Why We Spend More on Chicken Feed Now

We didn't start out with the feed we use today, and we definitely didn't start out splitting our coops between two different feeds. Years ago, someone told me "vegetarian feed" was better than the regular stuff, so we bought it. Took me a while, watching our birds go tearing after bugs and grubs every chance they got, before I laughed at myself. Chickens aren't vegetarians. I just liked the sound of the label and never stopped to ask what it actually meant for them.

That was more than ten years ago, and we've changed feed more than once since then. Every change started the same way: something we noticed, something we read, another look at the tag, another conversation about what we could actually afford. When you're feeding more than 100 chickens and other poultry, a few dollars a bag turns into real money fast. If you've ever stood in the feed store wondering why one bag costs twice as much as the one next to it, I get it. I've asked the same thing. The answer turned out to be two separate stories, one about soy and one about corn, and they ended with us running two different feeds side by side.

Soy became a personal thing

This one started with me, not the hens. Soy doesn't agree with me, and while I was working on getting it out of my own diet, it hit me that our laying hens were eating it every single day. I don't think soy belongs in our food or our animals' feed. We keep these birds to help feed our family well, so seeing soybean meal on that tag stopped me cold. I'd been so careful about my own plate and never once checked what was going into the hens laying our eggs.

Once I started digging, it got worse. Soy's isoflavones act like hormones in the body, and there's real research calling them out as endocrine disruptors. With my own autoimmune issues, that's not something I can shrug off. And soy is about as commodity as commodity crops get: 96% of U.S. soybean acreage in 2025 was genetically engineered, herbicide-tolerant seed, and it's propped up by federal commodity programs on top of that. Big Ag has a whole empire built on soybeans. Nobody in that empire was going to talk me out of pulling it from our coops.

So we switched those hens to soy-free feed, and I can eat their eggs again without the problems I used to have. That alone would've been enough reason to keep it out for good. But going soy-free doesn't mean much if the replacement feed is garbage, so we kept reading past the words on the front of the bag to see what was actually holding the ration together.

Then corn got the same look

Once you get in the habit of actually reading tags, corn is the next thing you can't unsee. It's mostly there for energy, and that's not a crime by itself, but once we found feeds that gave our layers the protein, calcium, and minerals they need without leaning on corn, we didn't have a reason to keep it around.

Our summers made up our minds for us just as much as the ingredient list did. We're in the Florida Panhandle, so heat is something we're managing every single day: shade, airflow, keeping water fresh, all of it. Turns out corn's starch converts to heat once a bird digests it, which is exactly what you don't want more of in July. New Country Organics has written about this and recommends a lower-starch, corn-free feed for hot climates, which lined up with something we were already worried about, so corn went the way of the soy.

I'm not saying a different bag of feed fixes a hot chicken on its own. Housing, water, airflow, and just paying attention to the birds still matter more than anything on a tag. But corn wasn't an ingredient we were attached to, especially not through a Panhandle summer, and we found feed that let us drop it.

Why we're running two feeds instead of one

Here's where the two feeds come in. We keep this many hens because we breed and hatch poultry, not because our family is eating that many eggs. When we're hatching, eggs from the breeding coops go toward that. When we're not, we sell eggs from the other coops to folks who want good eggs for their own table. The hens whose eggs I actually eat are on New Country Organics feed, full stop. Everybody else is on Tucker Milling's NatureCrest Layer: soy-free, corn-free, non-GMO, but not certified organic.

Would we love the whole flock on New Country Organics? Sure. But with a flock our size, we can't cover that cost across every coop and still sell eating eggs at a price our area will actually pay. People see the number on a carton of eggs and have no idea what's behind it. We can't eat that price difference every month, and neither can our customers.

So NatureCrest keeps corn and soy out of the coops that aren't mine to eat from, and New Country Organics covers the ones that are, and we're also working on shrinking the flock overall. Whether an egg's headed for the incubator, our own table, or somebody else's kitchen, that hen still deserves good care. Two feeds is how we make that work without blowing up the budget.

Why one bag costs more than another

Once we started buying feed this way, the price tags finally made sense. Corn and soy are grown and sold at massive scale, so feed built around them is just cheaper to make. That doesn't make it the feed we want, but it explains the gap. A mill has to work harder to build a complete ration without those two ingredients, and we're paying for that extra work.

Organic adds another layer on top of that. USDA organic standards control how the ingredients are grown and handled, and they rule out genetic engineering entirely: "non-GMO" and "certified organic" are not the same claim, which is exactly why NatureCrest and New Country Organics aren't interchangeable to us even though both skip corn and soy. Organic costs more because it actually is more.

Bag size gets me too. A 40-pound bag doesn't go as far as a 50-pound bag when you've got a flock our size, so I check cost per pound before anything else, then the ingredient list, then the guaranteed analysis. None of that tells me everything, but it keeps me from assuming the cheapest bag is the best deal, or the priciest one has to be the best feed.

And then there's just getting the bags here. Before we started selling feed ourselves at Whitetail Hollow Farms, we only knew feed by its weight: heavy, and ours to haul out to the coops. Now we see the whole trip: ingredients hauled to the mill, feed made and bagged there, then hauled back out to us. Whether freight shows up as its own charge or gets folded quietly into the price, we're the ones paying for that drive either way.

Where that leaves us

We've bought feed because a label sounded good, and we've gone back and read the tag again more than once since. My health got me questioning soy. Our summers got me questioning corn. And feeding a flock this size keeps us honest about what we can actually afford right now, including some hard calls about which birds we can keep going forward.

So when someone asks why our chicken feed costs what it does, I'm thinking about a lot more than the sticker price: what we chose to leave out, what had to replace it, the organic standard we're paying for on part of the flock, and just getting the stuff here. That's the real answer from our farm. We're trying to raise birds and eggs we feel good about, on a budget that's real, not aspirational. If you're weighing feed costs yourself, I hope this helps you look past the price tag and figure out what actually works for your flock and your family.

We'll keep posting these behind-the-scenes decisions as we make them, including what comes out of our own flock downsizing this year. Want those first? Join our farm email list.

Sources and further reading

• National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences: Endocrine disruptors and phytoestrogens
• Křížová et al., Isoflavones, Molecules (2019)
• USDA Economic Research Service: Herbicide-tolerant soybean acreage
• USDA Farm Service Agency: Federal commodity support programs
• Feedipedia: Nutrient composition of maize grain
• New Country Organics: Corn-free feed and warm-weather poultry care
• Tucker Milling: NatureCrest Layer ingredients
• USDA Agricultural Marketing Service: Organic standards