The short answer to that is yes, chickens can eat frozen corn, but they usually wait for it to thaw before they go about eating it. It’s cheap, it lasts quite a while, depending on how you store it and is the easiest grain for chickens to digest.
What Kind of Corn to Feed Your Chickens
You can use pretty much any variety, and in any form: cooked or raw, as long as it’s not boiling when you feed it to your chicken. They can have it as a grain, sweet white or yellow, cooked and cooled, or frozen, depending on how and when you feed them.
Why Feed Your Chickens Frozen Corn?
Feeding your chicken corn can adversely affect its body temperature, depending on which season you feed it to your chickens.
Corn, which is high in calories, will give your chicken a good amount of the calories it needs to provide energy to warm its body, especially during the winter months. However, this might not be such a great idea during the summer months when your chicken will feel hot. Trust me, there are other ways to roast your chicken.
This is where frozen corn comes in. Frozen corn is a great treat for your chickens that will help them cool down on a hot summer day. Frozen corn will effectively regulate its core temperature.
Either way, corn will regulate your chicken’s body temperature.
Corn Nutritional Value for Chickens
Your chicken needs a certain amount of calories to function. Corn, also known as maize, is the most popular choice of grain to feed poultry. It is also the easiest grain for chickens to digest. This applies to both the kernels and thawed out frozen corn that comes out of the bag.
Here’s a short list of all the nutrients you can find in corn:
Corn is pretty low in fiber, only 1.9%, and will not affect your chicken’s digestion.
7.5% of corn is crude protein, which is low in methionine. This is why corn is often combined with soybean meal, which has a relatively higher composition of methionine.
The phosphorus found in corn grain is bound to phytate, and not easily available to chickens. You can feed your poultry low-phytate varieties of corn, so check the back of the frozen corn bag to check.
Sweet corn, in particular, has a good dose of lutein and zeaxanthin, both of which are phytochemicals that will help keep your chicken’s vision healthy.
Frozen Corn Recipe for Chickens
You can also consider adding other ingredients and making a kind of frozen corn salad for your chicken. Here’s what you can do:
Take a small container. Chop up any leftover fruits and veggies you have in your refrigerator: tomatoes that have gone a little too soft, a carrot that has dried out a little, bits of zucchini or apple.
Add your frozen corn, and even some peas if you have them.
Can chickens eat frozen corn? Yes. Can they eat garlic, onions, and avocados? That’s an emphatic no. So avoid those three ingredients, as well as anything that you think has gone a little off.
Put them all in your container, give the ingredients a toss, skip the seasoning and condiments, and pour in water till the container is full. Freeze this overnight.
You can store these frozen corn treats for a bit and feed it to your chicken over the course of the week.
How Much Frozen Corn Can Your Chickens Eat?
How much frozen corn do chickens eat, and how much to feed them are two very different questions. Chickens will eat a lot of corn, if you don’t keep an eye on their feeding habits or if you overfeed them.
Seeing as how corn is highly calorific, this might be the best idea, especially if you have a lazy chicken in the pen. When feeding them frozen corn, give them no more than 1oz or 28 grams, and ideally, feeding them mixed corn is the most feasible solution.
Mixed cornmeal is usually 80-90% wheat, and 10-20% cracked maize, which gives them a balanced diet.