Did you know that grass and insects can make up about 20% of a chicken’s diet in the summer months? Unfortunately, cooped-up chickens don’t have access to that same scrumptious feast. But you can fill in the gaps with chicken scraps of nearly any sort.

Although some websites report that certain human foods are bad for chickens (notably dried beans, avocado stones and skins, green potatoes or tomatoes, and chocolate), I have my doubts that a non-starving chicken would even attempt to eat something hazardous. (Except possibly chocolate — but why are you throwing chocolate out?! Oh, and rotten meat — Harvey Ussery learned the hard way that dangling a corpse above the chicken coop in hopes maggots would drop in for free food wasn’t as clever as it seemed at first.)

The food scraps I actually consider hazardous in the chicken coop fit into an entirely different category. Anything high nutrient and tasty is likely to attract vermin (raccoons, opossums, rats) that will stick around and nibble on your eggs and/or flock. Specifically, I sincerely regretted giving fresh sweet-corn cobs to our flock because it jumpstarted a raccoon infestation that lingered for several months.

In the end, I recommend using your best judgement. If your flock has plenty of laying pellets around and the coop is tight enough to keep out critters, you might get away with tossing in anything at all.

So many of us get into critters through love…while also harboring a hope that our livestock will pay for themselves. There are high- and medium-tech ways of keeping track of cash inflow and outflow in such a situation, of course — spreadsheets and apps come to mind. But what if numbers give you the willies and you still want to make sure the eggs you’re selling are bringing in enough cash to pay for the flock’s feed?

One easy solution is an egg-money jar. Put in cash when you sell a farm product. Spend cash (only from this jar!) when you need to pay for a farm-related expense. At the end of the month, you’ll know whether your flock is in the red or black based on how much money is left in the jar.