Poultry Food & Drink
In the "olden days", hens may have been fed on scraps, but if you want decent egg rpoduction, you must feed a good, balanced diet. For most of us, that means a proprietary feed. As with houses, there are lots of poultry feeds on the market, many aimed specifically at smallholders. Organic and GM-free feeds are available.
We feed our hens Organic Layer Pellets from The Organic Company on an adlib basis. At first, we used mash, which is basically powdered pellets, but changed to pellets because a) the mash tended to get damp, sour and lumpy, and b) our local suppliers keep the pellets in stock, so we don't have to remember to order them in advance. We have two feed hoppers, in separate places but both under cover - if food gets wet, it gets sour and the hens won’t eat it.
We also feed about one ounce of organic mixed corn (also from The Organic Company), per hen per day, in the evening. If you think of the layesr pellets as being the "meat and two veg" and the corn as the "chocolate mousse", you get the idea - the corn shoudlbe a treat. We feed it in the evening as this encourages the wanderers to head back o the hen houses and it means that they go to roost with a fiull crop, to keep them content during the night. If you offer corn in the morning, the hens will ignore the balanced but boring pellets!
Our hens also, of course, have a varied diet of seeds, slugs, snails, worms, bugs and grass. If your hens don't have access to much grass, give them greens such as lettuce, cabbage and sprouts, including the stems. Hang them up so that they don't waste too much. Our hens also like wholemeal bread, boiled pasta, and boiled potatoes and they LOVE sardines. We were told to try to get them to take oil while they were moulting to help with feather regrowth, so we hit on the idea of sardines in sunflower oil. However, this is fed once a week as a treat and received wisdom seems to indicate that poultry perform better if they are fed a properly balanced diet.
Poultry also need access to mixed grit, so we have a grit hopper alongside each feed hopper. The grit is to aid digestion, not to form eggshells. Even though ours freerange, and so have access to soil and wee stones, they still take quite a lot of grit form the hoppers.
Poultry must always have access to fresh, clean water. We use a galvanised Eltex water feeder, but the hens seem equally happy drinking from puddles, the bird bath, the sheep trough or just about any 'natural' source. Adding garlic to the water is supposed to stop worm infestations but we've not tried this.