Well said, and in agreement with my continued opinion that commercial chicken feed is not the perfect diet for poultry. Do you ever have a day when you just crave an ice cold glass of orange juice, or perhaps a nice tender steak, cooked to perfection on the grill? If the human diet consisted of nothing but Cheerios, which was advertised as the perfectly balanced food... how much greater would those cravings be? Not to attribute chicken behavior to being similar to human behavior/emotions/thought process... but when i see chicks delving into a bowl full of nothing more than garden soil with great gusto, while totally ignoring their feed, it tells me that poultry feed DOES NOT meet all of the needs of the average chicken!Forcing any animals to eat only one kind of food is asking for problems.. despite the manufactures claim that they are complete diets. After all, they what to sell the most of their product they can.. so they don't want us using less by feeding other foods to our chickens.
You might want to check the threads about making an electric pop door using a car radio antenna.I So my cheap chickens idea now turned into a fort knox coop with electric fencing, the run just went from 4x8 to 8x16, an electric door (probably 1500$ into a homemade coop/run).