What if you could grow your own chicken food faster than brewing coffee?

Quick Recap for Busy Chicken Peeps

• Sprouts grow in days, not weeks or months

• Chickens can’t digest greens the way we think

• Why kitchen scraps are more garbage than gold

• The bucket system that feeds flocks daily

• Cut feed bills 30–50% and boost egg quality

The Garage That Became a Farm

When I first started, it wasn’t on acres of pasture. It was in my garage. Tight walls, low ceiling, not much room for mistakes. Space forced me to get smart. Whatever I grew had to work in a closet-sized footprint and give me a solid return.

That’s why I landed on sprouts and microgreens. They weren’t just efficient. They were teachable. I could show anyone—kids, teens, adults—how to grow them and watch their eyes light up as seeds turned into something alive and edible.

But here’s the twist: the real lesson came from the chickens.

Garbage Disposal or Bioreactor?

Like many backyard keepers, I tossed scraps to my six hens. Old fridge food, kitchen peelings, and sometimes the leftover mats from microgreens. The chickens picked at it, sure. But one day it hit me: chickens don’t even have the enzyme to digest green plant matter.

So what was I really doing? Feeding them garbage. A disposal system, not a bioreactor.

That realization stung. If I were going to give them something “fresh,” it needed to be fuel their bodies could use. Not scraps that passed through without purpose.

And that’s when sprouts walked back into the story.

The SproutingOS

An unfortunate surplus of sprouts piled up one season, and I decided to test it on my hens. They didn’t just eat them. They devoured them.

But I didn’t grow them the way most folks do—in flat black trays like microgreens. Instead, I borrowed from industry models and built a homemade sprout spinner. Seeds to harvest in three days. Later, that contraption evolved into something even simpler: buckets. Multiple buckets in rotation.

Every day, fresh sprouts. Every day, feed them alive with enzymes and nutrients that birds could actually use. Check out what we use here...

The Rhythm

I boiled the whole process into a repeatable rhythm:

Calibrate → Sanitize → Soak → Rinse → Rotate → Feed.

• Calibrate how much seed you need (1 oz dry seed = 4–8 oz fodder).

• Sanitize with a light bleach soak to kill mold and bacteria.

• Soak for 24 hours, then…

• Rinse daily to keep seeds clean and hydrated.

• Rotate buckets so there’s always a fresh one coming online.

• Feed your flock daily—not once in a while.

Because here’s the thing: feeding sprouts once in a while is like eating fast food all year, then shopping at Whole Foods once. That doesn’t make you healthy. It makes you broke.

Consistency is what transforms the birds—and the eggs.

The Payoff

Right now, folks using this method are seeing 30–50% reductions in feed bills compared to bagged feed alone. And the hens? They pay it back with eggs that don’t just look better...thicker shells, richer yolks...but taste like something you can’t buy at the store.

Once you crack one of those yolks, you’ll never go back.