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Did your wife's uncle tell you how those "big boys" raise their chickens? Did they tell you how much space they have on those commercial egg production facilities per bird? Did he explain how much confinement increases likelihood of disease? How birds on that scale are all but impossible to adequately monitor for potential outbreaks before it gets out of control? Or did he forget those parts (and probably so many more)?
Are you raising your birds in a confinement setup?
If not what makes you think they should be fed like confinement raised birds?
And if so, why are you raising a backyard flock at all? Your eggs will not differ for the better from those you can purchase at your nearest big box retailer and will be exponentially more expensive.
As for the protein requirements you've set forth, if he really explained to you the depths of chicken feed formulation he should have also included that you should be more concerned about amino acid profile than crude protein.
Your wife's uncle is probably a wealth of information and a perfectly nice and well-meaning guy, but following his advice for a non-confinement, backyard flock is short sighted. His knowledge draws from experience and an industry that is so unlike what you are probably trying to accomplish it's not even in the same ballpark. Trusting anyone's "every word" without verification of those words is not a good idea. Even if you were trying to start a commercial egg farm you would want to research and verify his recommendations as industry practice is ever-changing, and if he's been out of the game for even a short period his knowledge could very well be out dated to current practices.
