Home

Bokashi chicken feed

We try out a clever chicken feed with an ingredient to make your hens healthier and less smelly.

One of the things that amazes you when you get hens is just how much poo they produce. It is a disproportionate amount to their size. In the mornings (stop here if you’re not that into this kind of toilet discussion), they come out of the coop and do extra big droppings from the food they’ve been digesting overnight. This means a lot of mucking out. I pick up droppings from the coops every other day and then go around the runs and the garden with a spade skipping out once a week. That’s fine with four birds living in two coops. Any less diligent and things can get a bit smelly.

But one of the ways of stopping things getting smelly, and of doing lots of other clever things too, is to add bokashi bran to the feed. It’s good for the birds’ guts, it helps the poo rot down super fast in the compost heap, it prevents the heap becoming too acidic from too many chicken droppings, and it stops the smell. You can mix this in yourself or, if like me you think life is just too short, you can buy it pre-mixed. Wiggly Wigglers sent me a sack of their bokashi chicken feed to try out.

bokashi chicken feed

wiggly wiggler chicken feed wiggly wigglers

Firstly, the hens liked eating this stuff, which is good as everyone who keeps chickens knows that sometimes their birds turn their noses up at the weirdest things. It helps that there are a few black oil sunflower seeds sprinkled throughout the mix, which the girls love and which are good for them too.

bokashi layers pellets

And secondly, yes, the poo doesn’t smell quite as sharp, which is particularly useful during a spell of hot weather. It’s gone into the heap with everything else, and hopefully the bokashi will work its magic there too.

This is more expensive than a normal bag of layers’ pellets. I buy mine from a local farm for £9 per 20kg bag, whereas a 25kg bag from Wiggly Wigglers costs £19.75. It’s probably worth it if you have a small garden and are very worried about your neighbours smelling the chicken poo, and if you are worried about your chickens’ digestive systems then you might want to shell out too. They also have a very useful ‘subscribe and save’ service which means you’re not - as I often am - always just about to run out of feed and having to drive to your local farm at inconvenient times to get more because life is busy and sometimes even chicken feed falls down the list a bit.

Related Posts

Leave a Reply