Okay, this isn’t exactly a ‘health benefit’ per se… but valuable nonetheless! As chicken feed grain soaks in water to ferment, it also expands in volume – so your birds will get full faster. They aren’t being cheated out of anything in the process though, like filling up on junk food.
No, that does not save money on feed.
Yes, the water causes the feed to swell. The same thing happens inside the chicken, if they eat dry feed and drink water.
But that does not mean they need less total feed. The water does not provide protein, it does not provide energy (calories), it does not provide vitamins or minerals. Water is NOT a substitute for feed.
If you like comparisons with people, adding water to the feed is like making the person drink extra glasses of water with their meal. It is not going to make them fat and unhealthy (like junk food), but it is not good food that will keep them healthy either.
Chickens can safely eat their food wet or dry, fermented or not. But they will need the same amount of food each way (meaning: the number of pounds to buy per week is going to stay the same.)
As regards the original question that was asked almost 15 years ago:
My friends and I are getting chickens for our school's campus...We plan on having about 3-4 chickens.
They'll be in empty garden beds, and will get a lot of tastiness from grit, grubs, bugs and weeds from the soil. We're gonna supplement that with food scraps from the kitchen, so will store-bought feed be necessary? if so, how much? if not, awesome!
With just 3 or 4 chickens, and access to the food scraps from an entire school cafeteria, it is probably possible to keep the chickens healthy without buying feed. That will take some research on nutrition, and will probably mean giving the chickens more scraps than they want to eat, so they can pick out the most nutritious bits for themselves.
The food scraps from a typical family are not enough for a typical backyard flock (much smaller amount of scraps, sometimes a larger flock as well.) So the previous advice about needing to buy food is correct for most flocks that people ask about. Buying a balanced feed is also easier than learning to recognize and provide what chickens need to be healthy, so that also makes it a better choice for some people. Learning about chicken nutrition might be a very good project in a school setting.
I know this is an old thread, so the answer probably does not matter to the original poster. But because other people do read old threads to learn from them, I figured I'd add something that had not been said yet.
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