are too fibrous for chickens and that hens lack the enzymes to digest them (it even warned of blockages), since no source I read says so. Its line that organic means pesticide-free is out, along with its 90/10 rule and its recipes. And its three illustrations are now real photos, each one credited under it.
Sources
- Feedipedia: Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) tubers (V. Heuzé and colleagues; updated September 2020)
- Feedipedia: Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) by-products (V. Heuzé and colleagues; updated September 2020)
- FAO: Feeding of sweet potato to monogastrics (P.L. Dominguez, in Roots, tubers, plantains and bananas in animal feeding)
- Merck Veterinary Manual: 4-Ipomeanol Toxicosis (Moldy Sweet Potato) and Perilla Ketone Toxicosis in Cattle (John Campbell, DVM, DVSc; reviewed December 2022, updated September 2024)
- University of Hawaii CTAHR: Java Black Rot of Okinawan Sweetpotato (PD-55, Scot Nelson, October 2008)
- NC State Extension Plant Toolbox: Ipomoea batatas and Solanum tuberosum
- Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way: Disease Control and Feeding (Howard Enos, December 2019, reviewed August 2025)
- UC Cooperative Extension and UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine: Feeding your Flock (Dr. Maurice Pitesky and Dr. Nancy Reimers)
- Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913; Wilmer Pacheco with Joseph Gulizia and Kevin Downs, August 2022)
- Merck Veterinary Manual: Management of Backyard Poultry (Yuko Sato, DVM; reviewed November 2024)
- USDA FoodData Central (SR Legacy): raw sweet potato (168482), baked in skin (168483) and boiled without skin (168484). The treat amounts above are my arithmetic from these figures.
Sources checked October 26, 2026. We aren’t vets. If a bird goes off her food or sits fluffed up after getting into something moldy, call a vet who sees poultry.
Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe
