Commercial egg laying hens normally eat somewhere around a 16% protein feed, no treats, no forage, no nothing else. All they eat is that commercial 16% feed. It contains everything they need to stay healthy and produce nice commercial quality and sized eggs. If they fed them a higher protein diet the eggs would be larger which could cause medical problems from laying those larger eggs.
Chickens that forage for practically everything they eat may eat more or less that 16% protein even if you feed them a higher protein feed. You don’t control every bite that goes inside them, you just don’t know exactly what they are eating. It’s not what is in one bite, it’s how many grams or micrograms of calcium, protein, fats, fiber, minerals, vitamins, and other things they consume in an entire day, and even that is averaged over several days. If you are feeding a fair amount of fairly low protein treats you might need a slightly higher protein feed. If you are feeding a lot of high protein treats you probably aren’t gaining anything by feeding a higher protein feed. They can thrive even if they don’t get the precise micrograms of all the nutrients they need.
Some people eat a high protein diet, others eat a lower protein diet. In many cases people on the lower protein diets are extremely healthy. Chickens and humans can do quite well on different diets, high or low in certain nutrients, as long as you don’t get ridiculously out of balance in those nutrients.
Commercial chickens have fairly small bodies on purpose, they are bred that way. They don’t need a lot of protein or other nutrients to maintain that body like many of our chickens do. If you are raising your chickens for show you should be feeding them a fairly high protein diet so they grow big as show chickens should and so they can maintain those larger bodies.
Some of it is how they were raised. If your chickens have always eaten a high protein diet they probably need more protein than mine do. Their bodies have probably adjusted to it. Mine eat a fairly low protein base diet and forage for a lot of their food. I really don’t think they find that much extra high protein foods to eat, at least not consistently.
I see a lot of Layer feed that is 16% protein. A lot of people feed that, some feed nothing else, some add treats or let them forage. Those chickens do great. I see a lot of people on here that fixate on protein, protein, protein. You don’t love your chickens unless you feed them a lot of extra protein. In my opinion, unless you are raising specialized chickens that need a specialized diet like show chickens or meat chickens, you are splitting frog hairs worrying about the difference in 17% or 18% protein feeds, even if they don’t forage. The vast amount of our backyard flocks will do perfectly fine whether they get a 16% or 20% protein base feed, whether they forage or get treats or not.
