Owning chickens as pets can be an enjoyable experience. You will come to learn that, over time, chickens absolutely have personalities. Chickens as pets can be fun to work with and fun to get to know, but what makes them even better is that they can be a good source of both meat and eggs.
As they are farm animals, if you want to have good production from them, you are going to want to be absolutely certain that you feed them well and feed them with nutritious food so that you can get the most out of them.
For the most part, the majority of a chicken’s diet should consist of its commercial feed, as their commercial feed is designed to take care of just about all of their nutritional needs while also making sure that they will be healthy and happy, and produce good meat and eggs.
However, as people get to know their chickens, they will find that they want to feed their chickens table scraps as treats as this can make for a happy chicken at the end of the day.
Because of this, you might begin to wonder whether or not certain table scraps are going to be safe for your chickens to enjoy, and this is a good thought to have. Chickens have far different digestive systems than people do and this means that your chicken’s food needs to be tailored to that.
Some foods that people eat, chickens can digest just fine. Other foods that people can eat, chickens cannot digest well and it can actually end up causing problems. For example, if you have a farm, you might find that you have more than a few scraps of cauliflower you don’t know what to do with.
If this is the case, you may not be too certain about whether or not you can feed this to your chicken without causing problems.
Chickens and Cauliflower
Cauliflower is wonderfully healthy for your chicken, making cauliflower scraps a wonderful addition that you can include in your chicken’s diet as long as it remains a treat.
Cauliflower, while healthy, does not have what a chicken needs to sustain itself on and can be hard for chickens to digest, meaning that it should never become a staple of its diet.
For chickens, cauliflower can remain a wonderful addition for more nutrition in the chicken’s current diet, especially if a doctor recommends a more nutritious diet for chickens, and many chickens seem to enjoy cauliflower as a treat too.
When you look closely at what a cauliflower has in it, you will notice that it has just about every nutrient that chickens need in their diets while being low in calories and fat, ensuring that your chickens will not gain weight from eating cauliflower, especially when it remains as a snack in their diets.
Cauliflower is also a source of calcium, which is especially important if your farm focuses more on egg production.
With many animals, especially pets, feeding the leaves, stem, and other portions of cauliflower (and similar) plants can be problematic, but this is not the case for chickens. Chickens can actually eat the stem and leaves of the cauliflower plant, meaning that no table scraps go to waste when preparing cauliflower when you have chickens to feed.
In fact, there have been more than a few reports that chickens seem to enjoy the leafy green portions of cauliflower plants the most and what makes this even better is that these leaves are full of antioxidants, which are good for your chickens as well.
Again, these should be given to your chicken as a treat or as a supplement to their main diet, but should never become a staple part of their diet. There is good reason why the majority of a chicken’s diet should always be its feed and it is not supposed to deviate immensely from that with other vegetables, such as cauliflower.
How Should You Feed Chickens Cauliflower?
What makes cauliflower an even better plant for your chickens is that it can be fed to them either raw or cooked, so you don’t need to worry about doing anything special to ensure that the spare cauliflower you have is chicken-safe.
All you need to worry about is making sure that you don’t feed your chickens too much cauliflower at once, because it does remain a relatively hard-to-digest food for them.
Keep in mind that if you have cooked the cauliflower, you should be mindful that it remains plain and untouched by anything else that you might have cooked it with as this could be problematic for your chicken’s health.
Additionally, if you have cooked the cauliflower, make sure that it is an adequate serving temperature for your chicken so that it does not hurt itself when trying to eat it.
Depending on the personality of your chickens, they may actually enjoy pecking and picking at the crumbly florets of an uncooked cauliflower piece, which may become a fun way to allow your chickens to have a treat.
If you are planning on feeding the cauliflower to your chickens raw, you won’t have to do anything with it besides putting it in their enclosure as-is, including leaves and stems, as some chickens also find the stem to be somewhat hydrating.
Boiled cauliflower is especially hydrating for chickens, making it a wonderful addition to their diet on hot or dry days as long as you let the cauliflower cool back down to room temperature.
This can also be given to your chicken as-is, though you may want to put it on a surface where it won’t collect dust and dirt that may make it more unappetizing for the pickier chickens in the family.
If you are offering it to them as a nutritional supplement rather than a treat to enjoy, you will want to serve it to them along with their feed. You can place it in an area that the chickens can get to easily but always make sure that all the chickens can have access to it, as you won’t want there to be any fighting between your chickens over the cauliflower that is meant to be a supplement to their diet.
At the end of the day, you should clear out any uneaten scraps of the cauliflower so that you can minimize the chance of having it rot and the chickens ingesting rotten food, or having the rotten smell attract vermin that could cause problems for your chickens.
However, because cauliflower seems to be such a popular treat among chickens, it is very unlikely that you would have many scraps left over to clean up.
As for how much cauliflower your chicken can eat, you should consider how much feed your chickens eat as a comparison. Cauliflower should, at most, be a nutritional supplement for your chickens and should never be a main portion of their diet.
Because chickens should have their diet be at least 90% their commercial feed, in theory, your chickens should not have more than 10% of their diets be cauliflower. If you also include other treats or supplemental food in your chicken’s diet, then you need to factor this into the equation as well.
Because of this type of thinking that you need to do, it can be hard to say exactly how much cauliflower chickens can and cannot have. More often than not, a large group of chickens will be happy to enjoy a whole head of cauliflower, including the stem and leaves, and will leave very few scraps behind for you to clean up after and will generally not have any digestive issues either.
Also, even if you accidentally feed your chickens more than 10% of their diet as cauliflower for one day, as long as it is a one-time occurrence and not a regular problem, it won’t matter too much to your chickens in the long run. It will be one day of not the best food intake, but over the course of weeks, months, and years, this is miniscule.
The worst you might encounter is a more sensitive chicken having a bad day but even then, that is highly situational as it requires you to have a sensitive chicken who also ate a lot of cauliflower compared to feed.
As long as your chicken’s diet remains mostly commercial feed, you can feed your chickens cauliflower every so often without having to worry about it or how it would affect their meat and eggs.
What Are the Signs of Too Much Cauliflower?
Cauliflower is mostly just pure health food for your chicken. If you accidentally fed your chicken too much cauliflower or if your chicken has a more sensitive digestive system, there is a chance that it may have some digestive distress. Even then, it will be temporary and often somewhat mild and will mean a day of bad poop.
Cauliflower, in both humans and chickens and many other animals, is fairly hard to digest because it is part of a family of vegetables known as cruciferous vegetables. This family includes broccoli, cabbage, kale, bok choy, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower, among other similar vegetables.
This family of vegetables are notorious for causing digestive issues in people and animals alike, and while chickens have a surprisingly strong digestive system, too much cauliflower will be no match for it. This is because cauliflower, among the rest of the cruciferous vegetables, has a type of sulfur-containing chemical known as glucosinolates in it.
Glucosinolates are the cruciferous vegetables’ defense system against other animals and it works pretty well. When broken down in the digestive system of most animals, these chemicals will produce intestinal gas, and a lot of it.
No animal appreciates the amount of gas that this brings, and in animals, it can cause some degree of distress. For a chicken, this probably means a day of reduced appetite as it has some discomfort from potential bloating.
While this is not severe, it isn’t optimal for your chicken either. For most chickens, this will go away as the body finishes processing the cauliflower and is done with the glucosinolates, but it is always important to keep an eye on any pets that show a reduction in appetite even if you have a good idea of the reason why.
As long as your chicken recovers in a day or two, it will be fine and you will just have to be mindful not to feed that much cauliflower to your chickens again. As a whole, cauliflower is good for chickens and is a wonderful supplement to give to them as long as you do not feed them too much of it at once.
A Chicken’s Ideal Diet
As mentioned earlier, the majority of your chicken’s diet should be a good-quality commercial feed. It should be almost entirely commercial feed as these feeds are designed to have all of your chicken’s nutritional needs covered at its most basic level.
Of course, when one says “mostly,” this means that there is room for supplementation, which is where cauliflower can have a place in a chicken’s diet. What you choose to supplement the rest of your chicken’s diet with, besides the 90% commercial feed, is up to you depending on what you want your chickens for, such as meat or eggs in particular.
Common treats that you can include in your chicken’s diet on a daily basis include berries, leafy greens, squash, herbs, and even oats. All of these treats will benefit your chicken’s health in one way or another and will simply make your chickens happy in their little enclosures.
You can also feed your chicken other treats on occasion. Yogurt, mealworms, cracked corn, and whole-grain pastas/cereals/breads are all very beneficial, and in some cases, too beneficial.
What this means for your chickens is that if these are given more than a weekly basis, your chickens may become overweight, which can lead to more problems for your chicken’s health. These are treats that should be given sparingly and on an occasional basis, but are still beneficial for your chickens when they are given to them.
Naturally, there are going to be some treats that chickens should not eat, and this will include chocolate, onions, raw eggs, uncooked grains and beans, and avocado skins and pits.
All of these will contain something toxic for chickens or may cause problems in your chicken group that you will not want to deal with as it can lead to many health problems within the whole flock.
I have a bachelor’s degree in construction engineering. When I’m not constructing or remodeling X-Ray Rooms, Cardiovascular Labs, and Pharmacies, I’m at home with my wife, two daughters and a dog. Outside of family, I love grilling and barbequing on my Big Green Egg and working on projects around the house. Growing up, I had pet dogs, cats, deer, sugar gliders, chinchillas, a bird, chickens, fish, and a goat.