Commercial chicken feed is hard as heck. Just out of curiosity I took a piece of the dry corn out of their grain and tried to eat it. It was unbelievably hard and difficult to get chewed up; I had to spit it out after I chewed on it for a minute. I got to thinking, "in a chickens natural environment, they wouldn't have dried grain to eat so why should they here." I then started soaking my scratch grain in water for a day before I feed it to them.
I am a big advocate of using models in nature for farming and gardening. The intricate processes of nature have worked for millions and billions of years, or however long, so who are we to think we can come up with something better. This hard-as-a-rock feed has to be difficult to digest and limit feed conversions. Since I have been soaking it I have noticed a slight decrease in feed consumption.
With my tendency toward modeling nature on my farm, I want to get completely away from feed, except for winter maybe. They will be free ranging pretty much where they want scratching through leaves and sticks and what not, getting bugs and worms for protein and grass and weeds etc. for their plant material. That's another thing about chickens; they are omnivores so this vegetarian diet that some folks are feeding their chickens these days is not something they would be doing naturally.
our chickens are free range and really don't eat all that much. In the spring and summer we just supplement them with some oyster shells.
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