Red Hen Food

Laucke Mills Red Hen Free Range Layer Feed

While overall this would be a great food to feed your hens, there are a number of things I didn't like that mean I probably won't purchase this again.

The pros of this grain mix is that it does not contain any pellets. I refused to buy pellets for my hens even though that is what the store tried to push. I prefer a more natural diet that does not contain highly processed foods which can be full of anti-biotics and hormones that your chickens just don't need.

In the cons, it contains small rocks, which hens will eat in order to help them process their food in their crop, however I provide shell grit and they are able to pick up this sort of thing in the backyard, so I wasn't very happy paying for rocks which they don't eat.

My hens are also not very keen on the split peas and these seem to comprise of roughly half of the food mix. This meant that they were always telling me how hungry they were even when they had a bowl full of neglected peas left to eat.

Therefore we've decided that we're going to switch to a diet of mainly wheat and buy smaller bags of seed mix or sunflower seeds (which they love) so that we can give them a small handful with their daily grain.

The Red Hen Layer mix was AU$32 for a 30kg bag. Wheat is only going to cost me AU$26 for a 40kg bag! So with the savings we will buy them a little 5kg bag of sunflower seeds for AU$9 as a treat.

Laucke Mills website