Cheap Chicken Treats
9 Ideas for Money-Saving Snacks Your Flock Will Love
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Here’s a list of nine creative, money-saving chicken treats and DIY ideas that will keep your backyard hens happy and clucking for more.
By Ashley Taborsky Backyard chickens can be a joy. They offer hours of entertainment, fantastic compost, and better-than-store-bought eggs that will have your friends begging for you to share.
With everything your feathered companions provide you and your family, they deserve a special snack now and then. But treating the entire flock can quickly become expensive — unless you shop savvy or have the skills to make your own.
Here’s a list of nine creative, money-saving chicken treats and DIY ideas that will keep your backyard hens happy and clucking for more.
1. Cabbage Tetherball
Offering your flock a cabbage tetherball is not only an inexpensive snack, but it provides your chickens with exercise and entertainment. All you need is a thin rope (or thick string), a head of fresh cabbage, and a good place to hang it. You can either drill a hole through the center of the cabbage or just wrap the rope around it tightly a few times. You can hang it at chicken eye-level, or cinch it up a few inches above their head, making them hop for it. (Who doesn’t love watching chickens hop for treats?)
2. Raking Fall Leaves
If your neighborhood is covered in deciduous trees, you’re in luck. A great treat that’s entirely free is piles of raked leaves. Toss a few armfuls of dried leaves into the chicken run, and watch your birds go crazy as they happily kick around leaves, searching for bits of grass, bugs, and more. Dried leaves also act as a nice layer of free, all-natural bedding for your chicken run and coop.*
*Just make sure you know the source of the leaves and you’re confident the trees they came from weren’t sprayed in pesticides.
3. Wild Bird Seed Mixes
Many stores sell large bags (10lbs+) of wild bird seed mixes at a relatively low price per pound. Even though those bird seed mixes are labeled and marketed toward wild birds like finches and cardinals, chickens love sunflower seeds and millet, too! Oftentimes you can buy wild bird seed mixes cheaper than you can buy bags of similar products labeled as “chicken treats.”
4. DIY Chicken Treats Suet Blocks
Think about sources of fat you may throwing away in your kitchen — bacon grease, drippings after browning ground beef on the stove. Chickens love these natural fats. Start saving bacon grease in a jar in the freezer until you have a cup or two stockpiled. Remove it from the freezer and warm it to liquid temperature. Line a small tray with wax paper. Fill the tray with sunflower seeds, peanuts, the “dust” from the bottom of the chicken feed bag, or whatever else you have available, then pour the warm grease over top of the mixture of loose chicken goodies. Gently shake the pan, to allow the grease to penetrate the mix and work its way to the bottom. Put the tray in the refrigerator for a few hours or until solid, then pop it out of the wax paper whenever you’re ready to treat your chickens.
5. Pulling Garden Weeds for Chicken Treats
If you’re a gardener, you know how many uninvited weeds you can yank from the ground by the end of a season! Chickens love most common garden weeds, like dandelions and chickweed. Instead of tossing your weeds directly in the compost or trash, collect them in a bucket and empty the pail in the chicken run at day’s end. Your flock will thank you for the fresh, green snacks.
6. Scraping Kitchen Plates for “Chicken Salad”
During mealtimes, depending on what’s for dinner, there can be plenty of chicken-worthy scraps leftover. When we have BBQ evenings, we keep a bucket next to the trash can labeled “chicken salad.” Our close friends know the drill as they’re scraping the dinner plates: bones and napkins go in the trash, but food the chickens may still enjoy goes in the bucket. By the end of the evening, the bucket contains items like watermelon rinds, chewed-on corn on the cob, potato salad, dinner rolls, and more — an odd “salad” that your chickens will love.
7. Chicken Treats out of Box Cornbread
If you want to give your flock a homemade, warm treat, try baking up a fresh pan of cornbread. Depending on the brand, you can find a box of cornbread mix for one to two dollars. To add extra variety, try adding fun mix-in ingredients, like a cup of peas or corn, or whatever chicken-friendly leftovers you have on-hand.
8. Lawn Clippings
After mowing the lawn, dump the bag of grass clippings directly into the chicken run. They’ll have a blast scratching through the pile of fresh lawn cuttings, eating grass and rummaging through for potential bugs and other snacks.
9. Spent Grains from Local Breweries
“Spent grains” are the grains that have been used in the beer-making process (and contain no alcohol). Many local breweries have programs to donate their spent grains, which are commonly used as livestock feed and chicken treats. If you have a local brewer in your area, reach out and see if they have a free spent grain pickup site — many do.
Ashley is an Anchorage-based digital marketing consultant with a passion for sustainability and ongoing learning. When she’s not hiking, sightseeing, or trying new local beers with her husband/partner in crime, Ashley is a recognized Alaska hobby blogger, known as the ‘Alaska Urban Hippie’, who can talk for days about chickens, composting, honeybees and gardening. Check out her blog, her YouTube channel, and her Facebook page to follow her backyard adventures in the Last Frontier.
Originally published in the October/November 2019 issue of Backyard Poultry and regularly vetted for accuracy.
