How to Make Alfalfa Meal for Chickens, and How Little to Feed

Yes, you can make alfalfa meal for your chickens, and the easy way is to grind store-bought alfalfa pellets. You don’t need to grow and dry a field of it. What matters far more is how much you feed. For a laying hen, alfalfa is a treat, not half her dinner: 10 to 15 grams a day at most, about a third to half an ounce. In the big amounts this page used to recommend, alfalfa is what egg researchers feed when they want hens to stop laying.

I rewrote this page from 18 sources, and they’re all listed at the bottom. The feed facts come from Feedipedia, the feed database that French agricultural research bodies run with FAO, and from Jacquie Jacob at the University of Kentucky. The laying results come from three Texas A&M molt studies and two yolk-color trials. The serving math comes from Colorado State and Alabama Extension. The haymaking facts come from Montana State, New Mexico State and Oregon State.

This page used to open with a story. The writer had “6 Rhode Island Red laying hens”, called themselves an “overeager new chicken dad” and “planted up a quarter acre plot” of alfalfa. Then came “a record heat wave of 100 degree temps for 2 weeks straight”, and the patch “yielded about 10 pounds of hay”. Next, a “$20 blender from Target” burned out “after just 30 seconds of grinding”, so they bought a “$350” Vitamix. They sifted the meal through a strainer, dated their containers and signed off with “6 hungry Rhode Island Red ladies”. I can’t vouch for any of it, so it’s all gone.

The old advice went too, and the worst of it was backwards. It said to mix alfalfa meal “50/50 with your regular grain feed” and that “Laying hens can go up to 75% alfalfa”. In the closest test I found, hens on 70% alfalfa quit laying within 8 days, and that was the whole point of the study. It said alfalfa “increases productive energy compared to grains so hens lay more eggs”, when the researchers call it low in energy. It blamed rancid meal on “high fat content from all the vitamins”, but dehydrated alfalfa is only 2.7% fat. It also gave numbers for chicks, broilers, cutting height and drying days that I couldn’t find a source for, so those are gone too.

A word on the photos. None of them shows a hen eating alfalfa meal, because I couldn’t find a real one I’d trust. Justin Miller at Alabama Extension shot the three alfalfa field frames, all on one afternoon. Bruce Dupree, also at Alabama Extension, took the young hens and the chicks. The flowering sprig comes from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Montana. Preston Keres shot the hen in the nest box for the USDA, and the egg comes from a USDA Team Nutrition kitchen shoot. Every credit links to the photo’s own page.

The short version.

• Yes, you can make it. Grind alfalfa pellets or bagged dehydrated alfalfa a little at a time. Growing your own is optional.
• Keep it a treat. A hen’s share for every treat combined is 10 to 15 grams a day.
• Never mix it 50/50 with feed. Diets of 70 to 100% alfalfa are what researchers use to make hens stop laying for a molt.
• The real upside is yolk color. In two trials, about 10 to 15% alfalfa inside a balanced diet deepened the yolks and the hens kept laying.
• Chicks get starter only for their first two weeks. Meat birds are better off on their own feed.
• Keep it dry, and toss anything moldy or musty. If a hen acts off after eating something, call a vet who sees poultry. We aren’t vets.

Alfalfa Meal Is Just Dried, Ground Alfalfa

There’s nothing fancy about alfalfa meal. It’s the whole plant, leaves and stems, dried and ground fine. Feedipedia describes how the commercial kind is made. The fresh crop is drum-dried at high heat “down to 10% moisture”, then it can be “ground to make alfalfa meal or ground and passed through a screw die to make pellets”.

So a pellet is just alfalfa meal pressed into a shape. Grind a pellet and you’ve got meal again.

Here’s what you’re grinding, by Feedipedia’s averages for dehydrated alfalfa, on a dry matter basis. Protein is 18.3%, crude fibre is 28.6% and fat is 2.7%. Calcium is 22.1 grams per kilogram, which works out to about 2.2%. The protein swings a lot from batch to batch, from 13.1% to 27.9% across the samples.

Honestly, that fiber number is the one I’d want you to remember.

The feed experts are blunt about it. Feedipedia says dehydrated alfalfa meal “has a low energy and protein content, and a very high fibre concentration” for poultry. Jacquie Jacob, a poultry specialist at the University of Kentucky, writes that using alfalfa in the diets of single-stomached animals like chickens “typically is limited by its high fiber content”.

The Easy Way: Start From Pellets

You don’t need a farm or a $350 blender for this. Buy a bag of alfalfa pellets or dehydrated alfalfa and grind a small batch when you need it. Your hen’s share is only a few grams, so the cheap grinder or blender you already have will do. That part is my call, not a lab’s.

Read the tag before you buy (it’s pretty much the only way to know what you’re getting). Feedipedia says pellets “are often standardized to a certain protein content (such as 17 or 18%)”, so the bag tells you roughly what’s inside. Some bags carry a binder too. Cargill’s Country Companion pellets, for one, list “Alfalfa hay sun-cured ground, Bentonite” and guarantee at least 15.0% protein and at most 33.0% crude fiber.

Rabbit pellets are a different animal. They’re a rabbit feed, not plain alfalfa, and I went through them in can chickens eat rabbit alfalfa pellets, so check that before you grab a bag from the rabbit aisle.

If you’d rather order online, plain sun-cured alfalfa pellets like the bag below work the same way. I’d grind a week’s worth at a time, no more.

Unearthed Non‑GMO Alfalfa Pellets – 100% Pure Sun‑Cured Alfalfa, No Additives or Fillers | Premium Feed for Rabbits, Horses, Goats, Chickens & More | Natural Garden Soil Booster

$32.99 In Stock

View deal on Amazon

Paid link · price checked November 3, 2026 09:18

How Much: About 10 to 15 Grams a Hen a Day

Here’s the whole story in one number. Colorado State 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 or roughly 0.25 pounds”.

Put those two together and a hen’s treat share is 10 to 15 grams a day. That’s about a third to half an ounce. The math is mine, and that share covers every treat combined, not alfalfa alone.

If you’ve got a flock of 6, that’s 60 to 90 grams a day at the very most. I’d use a kitchen scale the first few times (it’s a lot less than most people would guess).

The other 90% of her food should be a complete layer feed. Alabama Extension wants one with “Protein 16% or more” and “Calcium 3% to 4%”, and it reminds you that “complete feeds are designed to be the sole source of nutrients for your birds”. The Chicken Feed Calculator will tell you how much layer feed your flock goes through.

The Merck Veterinary Manual has a list of common problems in backyard flocks, and one of them is the “dilution of balanced and nutritionally complete rations with scratch or supplemental feed”. A scoop of alfalfa on top of the feeder is exactly that. UC Davis puts it in plain words: “treat the scraps like a treat not like the main course”.

Why 50/50 and 75% Alfalfa Are the Wrong Way Round

I looked, and I couldn’t find anyone who tested a 50/50 mix on laying hens. What I did find is a stack of research that uses alfalfa-heavy diets to make hens stop laying on purpose.

Here’s why. Egg farms rest a flock between laying cycles with a forced molt, and the usual way to start one is pulling the feed for several days. That method “has come under scrutiny due to food safety issues and animal welfare issues”, so a team at Texas A&M tried alfalfa instead.

In a 2005 study, L. M. Donalson and colleagues fed hens 100%, 90% or 70% alfalfa, with layer ration making up the rest. Their result: “Egg production for A90 and FW treatments ceased completely by d 6, whereas birds fed A100 and A70 ceased egg production by d 8”. FW is the hens that got no feed at all.

So the 70% hens, the mix closest to that old 75% advice, were done laying inside 8 days.

Turns out the same group kept finding it. K. L. Landers and colleagues found alfalfa meal and alfalfa pellets “equally effective as feed withdrawal” at shrinking the hens’ ovaries. In W. K. Kim’s 2007 study, hens on alfalfa molt diets “stopped laying eggs within 5 d after molt started”. Jacob sums it up: “High levels of alfalfa have been used in molting diets for egg layers.”

The reason is energy, not protein. The Texas A&M papers call alfalfa a high fiber feed with “low metabolizable energy”. Alfalfa’s protein, about 18% on a dry basis, is in the same range as the 16% Alabama wants in layer feed. So protein was never the problem. Feedipedia adds saponins, “that have well-known depressing effects on poultry performance”, “notably on feed intake and egg production”.

So if your hens quit laying after you started a heavy alfalfa mix, I’d look at the alfalfa first.

What Alfalfa Does Well: Yolk Color

Alfalfa does have one real job in poultry feed, and it’s color. Feedipedia says “In poultry diets, dehydrated alfalfa is mostly used for pigmenting eggs and meat”. Jacob calls it “a natural source of xanthophylls, which are the pigments that give the yellow color to chicken skin and egg yolks”.

Two trials back that up without costing eggs. In 2014, V. Laudadio and colleagues swapped some soybean meal for a low-fiber alfalfa meal at 15% of the diet. They fed it to ISA Brown hens from 18 weeks old for 10 weeks. Laying didn’t change, and the yolk color improved.

In 2026, A. Hamim and colleagues mixed 10% alfalfa-based dehydrated silage pellets into a commercial diet for Novogen Brown hens, starting at 21 weeks, for 4 weeks. “Laying rate was similar in both groups”, and “Yolk colour intensity was significantly increased”.

Now the catch. Both were balanced diets that researchers built, and the 2014 meal was a special one, “obtained by a combination of sieving and air-classification processes” to cut the fiber. Neither was a scoop of ground pellets dumped on top of your full feeder.

Here’s the part I like, though. Ten percent of a hen’s 100 to 150 grams is the same 10 to 15 grams as the treat share. So if you keep alfalfa inside that share, you’re in the range those trials used, by my math. A deeper yolk is the most I’d hope for.

And if you’ve been wondering, alfalfa is a green, and so is barley grass, which falls under the same treat rule.

Chicks and Meat Birds

Your chicks don’t need alfalfa at all. Cackle Hatchery says to “Feed only starter ration for at least the first two weeks, when chicks need those important nutrients for fast growth.” After that, it says, “don’t feed treats amounting to more than 10% of the chicks’ diet by volume”.

The old version of this page put chicks under 6 months on 25% alfalfa. The nearest thing to a test I found is a 2012 lab study by J. F. Escarcha and colleagues. Young layer chicks got 25% or 50% alfalfa for one week during a Salmonella challenge, and it “did not negatively impact average daily gain”. That’s a one-week lab test, though, not a feeding plan, so I’d stick with Cackle’s 10%.

Meat birds are their own case. Feedipedia says that for white meat chickens and turkeys, “carotenoids are not desirable and the inclusion rate of alfalfa meal must be limited”. That’s the yellow-skin pigment at work. Jacob adds that “Enzyme supplementation of alfalfa has not been shown to be effective in improving the performance of broiler chickens” on alfalfa diets. Give your broilers their broiler feed and skip the homemade mix.

Growing Your Own: Cut It at the Bud

If you grow alfalfa anyway, when you cut it matters more than anything else. Montana State’s hay guide by Dennis Cash and Howard Bowman lays it out stage by stage. At the bud stage, leaves make up more than 40% of the dry matter and protein runs above 18%. By full bloom, leaves are under 20% and protein is under 12%.

The guide explains why. As the plant moves from leafy growth into flowering, the fiber goes up while the protein and digestibility go down. For good hay from an established stand, it says to cut at the mid- to late-bud stage, weather permitting.

So I’d look at the flowers, not a tape measure. The old page said to cut “around 2 feet tall”, and the guide goes by stage, not height. The sprig in the photo shows both, with tight buds at the top and an open flower below.

Protect the leaves. Montana’s guide says the leaves carry 70 percent of the feed value. New Mexico State says it plainly too: “the leaves are the most nutritious part of alfalfa hay”.

Drying, Grinding and Storing It

Drying is where a lot of your leaves get lost. Randy Dovel of Oregon State’s Klamath Experiment Station writes that “Alfalfa is more prone to leaf loss as it dries. When moisture content drops below 30% shatter increases dramatically.” Montana’s guide says even a good haying job can lose up to 40 percent of the leaves, and rained-on hay that needs turning can lose over 60 percent.

So spread it out. Dovel’s station found wide windrows dry faster than narrow ones, and a 6 foot windrow was down to 19.1% moisture after 3 days.

Don’t store it damp. New Mexico State’s extension team puts safe baling moisture at about 18 to 20% for small rectangular bales, lower for big ones. Bale it wetter and you risk “molding, rapid deterioration of nutritive value due to excessive heating, and even fires”.

Once it’s dry, grind only what you’ll use soon. The old page’s reason, fat going rancid, doesn’t hold up at 2.7% fat. A better reason is the color you’re feeding it for. Feedipedia says “The stability and efficiency of alfalfa carotenoids have been debated for decades”, so nobody promises the color keeps. Merck also lists “prolonged feed storage, leading to degradation of vitamins and minerals” among the common backyard problems.

I’d keep yours in a closed container somewhere dry and dark. Good alfalfa hay, by Montana’s guide, has a “bright green color” and a “pleasant aroma”. If yours smells musty or shows mold, it goes in the trash, not the run.

Sources

• Feedipedia: Alfalfa, dehydrated.
• Feedipedia: Alfalfa (Medicago sativa).
• Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky: Alfalfa in Poultry Diets.
• L. M. Donalson and others, Poultry Science 2005: alfalfa and layer ration ratios for molt.
• K. L. Landers and others, Bioresource Technology 2005: alfalfa as a single source for molt.
• W. K. Kim and others, Poultry Science 2007: molt and bone density on alfalfa.
• V. Laudadio and others, Poultry Science 2014: low-fiber alfalfa meal for laying hens.
• A. Hamim and others, Veterinary Medicine and Science 2026: alfalfa silage pellets for laying hens.
• J. F. Escarcha and others, Foodborne Pathogens and Disease 2012: alfalfa and Salmonella in young chicks.
• Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way.
• Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen.
• Yuko Sato, Merck Veterinary Manual: Management of Backyard Poultry.
• Cackle Hatchery: What to Feed Baby Chicks.
• Dennis Cash and Howard Bowman, Montana State: Alfalfa Hay Quality Testing (PDF).
• New Mexico State University: Reducing Harvest and Post-Harvest Losses of Alfalfa and Other Hay.
• Randy Dovel, Oregon State University: hay harvest paper, 1994 California Alfalfa Symposium (PDF).
• Cargill Country Companion Alfalfa Pellets, product page.
• Maurice Pitesky and Nancy Reimers, UC Davis: Feeding your Flock (PDF).

Sources checked October 29, 2026. The per-hen math is mine, from Colorado State’s 10% and Alabama’s 100 to 150 grams. If a hen acts off after eating something, call a vet who sees poultry. We aren’t vets.

Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe