Here’s my short answer, eight winters in. Keep your hens on their regular layer feed and let them eat as much of it as they want. Add a small handful of scratch grains late in the afternoon. Put out grit and oyster shell in their own dishes, and never let the water freeze. That’s the whole plan. Scratch is the part most people overdo, and it’s the part that costs you eggs.
I keep 12 hens and one rooster with a bad attitude, and my first winter I got this backwards. Every cold morning I felt sorry for them and threw out another scoop of cracked corn. By January they were round and lazy, and the nest boxes were pretty much empty. Turns out I’d been feeding them candy and calling it a hot meal.
Below is what I do now, and what the extension services say about feeding a flock through the cold. Where a number comes from a university, I’ll name it.
Why Winter Changes the Feeder Math
A chicken runs hot. Her body sits at about 106°F, according to the University of Minnesota Extension, and she holds that heat with no trouble when the air is between 60 and 75°F. Below that range she has to burn more food to stay warm. That’s the whole reason your feed bags empty faster in December.
Minnesota puts the jump at up to 25 percent more feed during cold weather. Alabama Extension gives it in calories. A hen may take in up to 340 calories of energy a day in winter to keep warm, against about 260 in summer. That’s a big gap, and it has to come out of her feeder.
Breed matters too. Minnesota names Plymouth Rocks and Wyandottes among the heavier birds that winter well, and Ameraucanas and Orpingtons make the list as well. If you keep smaller hens, or birds with big combs and wattles, they’ll need more help to hold their weight. (The smallest hens in my flock are always the first to look scruffy in January.)
So yes, your flock needs more food once it gets cold. The mistake is in deciding what kind. Corn is cheap and they love it. It’s still the wrong thing to lean on, and the next two sections show you why.
Layer Feed Stays the Main Course
Your bagged layer feed is built to be a complete diet. Penn State Extension says laying hens over 18 weeks should get a 16 to 18 percent protein layer ration, with grit and a calcium source like oyster shell offered free choice in a separate feeder. Minnesota says it in plainer words. You can keep feeding your normal, balanced diet all winter.
What changes is the amount. I don’t measure feed out in the cold months. The feeder stays full from first light to dark, and I check it twice a day. If your birds are eating more, it’s because they need more. Honestly, I’d rather you buy an extra bag than ration it.
The one change I’d push hard is a second feeder. Minnesota warns that heavier or bossier birds may peck at the others and keep them away from the feed and water. In summer that matters less, since everybody’s spread out in the yard. In winter they’re packed into the coop together, and the low hens lose. My rooster used to stand guard over our only feeder like somebody was paying him. Now I run two from November to March, one at each end of the coop, and the shy girls finally eat. It was worth it the first week.
Pellets or crumbles both work. If you’re stocking up before the roads get bad, our chicken feed calculator will tell you how many bags your flock goes through. Don’t buy too far ahead, though. Alabama Extension says feed should be as fresh as possible, never stored longer than two months in winter or one month in summer.
Scratch at Dusk: A Handful, Not a Bucket
Scratch grains are a mix of seeds and grains, usually corn and oats with some wheat or barley mixed in. Hens go crazy for it. Yeah, that’s the problem.
Scratch is low in protein. Nutrena puts it at around 9 to 10 percent, and says laying hens need at least 16 percent to keep laying well. Every bit of scratch your hen fills up on is room she didn’t save for layer feed. Kinda like kids and dessert.
Minnesota’s limit is no more than a handful per 10 birds. Nutrena’s rule of thumb lands in the same spot. Keep scratch to 10 percent of the diet or less, or only what the flock cleans up in about 10 minutes. For my 12 hens that’s one loose handful, a little heaped. If there’s still scratch on the ground the next morning, I threw too much.
Timing is where scratch earns its spot. Minnesota notes that digesting scratch grains produces heat, so feeding them before roosting can help chickens stay warm on cold nights. I toss mine into the run about an hour before dark. It gets everybody moving before bed. It also pulls them in from the far corner where they like to sulk, so you can count heads before you shut the door.
Overdo it and you’ll see the damage by spring. Penn State says feeding table scraps or whole grains can decrease production and make the birds fat. It can also cause prolapse, which is no fun for you or the hen. One winter I had two hens get so heavy they didn’t lay a single egg until April. Honestly, that one was all on me.
Grit and Oyster Shell When the Ground Is Frozen
Chickens don’t have teeth. They grind their food in the gizzard with small stones they pick up as they forage. In summer they find those stones on their own. Once the snow comes and the ground freezes, that’s over. Minnesota says to give your flock free access to poultry grit all winter for exactly that reason.
It matters even more once scratch goes out. Nutrena points out that pellets and crumbles don’t need grit, but scratch does. Whole grains with nothing to grind them can make birds sick.
When you buy grit, get the right kind. Alabama Extension calls for a hard, insoluble grit like granite. A calcium grit dissolves too fast to do any grinding.
Oyster shell has a different job. It’s extra calcium for eggshells. Alabama says a layer feed should carry at least 2.5 to 3.5 percent calcium, and you can offer an extra source on top of that. Crushed oyster shell works, and so does calcite or limestone, offered free choice. In my coop the hens peck at it when they need it and ignore it the rest of the time.
I keep both in a cheap two-compartment hopper screwed to the coop wall, grit on one side and shell on the other, which is the setup Alabama suggests. Don’t mix either one into the feed. When the eggs in my nest boxes start coming out thin and soft in January, it’s almost always because the shell side ran empty and nobody noticed.
Greens and Treats When Nothing Grows
By January my birds have picked the run down to bare dirt and frozen mud. There’s no grass and there are no bugs. They get bored, and bored hens start pecking at each other (my rooster isn’t much help there).
Minnesota suggests root vegetables, plus squash or pumpkins, which chickens enjoy. It also warns that not all produce is safe, and it names potatoes. I keep it simple. A split squash or a leftover pumpkin goes in the run a couple of times a week, and now and then I hang a head of cabbage from a string so they have to work for it.
Hay helps more than you’d think. Chickens tend to avoid going out in the snow, and Minnesota says a little hay laid in the run can get them outside, scratching around. I toss a flake on top of the snow by the coop door. It’s the cheapest boredom fix I know.
Seed blocks are fine too, and Minnesota counts them as a bit of extra energy for winter. Just keep treats as treats. Their words are that treats should never replace a balanced ration, and that’s the line I’d tape to the feed room door.
Keep the Feed Dry and the Rats Out
Winter feed has two enemies in my barn, damp and rodents. Wet feed spoils. Mice and rats move in when it gets cold, because the coop is warm and the food is easy. And where the rats go, a raccoon isn’t far behind. I lost a hen to a raccoon my third year, and I’m not doing that again. Not gonna happen.
Minnesota says to store feed in an animal-proof and moisture-proof container, such as a metal garbage can. That’s exactly what I use. Two galvanized cans with tight lids sit in my feed room, one for layer feed and one for scratch. A rat can chew through a plastic tote in a night. It won’t get through steel.
Spilled feed is the other draw. Hens rake pellets out of a low feeder and into the bedding, and that pile turns into a buffet for mice. I hang my feeders high enough that they can’t fling it around, and I clean up the floor under them every time I change the bedding.
Water goes hand in hand with all of this. Minnesota puts it plainly. Without water, chickens will stop eating. All the feed in the world won’t help a hen whose waterer froze solid at 9 a.m. If that’s your morning too, here’s how I keep chicken water from freezing without a heat lamp.
My Winter Feeding Day
Here’s a normal cold day at my coop. It’s about fifteen minutes of work, split into three short trips and one last walk out to shut the door.
Notice there’s no big scratch feeding in the morning. That was my old habit, and it filled them up on corn right when they should’ve been at the layer feed. Moving it to the end of the day was the single change that brought my eggs back.
One more thing that isn’t food at all. Minnesota says hens need about 14 hours of light a day for good egg production, and no feed in the world makes a short day longer. If your eggs dropped off in November, read why chickens stop laying in winter before you change anything in the feeder. Feed is only one of the reasons.
My flock comes through winter with full feathers and steady weight now, and that’s what I’m after. Layer feed all day and a small handful of scratch at dusk. Grit and shell on the wall, water that never freezes. The rest is just checking on them twice a day, which you’d be doing anyway, right?
Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe
