How do you manage feeding your chickens? Do you provide everything they eat or do they forage a lot? If they forage much you’ve lost all hope of micromanaging their feed intake.
If you look at the ingredients list on your Laying Mash it probably has a lot of corn in it. Corn provides a lot of nutrients. Many people on this forum seem to obsess over protein levels and forget everything else. They are all important but I’ll mainly talk about protein. The nutrient level in corn depends on different things, type of corn and how mature it is when harvested. Normally field corn which I think you are growing has over 16% protein when it is milk stage but that gets down to maybe the 11% range when it is totally mature. I’ll also assume you are talking about mature corn.
As a general rule of thumb if you limit how much you feed them of any treats to a total of 10% of their daily intake and the rest they eat is that Laying Mash they are close enough to maintaining a balanced diet. That doesn’t matter if you are talking about a really low protein treat like some stuff from the kitchen or garden or some really high protein source like cat food or other meat products. Another rule of thumb is that if they can clean it up in about 10 to 20 minutes it will constitute about 10% of their total diet. That assumes they go crazy over it like most flocks do over corn.
The Laying Mash probably has a total percent protein of around 16%. That is on the label too. They are probably using mature field corn with about an 11% contribution to the total protein so they are adding other components to raise the average protein content to 16%. They balance all the ingredients to get all the various nutritional requirements to where they need to be.
Whether yours forage a lot or not, I’d try to limit the total additional corn, above what is already in the Laying Mash, to that 10%. You could feed them a higher protein treat to balance out protein levels if you feed them more, but how does that affect calcium, fiber, fats, sodium, magnesium, manganese, copper, zinc, and all the other nutrients they need?
The biggest danger to feeding them a lot of corn is that you upset their balanced diet that they need.
