I recently met an old-timer who was expounding on his perceived evils of commercially prepared feeds. In his estimation they were of high cost & of low quality. More or less, he said people were wasting money. He could have come off as nasty or a know-it-all but he really was a sweet, engaging guy & his stories of "old-time living" were so fun & interesting that you couldn't help but love the guy. He claims that the ONLY thing he's ever fed his chickens was beans & pasta or beans & rice & they ate less, thrived on it, laid strong, healthy eggs & he spent less on those ingredients than he ever would on a commercial feed.
Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? Could such a combo REALLY provide full-grown hens with all the nutrition they need to be healthy AND lay eggs?
He has proverbial "rose colored glasses" on, his memory is influenced by nostalgia, or he had much lower definitions of "healthy and productive" than is expected of a modern bird.
Poultry nutritional needs are better understood than any other creature on the planet - even humans. Anything less than optimal nutrition is associated with declines in egg size, quantity, nutritonal content, etc. Similarly, reduced rates of growth, final mass, feed efficiency, resistance to disease and parasite challenge.
Some of those differences are very small, and you might reasonably decide that "less than optimum" is still perfectly acceptable. But to try and meet a chickens minimal amino acid targets (even the old ones) using simply black beans and whole (soft) wheat pasta, you would need to use about 2 parts beans to 1 part pasta. Beans have a large number of anti-nutritive factors, such that inclusion rates greater than around 15% are associated with negative outcomes - yet the recipe is amlost 67% beans to reach a target Met level of a mere 0.3%. That's not cost effective either.
Add more pasta and your Met levels come down significantly, meany greater consumption to meeet targets, meaning excess carbs, fatty deposits leading to FLH and similar maladies. Don't use whole wheat? New calculations. Nor have we begun to address a host of vitamins and minerals needed, from non-phytate sources of Phosphorus (which that recipe doesn't have) to trace amounts of selenium (which it probably does) and everything in between.
Making high quality, balanced chicken feed is HARD. In answer to your question, no a two ingredient feed doesn't work. Because Math, ands because Nature doesn't provide any two ingredients which, in combination, provide a balanced diet meeting all of a chicken's needs, anymore than it provides two ingredients meeting all of a human's needs. Look about the world, there are very few creatures adapted to live on just one or two feed sources - and most of them are threatened, endangered, or extinct.
None are omnivores domesticated for most of human existence.
