Chicken feed – what’s in it?

Chickens are fed diets that are formulated from a broad range of potential feed ingredients (predominantly grains) that are mixed together to meet the precise nutrient profile required by the bird at its different stages of growth.

As a result, chicken diets are primarily made up of macro ingredients such as cereal grains (eg wheat, barley and sorghum) and oilseed meals (such as soya bean or canola meal) or animal by-product meals.

Cereal grains make up between 60-70% of the diet and are the major source of energy in the diet. Other energy sources, such as plant or animal fats and oils, may be added to achieve the desired energy content of the diet.

As chickens are naturally omnivorous (that is, they eat both plant and animal materials), they have a higher requirement for protein than can easily be achieved by just eating cereal grains alone. To get sufficient protein into their diets (in excess of 20%), oilseed meals (like canola meal or soya bean meal) and sometimes an animal protein meal, will be added to their diets.

Chickens are very sensitive to the correct balance of vitamins, particular minerals and amino acids in their diets, so where the correct balance of these is not provided by the above macro-ingredients, these micro-ingredients will be added to make up any shortfall and / or correct any imbalances.

Chicken Feed Pellets

Doesn’t ‘look’ like grain? Virtually all meat chicken feed used in Australia is ‘pelleted’. That means that is has gone through a process of being compacted into a solid ‘pellet’, using steam and pressure to heat the ingredients to temperatures of about 85oC, which causes gelatinisation of the constituents in the mixture so that the pellet ‘sticks’ firmly together (see photo of pellets below). Prior to pelleting, the ingredients, including grains, are ground up and mixed together according to a defined formulation (or recipe) to achieve the desired combination of nutrients.

But wait…it’s not quite that simple! In fact in Australia, most diets fed to chickens will contain some whole grain (between 10-30% of the total diet), added back into the diet after pelleting, so that the finished feed is a mixture of both pellets and whole grain. This is done because research we have conducted here in Australia (and since reproduced elsewhere) has shown that providing some whole grain in the diet stimulates the chicken’s gizzard (a muscular part of the stomach that grinds grains and fibre into smaller particles; and is therefore a chicken’s equivalent of teeth) to function. Stimulating the chicken’s gizzard has been found to have long-term benefits in terms of bird health.

Most meat chickens produced in America, UK, Frence, Australia are‘grain fed’, as the major ingredient in all feed fed to meat chickens is grains, such as wheat, sorghum or barley. In Australia for example, grains such as these will constitute anywhere between 60 – 70% of the chicken’s diet.