Boulder Vermicomposting

Redworms for chicken feed

July 20th, 2010

One of the things I didn’t think of when brainstorming what to do with redworms was to use it as a supplemental source of feed for chickens.  Luckily, some other folks have thought about it.  Here’s a good page with some suggestions.  If you are at all familiar with worms, you can skip the first 2/3rds of the page–it’s only the last section where the author discusses how to use worms to feed chickens.  He has 4 suggested ways to integrate worms into a chicken system, including building a wormery with various sections that would allow the chickens to eat some worms and not others, and drying the worms using them as a protein additive.

I was talking to someone a few weeks ago who said that worms contained a fair amount of zinc, and that zinc is helpful for egg production.  I wasn’t able to substantiate the first statement (though it looks like too much zinc is toxic to E. Foetida).  As for the second, I found this reference stating that “normally, 15 to 30 grams of zinc are added to 1 ton of feed”.

It looks like some backyard chicken keepers have investigated redworms as a supplemental protein source.  At the bottom of the post, AK-Bird-Brain runs the numbers, and concludes that, given the amount of food scraps (20-25 lbs) one would have to feed worms to get 1 lb of extra worms a day, one would be better off just feeding the scraps directly to the chickens.  This makes sense the me–the only situation where I can see coming to a different conclusion would be if:

• you wanted the castings for your garden or to sell and
• you had access to a large amount of feedstock that chickens might not eat (chicken manure [here's a post describing such a system], other manure, hair, etc)

I also found this table of chicken parasites that can be transmitted via worms (though it says earthworms, so I’m not sure it applies to redworms).  Some other posts in the backyardchickens site also implied that chickens don’t like the taste of redworms, either.

What do you think?  Do any of you have experience using redworms for supplemental nutrition for chickens?

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized