can I supplement chicken feed for something else

[joshua k]

is it possible to stop feeding commercial feed or do chickens have to have it. if so what would I need to feed them

 

[azygous]

It's possible to turn chickens out to fend for themselves. Indeed this is the extent of flock management of some chicken keepers. But those chickens eventually have health issues associated with vitamin deficiency, including heightened risk of disease due to poor immune response.

Commercial feed is formulated to contain all the vitamins and important minerals that chicken require. Good diet is the best flock management tool available to chicken keepers unless you wish to always be fighting one disease after another in your flock and facing high mortality.

 

[Shadrach]

is it possible to stop feeding commercial feed or do chickens have to have it. if so what would I need to feed them

It is possible to stop feeding chickens comercial feed and no, they don't have to have it.
That's the honest answer.
However when responsible people with experience in both chicken keeping and answering forum questions reply to such posts, the answer given by azyous is the correct response.
When replying to such posts one has to make some assumptions about the OP's knowledge and generally those who have sufficient knowledge to move from commercial feed to other options, wouldn't be asking the question in the first place.
This may seem a bit arrogant, but I hope at least part of the aim of BYC is to give good advice and sometimes the issues are too complicated to do much more than this.
My advice is feed your chickens commercial feed until you've learn't enough about nutrition to not ask such a question.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

and not to "jump on", but it is nearly impossible for the average chicken owner to reliably provide a nutritionally complete and well balanced feed meeting the optimal nutritional needs of a modern chicken. For a host of reasons completely out of the owner's control. Even if they could, without the economies of scale enjoyed by commercial mills, they can't do so at a cost savings.

The more I know about feeding birds, the less inclined I am to attempt to do so on my own - though I do engage in some "educated risk taking", I readily acknowledge that there are no guarantees, that my methods are not for most, and I do NOT recommend them.
BYC members have helped a few in rare or unique circumstances with at home feed recipes - but those persons were already successfully engaged in commercial scale farming, lived in remote locations with no commercial feed option, or were attempting a substitution of ingredients with a more readily available local grain (typically). With no guarantees, merely a start there, and adjust based on experience and observation.

My advice, like the others above, is don't attempt it. But if you want to educate yourself, I recommend you start with J Rhodes' recipe and flock management, then research/read/study until you understand why he uses the ingredients he does, in the quantities he does. You want to may particular interest to the research on poultry and B6, B12, Methionine, Lysine, Calcium sources, Phosphorus, Ca : P ratios, Selenium and acceptable fat levels. That should lead you to yet more more research and other topics that need understanding before you can begin to put together an optimum at home feed. In Theory.

In Practice, with no way to assay the actual nutritional contents of the ingredients, its educated guess work, more akin to stereotypical hedge witch of the dark ages than a scientific formulation.

 

[Penpal]

You can create your own feed. When we had chickens years ago they were fed commercial chick feed until they were about 8 weeks old. At that age they are big enough to go outside in the fresh air all day. They free ranged, but I put out locally grown wheat, corn, oat grouts. In the winter I added BOSS. They had free access to all the bugs, weeds, hay, etc. they could get. They were healthy and lived to age 7 when we had a problem with the neighbor's dogs and a fox.

As written above, you can't go into it willy nilly. I can't get the grain I need right now, only corn, so my free range chickens are on a commercial grower feed from the local Vita-Plus, which I think is better than what I can get at TSC.

You can make a maggot bucket (entice flies to lay eggs on a piece of meat or other yummy, let the maggots fall out which the chickens will eat), to supplement a commercial diet if they don't free range. You can add BOSS (black oil sunflower seed) in the winter to supplement your commercial feed.