Where poultry feed is lost between the store and the beak: overfilled feeders, wrong height, rats, wild birds, stale fines and torn bags, and how to measure it.
Halaal Farms Ghana team4 October 2026 · 13 min read
Five per cent does not sound like much. On a flock of 1,000 layers eating 115 kg of feed a day, it is 5.75 kg a day, 172 kg a month, or about three and a half 50 kg bags that you paid for, carried to the house and poured out for nothing. At an example price of GH₵ 400 a bag, that is close to GH₵ 1,400 a month. A farm with overfilled feeders and a rat problem can lose double that without anyone seeing it, because wasted feed does not pile up anywhere. It sinks into the litter, leaves in the stomachs of rats and weaver birds, or goes mouldy at the bottom of a stack.
Feed is around two-thirds of the cost of producing a broiler or an egg, so no other saving is as large or as quick as stopping feed you have already bought from being lost. The losses happen at a handful of points between the delivery truck and the bird's beak. This guide takes them in the order that usually matters most, starting with how to find out how much you are losing.
Guessing does not help, because the answer changes what you do. A farm losing feed in the litter needs to adjust feeders. A farm losing it at night needs to deal with rats. Four simple checks will tell you which you are.
Divide the feed that left the store in a week by the number of birds and by seven. That is what each bird appears to eat in a day. Now compare it with what a bird of that type and age should eat. A brown laying hen eats roughly 110 to 120 g a day. If your 1,000 hens are "eating" 132 g, about 15 kg a day is going somewhere other than into hens. For broilers, compare with the feed intake column of the breed guide for their age.
Take a double handful of litter from directly under a feeder and another from the middle of the floor, well away from any feeder. Shake each through a kitchen sieve or a piece of mosquito mesh over a sheet of paper. If the sample from under the feeder is full of maize grit and feed dust and the other is not, the feeders are spilling.
Slide a wide, shallow tray under one hanging feeder, covered with a piece of wire mesh so that the birds cannot eat or scratch out what falls. Leave it for 24 hours, then weigh what has collected. Multiply by the number of feeders. If 40 g falls under one feeder and you have 30 feeders, you are losing 1.2 kg a day in that house from spillage alone. Repeat after adjusting the feeders to see what the change achieved.
Once a week, count the bags. Opening stock plus deliveries minus bags issued should equal what is on the pallets. Weigh a few bags from each delivery as well. Missing bags, short-weight bags and bags emptied by rats do not show in the poultry house at all, but they are all feed you paid for.
How full you keep the feeder is the largest single cause of spillage. Often-quoted figures from extension work on trough feeders run like this: a trough filled to the brim loses around 30 per cent of its feed, one that is two-thirds full about 10 per cent, half full about 3 per cent, and one-third full about 1 per cent. The exact numbers vary with the feeder and the feed, but the direction never does. Feed above the rim, or close to it, is pushed over the edge every time a bird rakes its beak through it.
Put the rule into practice in three ways.
The first week is the exception that needs watching. Chicks start on trays or paper so that they find feed quickly, and they walk in it, scratch it out and foul it. Put down small amounts several times a day instead of a deep layer, and move chicks onto proper feeders in stages during the first week to ten days. The chick brooding guide sets out the early feeding routine.
The lip of the feeder should be level with the birds' backs. At that height a bird reaches in and down to eat, and feed dragged back by the beak falls inside the pan. Check it every few days in broilers, which grow fast enough to be wrong-footed within a week, and at least every week in growing pullets.
When a feeder is too low, birds stand over it, rake feed out sideways, scratch litter and droppings into it and sometimes perch on the rim. When it is too high, the smallest birds cannot reach properly. They stretch, drop feed as they pull back, and fall behind the rest of the flock.
A few other points about position save feed.
Feeder design matters too. Pans with an inward-turned lip or a grille hold feed in far better than open bowls and cut-down gallons. Long troughs need a spinning bar or wire along the top to stop birds standing in them. The types and how many birds each serves are compared in our guide to choosing poultry feeders.
Chickens choose what they eat by size and feel. Given mash, they pick out the larger particles of maize first and leave the fine dust. If the feeder is topped up before it is emptied, that dust builds up in the bottom of the pan day after day. It is not worthless filler. The fine fraction is where most of the vitamin and mineral premix, the salt and the added amino acids end up, so birds that never eat it are on an unbalanced diet while you pay for a balanced one.
Old fines also absorb moisture from the air, cake, and go mouldy. Once feed in a pan smells sour or is stuck in lumps, birds avoid it and flick it out to reach fresh feed underneath.
The answer is to let the birds finish what is there.
Feed form makes a difference. Pellets and crumbles are wasted less than mash because every piece is the whole ration and nothing can be sorted. If you feed mash, ask the mill for an even, medium grind. Very fine mash is dusty, sticks to beaks and blows out of feeders.
Watch a group of hens at a trough for two minutes. Some eat neatly. Others sweep the beak from side to side and send feed over the edge with every stroke. This raking is partly natural searching behaviour, and it is worse when the feed level is high or the mash is very uneven.
Beak shape also plays a part. A long, sharp, untrimmed beak is an efficient tool for picking through feed and flicking aside what is not wanted. Properly beak-trimmed layers waste noticeably less feed, which is one of the reasons commercial layer flocks are trimmed (the main one being to control feather pecking). A badly done trim causes the opposite problem. A hen with a lower beak much longer than the upper, or a crossed or split beak, cannot pick up feed cleanly. She shovels, drops what she lifts and needs a deeper feed level to eat at all.
Check beaks when you handle birds. A few with deformed beaks in a flock of pullets are candidates for culling. If the whole flock is uneven, speak to whoever did the trimming before the next batch. Our article on beak trimming in layers explains what a correct trim looks like and why a trained person should do it.
An adult rat eats roughly 25 to 30 g of feed a night, about a tenth of its body weight. That sounds trivial until you multiply it. A colony of 100 rats eats 2.5 to 3 kg a night, which is 75 to 90 kg a month, or nearly two bags. They spoil more than they eat, fouling feed with urine and droppings that can carry salmonella, and they gnaw the corners of bags so that feed runs out onto the store floor.
You will rarely see them by day. Look for the signs instead: dark, pellet-shaped droppings along walls, gnawed bag corners, greasy smear marks where they run along ledges and pipes, burrows at the base of walls outside, and feed trays emptied overnight. A walk round the house with a torch two hours after dark tells you more than any daytime inspection.
The feed-saving steps are straightforward. Do not leave feed in open trays overnight where rats are active. Keep bags on pallets away from walls so that you can see behind them. Sweep up spilt feed every day, because spillage is what attracts the first rats. Close holes in walls and under doors, and clear weeds, timber and rubbish from around the buildings. Baiting has to be done safely so that poultry, dogs and children cannot reach it. Proofing, trapping and bait safety are covered fully in our article on keeping rats, snakes and wild birds out of the poultry house.
Weavers, doves, sparrows and crows learn quickly where the feed is. A flock of weaver birds going in and out of an open-sided house all day takes a steady share of feed, and unlike a rat, each visitor arrives from somewhere else. Wild birds can carry Newcastle disease, mites and salmonella into the house on the same trip.
Ordinary chicken wire with openings of about 2.5 cm keeps chickens in and lets small wild birds through. To keep them out, cover the open sides with mesh of about 2 cm or smaller, repair every tear, and close the gaps at the eaves and above doors, which is where most of them enter. Keep the door shut or fit a mesh inner door. Never feed your birds on the ground outside the house, and clean up spills around the feed store, since a scattering of feed outside is an invitation.
A two-minute test for any feeder: fill it as usual, step back and watch the birds eat. If you can see feed going over the rim, the level is too high, the feeder is too low, or both. Adjust and watch again. Nothing else on this page is as quick or as cheap.
Some feed is wasted before a bird ever sees it.
Not all waste falls on the floor. Feed that goes into a bird and produces nothing is lost just as surely.
All of these show up in one figure, the feed conversion ratio, which is why it is worth calculating for every batch. Our article on feed conversion ratio with worked examples shows how, and the poultry profit calculator shows what a change in feed use does to the batch result.
The last step is the one that tells you whether the others are working. A flock whose apparent intake falls back towards the expected figure after you adjust the feeders has just shown you, in kilos, what was going on the floor.
Getting feeders, feed and chicks right together is easier at the planning stage than in week three. If you are preparing for a new flock of layer chicks or broilers, Halaal Farms Ghana gives free advice before and after an order, including how many feeders a batch of your size needs at each age. Call 024 915 1503 or send the order form with your flock size and start date.
On a well-run farm, waste can be held to 2 or 3 per cent. On farms with overfilled feeders, feeders set too low, rats and careless filling, losses can reach 10 per cent or more, and the farmer usually does not know. The only way to find your own figure is to measure: compare what the flock appears to eat with what birds of that age should eat, and check the litter under the feeders.
Usually because the feeder is too full or too low. Birds rake sideways with the beak to find the particles they prefer, and anything above the rim goes over the edge. Fine dusty mash, long or uneven beaks, too few feeders for the flock and bored birds all make it worse. Lower the feed level to one-third, raise the lip to back height and check again.
No. Feed that has fallen into litter is mixed with droppings, moisture and mould, and feeding it back risks coccidiosis and other gut disease. Feed spilt on a clean, dry store floor is different: sweep it up the same day and use it. The answer for litter spillage is to stop it at the feeder, not to recover it afterwards.
Generally yes. Each pellet or crumb carries the whole ration, so birds cannot pick out the coarse pieces and leave the dust, and less is flicked out of the feeder or blown about. Mash can still be fed with little waste if it is evenly and not too finely ground, the feeders are kept one-third full and the hens are allowed to clean up the fines once a day.
In Ghana's heat and humidity, aim to use mash feed within about three to four weeks of the date it was made, and sooner in the rainy season or if the feed contains added oil. Vitamins lose strength, fats turn rancid and mould starts wherever moisture gets in. Check the manufacturing date before you pay, and do not buy more than about two weeks' supply at a time.
Written by the Halaal Farms Ghana team. We hatch and import day-old chicks at Opeikuma, Kasoa, and deliver to all 16 regions. This article is general guidance for farmers. For diagnosis and treatment of sick birds, speak to a vet or your district veterinary office.
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