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It's worked differently for me for 25+ years. They (chicks, if I order from a hatchery) get chick starter until about 3 or 4 months of age. After that, all my birds have ever been fed is layer. If there's chicks from one of my hens hatched, she feeds them: whatever they eat free-ranging, scratch grains I throw out as a treat for all the birds and the layer pellets I free feed the whole flock. All happy, fat, grow just fine and the hens make fantastic tasting eggs and all but the chicks taste wonderful when it's their time (hens usually go first when the egg production gets so low that there's no return on the feed they eat, roosters go when the ones I've kept after culling at 4 to 6 months of age can't protect the flock very well anymore and a young(er) one will do much better or I need to introduce different genes for whatever reason(s)...~5 years of age.
Then you're not doing what you said was safe (feeding layer all their lives). Your hen raised chicks are having a mixed diet and your hatchery chicks are on chick starter to an appropriate age.
It's not correct to tell people they can feed layer safely to birds at any age. Some people may take that as gospel and feed nothing else (with no free range) to chicks. I'm only clarifying so that isn't the case.
best wishes
Erica
Best go back and read what I wrote. They *all* get layer *except* for hatchery chicks. The OP wanted to know what to feed *roosters* and I feed mine only layer. Doesn't matter if they're roosters or hens, that's what they all get and I've not had one problem with *any* of my birds, *ever*, also note I said the hens born under my own birds get layer also, although they can, if the mother hen brings her chicks to it, eat the scratch, but since there's only about a quart bucket of it thrown out at any one time, there's usually not a lot for the chicks to eat so they're stuck with...what mama hen teaches them to eat free-ranging or layer feed (when there's chicks in this scenario I'll keep a bag of layer crumbles in the feeders until the chicks are big enough to eat pellets). That's "gospel" that works *for me* (read that part again too, it's what I stated in my post, that "It's worked differently for me for 25+ years"). I still say anyone *can* feed layer feed to anything they want. You're the one who posted some kind of "gospel" without a single cite, whereas I'm posting from many years' experience. Chickens weren't eating 'layer feed', 'chick feed with ultra-super-duper-medicated-protein feed' nor any other man-made feed before we domesticated them to keep for food, and even in the early years they got nothing but what they could scrounge up and any scraps thrown out to them...how did they survive without all these fancy feeds? In the days when the average Joe knew absolutely nothing about 'proteins' or 'calcium' or any of that other stuff the birds got whatever was given to them. Hey! Surprise! The birds survived, gave eggs and meat, just like they do today!
Anyway, I'm done with this discussion. Experience doesn't matter around here anyway it seems, it's books and people talking like they're chemists and not ever citing anything to back up what they say (that's not a barb at you, that's my opinion of what direction this forum has been headed for a goodly while now).