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I don't know how I missed this one. It is a fun read. Anyway my OPINION.
Corn is a grain. Wheat is a grain. Bermuda grass seed is a grain. Orchard grass seed is a grain. Johnson grass seed is a grain. Grass seed in general is a grain. Different grains have different protein, fiber, carbohydrate, etc. contents. Chickens have been eating grains for thousands of years as a preferred source of concentrated nutrients. Humans have been eating grains for thousands of years as a preferred source of concentrated nutrients. When my dogs eat grass, they seem to prefer the seeds. Generally, the higher up the food chain you are the more concentrated your food source is in nutrients. I once found a link that showed the differences in protein, calories, and such for a few of the common grains but was unable to find that again. Maybe after some more coffee. Anyway corn is lower in protein and higher in calories than some other grains.
Chickens that free range eat a lot of different foods. Grain in the form of seeds is a preferred source, but they eat so many different things that they pretty much get a BALANCED diet.
Commercial chicken feed has been developed to give confined chickens that eat nothing but that commercial chicken feed a BALANCED diet, whether that is a Layer for hens that are laying or the special feeds for meaties. Those feeds are designed to give them the most efficient mix in terms of cost but also to keep them healthy enough to lay or produce meat efficiently. You really don't HAVE to feed them anything else. If you feed them anything else, you are upsetting that balance. The general recommendation is that you feed only enough treats so that they can clean them up in 10 to 20 minutes so you don't upset that balance too much. When I keep mine confined I violate that a lot. For example, when I make saur kraut with home grown cabbage, I put enough of the outside cabbage leaves in the run to last them for over a day. They survive. I am not in it commercially so i don't over worry about efficiency.
Commercial chicken feed is a mix of different things to give the relative proportions of protein, fat, fiber, calcium, and other stuff they need. Corn is one of the things in the mix, but so are maybe soybean, wheat, sunflowers, and other things that have different relative amounts of protein, fats, etc. You can get that right mix without corn, but you can also get the right mix with corn and corn is a relatively cheap grain compared to some of the others, hence economic efficiency. So Chkinut, in my opinion, there is nothing wrong with having corn as part of that mix.
Now, my opinion on something else that I think is related and I've seen in this thread. It is about corn keeping chickens warm or heating them up. Animals higher up the food chain seem to like things that are higher in energy. Fat is generally preferred over lean meat. Grass seed has a higher concentration of fat, or should I say calories, than say a blade of grass. I think that is why chickens prefer grains over some other foods. You can get into all kinds of twisted thinking processes over whether they eat more or less in the winter over summer when they are or are not laying or molting, and whether they need more calories to keep warm. Will you allow me to just say they need calories in the winter to keep warm and not over-worry about whether they get the calories from fats or protein? (Yes, protein has calories in it, just not as much as fat) They use the calories for various things such as energy to walk or to keep warm. Once they have used the calories they need for their body functions, whether walking or keeping warm, they store excess calories as fat. Converting calories to fat is normal in a lot of animals to store energy for when it is hard to get in nature. If calories are never hard to get, such as with most of our chickens, they don't use that fat. Anyone that has processed pullets or hens has probably noticed a fat pad in the pelvic area that is usually not as pronounced in roosters. That is where hens store the extra fat. (As an aside, too much fat in the pelvic area can cause laying problems in hens and too much fat overall can cause fatty liver syndrome, but that is another thread)
Chickens are warm-blooded animals. I don't know what temperature they keep their body, but they use enough calories to keep their body temperature where it needs to be. Any excess calories then go to fat. So any excess calories fed to them above what they need will not heat them up, but they do need enough calories to keep them warm. Since they are usually not laying eggs in the winter and I don't think they use near as many nutrients to grow feathers when they are molting as when they lay eggs, I personally don't see a lot of reason to overfeed them with calories in the winter. Just my personal opinion.
Does feeding them corn just before bedtime help keep them warm? From a calorie viewpoint, I don't think so. But there is something else working and the comments way back (I believe by ON) in this thread about alcohol keeping you warm helps explain it in a fun way. When the body is cold, the blood concentrates in the core of the body to conserve heat, since the blood is better insulated in the body core than in the extremities. That's why combs and wattles are so susceptible to frostbite. When it is cold, the blood leaves them to reduce heat loss. Alcohol makes you feel warm because it caused the blood circulation to the extremities to increase, thus bringing the warm blood from your core to the extremities. But the warmed blood will lose its heat faster in the extremities thus causing your overall body temperature to drop and cause you to freeze to death faster. Where this comes into play on this topic is that a chicken normally likes corn. If you feed it corn just before it goes to bed, it will fill its crop with corn and digest that overnight. The process of digestion causes blood to concentrate in the well-insulated core of the chicken. This may have some beneficial effect, but if the chicken is cold, the blood is going to concentrate there anyway. I personally doubt it has any significant beneficial effect, but it may. I'm not going to tell anybody to quit doing that.
As far as corn heating a chicken up in the summer, a chicken is a warm-blooded animal. Once the energy needed is used to get it to the proper temperature, any excess calories will go to fat. There may be some effect with blood concentrating in the core for digestion if corn is fed just before bedtime and thus hurt a chickens chance to cool off, but night times are normally cooler here than the heat of the day. I personally don't think it will make any significant difference heat-wise. My concern with feeding corn or certain other things IN EXCESS is the health problems caused by overly fat chickens.
Please take this as only my opinion with just enough facts thrown in to really confuse things.
