sunflower seeds for chickens?

[vegie chicken]

what i need to know about sunflowers is
how many plants would i need to feed a flock of thifteen chooks throughout the year as i will be storing them. how many flowers or seeds if i fed them sunflowers at a lower rate than wheat and barley as it will most likely be a treat.
what they require and can chooks be free ranged with them?

 

[digitS']

I grow a few sunflowers, wheat and millet each year and share the seed with the backyard hens. I am not trying to add much to their diet this way, however.

Work backwards:

Black oil sunflowers yield is about 1,000 pounds per acre. One acre is 43,560 square feet. So, you need about 44 square feet for each pound of seed in an average farm field. In an ideal garden, you might hope to double that.

A 1,000 square foot area might produce 40 pounds of seed.

Let's say your 13 chickens eat 1/3 pound of feed each day. They eat about 1,600 pounds in a year. You would need, at least, 4,000 square feet of sunflowers to produce 10% of that feed.

Free-range to harvest the seed? I don't think so. They could pick up the seed as it falls to the ground (or as it is dropped by the birds pulling it out of the heads) but that would be a very short season. The finches let me know when my sunflowers are ready to harvest.

Altho' I have fun with these kind of questions, math has never been my long suit. But, coming up with these kind of answers was why I never suggested to a neighbor that I could use his 1/2 acre field to raise grain for my chickens. He wanted me to invest in blueberry bushes and share the profits on sales . . . ha!

Steve

 

[lesa]

Digits, all that math makes my head hurt... This is how I would figure it out. First of all, you are not feeding your chickens exclusively these seeds- I assume you are feeding layer pellets. So, lets say you want to give them a flower head a day in the fall and winter months... I would say if you have 200 flowers you should be good. Some will be larger than others, etc.
I must say that my chickens don't go crazy for these flower heads, until all else is gone. If I throw them one this time of year, they hardly look at it. Come February, they love it!
I have had volunteer sunflowers come up in the chicken yard, and they have not bothered them. But, if you are going to really grow them in the chicken yard, I would recommend a little fencing. Good luck!

 

[hoodat]

They like the Russian sunflowers best. Those are the ones with the black seeds that are grown commercially for sunflower oil. I think it's the oil in them they like.