Raising Broilers: How Much Feed Do Meat Chickens Eat?

Are you thinking of raising your own cornish cross broilers and wondering how much feed do meat chickens eat? We’re getting deep into real chicken math here from baby chicks to food on the table.

How Much Feed Do Meat Chickens Eat?

According to Tractor Supply Co, the country’s leading backyard chicken feed provider, a cornish cross chicken should eat about 22.65 pounds over the course of an 11 week life. If you’re raising 50 birds, to serve your family just about one per week, you’ll need 1132.50 pounds of feed. That’s 23 fifty pound bags of feed.

Jump down to see if I think raising meat birds is worth your time and efforts.

Chicken feed with sunflower seeds and yellow shovel

Chicken Feed Consumption Per Day

The average cornish cross broiler chick weighs just 1.5 ounces each at one day old. It should be fed 4-5 ounces of 20% protein feed / chick starter in the first week. That’s about 40% of it’s own body weight per day in the first week.

During the second week, you’re going to double it to 8-10 ounces per chick for the week. For the third week, give them 14 ounces per week, or 2 ounces per day.

After that, until processing at 8-10 weeks old, add 4 ounces per week. You can decrease the protein amount in the feed you’re providing to 18% grower feed, but we do not. We choose to feed them the same 20% chick starter feed from the time they’re broiler chicks until butcher because we prefer the rapid growth of feeding higher protein.

Beyond 8 weeks, the gain you see on the bird will begin to decline and the feed requirement continues to increase. This lower feed conversion makes keeping them longer than 8-10 weeks more costly.

Group of white hens pecking fourages from the trough

How Much Feed Do Meat Chickens Eat to Gain One Pound

By three weeks of age, the cornish cross chick will have eaten 27 ounces and weigh about a pound. It takes almost 2 pounds of feed for your meat bird to gain one pound.

What Kinds of Feeder to Use for Meat Birds

There are so many different kinds of feeders that you can buy. I like to use a long tray-style feeder with a top that chicks can reach their heads through. This works while they’re in the brooder.

When I move them out to a chicken tractor on grass, I just toss their feed to the ground. This is how we encourage our cornish cross to be more like normal layer hens. It’s also the best way to get them to scratch through cow patties in the fields on our small farm. They will also pick up bugs and grass this way.

Chickens gather around a watering bell under a small chicken shed on a hot day.

Broiler Chickens Go Through a Lot of Water

I’m always amazed at how much water our meat birds go through on a daily basis. They drink twice as much water as our laying hens do. Even during the winter months, my 40 birds will easily drink 5 gallons of water per day.

If you choose to raise broiler chickens through a hot summer, you’ll need to be sure they never run out of water. They are prone to heat exhaustion and heart attacks.

Cutting Feed Costs

There are a few things that you can do cut the cost down for raising your meat birds.

Raise them on pasture / grass.
Add kitchen and garden scraps to their diet.
Ferment their feed.

Fresh Grass

If you raise your birds on grass, they’ll grow out faster, requiring less feed during their lifetime. Not only that, they’ll get added protein from bugs and worms and more fresh air than an enclosed coop can provide.

I wouldn’t entirely free range them because they’re more susceptible to predation than laying hens. They’re too large to fly, and they’re too slow to safely escape most attacks. A livestock guardian dog can help.

Using electric poultry netting is a good option, but you need to give them something to hide from ariel predators underneath. I like to use the tractor method so I can put them where I want them as needed, and I don’t have to rely on electricity or solar power. We modified this simple coop to use as a tractor around our fields, and it’s working well after reinforcing the bottom frame.

Food Scraps

Adding kitchen and garden scraps to their diet helps round out their nutrition. The digestive system of chickens likes variety. They can eat tomatoes, greens, and any number of extra food scraps.

Since we keep milk cows on our farm, we skim a lot of cream off the milk, leaving skimmed milk. Nobody really wants the skim, so we soak our chicken feed in it. Providing them extra nutrients and probiotics not only cuts feed costs, but it makes for healthier birds.

Fermented Feed

Lastly, you can ferment their feed. We fill a 35 gallon barrel about half way with feed, then fill the rest of it with water. Let it sit covered for a few days until the feed swells and ferments. You’ll definitely be able to smell the fermenting process giving off a sweet, almost alcohol scent. We have been able to feed about 30% less in the amount of feed we have to purchase for our meat birds this way.

Adding skimmed, raw milk helps to culture the mixture and the smell changes to a cheesier scent.

This has worked so well, that our current batch of Cornish cross broilers are taking longer to grow out because we haven’t been fermenting their feed. (The barrel was moved to the other side of our property for other animals.)

Broiler Chicken Essentials

Raising broiler chickens is one the easiest things that you can add to your homestead. They really only need a few essentials to grow out.

brooder set up with heat supply
food and water
a way to keep them protected from weather and predators
Livestock Feed Storage

Butchering necessities are minimal too.

a sharp knife for dispatching and evisceration
scalding water to pull feathers
A plucker is optional. While its a really nice addition, it isn’t needed.
a cooler to rest them on ice

Young Chicks

Cornish cross chicks need to be kept warm until they begin growing their feathers. Keeping their brooder at 100°F is essential or they will die. A heat plate or a heat lamp for every 25 chicks is needed so they don’t crowd the warmest space and get smushed.

Another problem that we’ve had is that the cornish cross chicks aren’t the smartest animals on the farm. They tend to emerge themselves in their water, getting chilled, and then they die.

To prevent this, we use small waterers that they can’t fit their bodies in. If you can’t find something small enough, you can add rocks to their water tray so that they can still drink the water between the rocks, but they can’t get into it.

Final Weeks

As you approach six to seven pounds of live weight in your birds, make sure that you don’t overfeed them. You can switch to a finisher feed, which has added chicken scratch, if you’d like. Steady rationing of feed is still necessary.

A sudden increase in added feed can cause green muscle disease. Green muscle is a phenomenon that gives the meat a green hue. The awful part is that you can’t see it until after cooking. While it won’t hurt anyone to eat it, nobody wants green chicken meat.

If you allow your cornish cross to get too old, you’ll have tough meat to put in the freezer. You may notice that they’ve begun to lay eggs too. This isn’t always the case, but it can certainly happen.

Total Cost When Calculating How Much Feed Do Meat Chickens Eat

1132.50 pounds sounds like a lot, but you’re going to average about 5 pound dressed birds (for cockerels). I can purchase enough feed from my local feed mill for about $271.80. For 250 pounds of meat, that’s $1.09 per pound of chicken.

At the time of writing this post, Walmart sells it’s cheapest whole chickens for $1.32/pound. That’s a $57.50 savings for the whole batch. But wait, there’s more.

A Fair Comparison?

But let’s compare apples to apples shall we? Walmart’s cheapest chicken is not pasture raised with humane treatment. Those birds are raised in a cramped space inside four walls with no sunlight, no grass, no dirt baths, and often suffering from ammonia scald on their breasts from sitting in their own manure.

My birds are raised on grass, picking through cow patties, cleaning up undigested grains, and chasing bugs. We also supplement with other feeds as already mentioned.

Don’t forget about the bone broth, feet, and usable organs. Compostable manure, blood for the garden, and fly control for our pastures are more benefits of raising cornish cross birds at home. My favorite part is the food security gained from raising our own meat.

Do I think that raising your own meat birds is worth the hassle? Yes, I absolutely feel that everyone can raise their own poultry, and that it’s a worthy endeavor.

The deep flavor that fresh poultry brings is unmatched by anything I have found at the grocery store.

Summarizing How Much Feed Do Meat Chickens Eat

Finally, fifty birds will eat 1132.50 pounds of feed. When asking how much feed do meat chickens eat, remember that you can buy the feed and raise the batch one time for the whole year. Providing 250 pounds of meat for your freezer, and chicken for the next year brings a better product and food security, which equals peace of mind. You can do it!