05/05/2025
I have had a fair number of people ask how we raise 50+ chickens 100% for free, so here ya go. I’ll list the cost-saving methods in order from easiest to start to things that take a little more setup.
-Give them ALL of your food scraps, even if someone told you it’s bad for them. As long as they aren’t being starved, they will avoid the things that aren’t good for them. Ours regularly get fruit scraps (including apple seeds), citrus, coffee grounds, onions and meat scraps/bones.
-Get free egg cartons. I posted twice on local Facebook groups asking for cartons. That was 2 years ago and we still have over 100 cartons left. Occasionally friends and customers will give us cartons back as well.
-Pile mulch in their run. Stir it around with a shovel every few weeks. They’ll pick through it for worms, bugs and other tasty bits. I called around to a few dozen local tree trimming companies, and now we regularly get deliveries of wood chips, all for free. (Bonus Tip: they also give us fire wood that we use for our wood stove all winter)
-Get free bedding. We use wood chips (see above), dry leaves, shredded paper, pine needles and anything similar. The deep litter method will reduce your work and bedding use. A few local landscaping/yard cleanup companies regularly drop off leaves, pine needles and grass clippings for this.
-Put your compost piles in the run. We have 3 areas that I rotate the piles into for 2-3 months at a time, with 5-foot-tall compost piles. One pile builds, one pile composts, and one gets taken from. The chickens get to peck through all of these for scraps, bugs, add their p**p to it and aerate them by scratching it around. It also gives up a LOT of free compost every year for the garden.
-Collect food scraps from friends, family and neighbors. Every fall, I make a handful of posts in local Facebook groups offering pumpkin disposal. We get around 50 pumpkins from that each year from people we don’t know, which helps feed the birds through the winter.
-Hatch your own chicks (to sell or add to your flock). If you hatch them and sell all of them as day-old chicks, you don’t even need much setup and make around 5x the amount you would selling the eggs.
-Put in plants that your chickens can eat from. I planted mulberry and Siberian pea tree around the run, so the chickens get to eat any fallen fruit. Sunchokes/Jerusalem Artichokes are another easy one. I don’t plant any annuals specifically for the animals, but some people do that as well.
-Collect brewery grains. Breweries soak grain (usually wheat or barley) in water to get the sugars out of them, then have no use for the high-fiber, high-protein leftover soggy grain. A few times per week I stop at a local brewery on my way home from work and load up 1-200 gallons worth of grains. When it’s sunny, I pour some out on a cement pad to dry for longer term storage, as well as to feed to our chicks and rabbits. This is one of our best methods of saving on feed costs, and the brewery is happy to get rid of their high-volume waste product.
-Collect restaurant scraps. Brewery grains are not a full diet for poultry, so I add restaurant scraps as well. Whenever I stop at the brewery, I also pick up 30-50 gallons of food scraps from the breakfast restaurant next door. Lots of egg shells, waffle bits, carrot tops, the occasional chunk of bacon, and other good variety to round out the nutrients the birds need. Sometimes it looks good enough that I wish I were a chicken myself!
-Each morning, I fill a wheelbarrow half full of food scraps and brewery grains and top it off with wood chips. I’ll lightly mix it together, then dump it in the chickens’ run. This helps keep the smell down compared to just dumping the food in on its own. The chickens pick through for what they want to eat, and everything else stays and gets turned into compost.
With all of this combined, we have not given any commercial feed in over a year. It takes a little more work each day, but saves a lot of money in the long run.
Photo of one section of the run, with a nearly-finished compost pile
