A standard model for thousands of years has been for small farmers to keep free range chickens that basically take care of themselves during the good weather months, providing eggs and meat. These chickens are not huge in size and don’t lay double extra huge eggs. They are more lean and athletic because they have to work for a living. They are generally pretty healthy because they develop a strong immune system.
As mentioned in the other posts, they need a good forage base. These small farms not only provided a variety of different grasses and weeds, these grasses and weed went to seed, so the chickens had those seeds to eat too. They had places to scratch in rotting vegetation, fence rows and woodland edges to forage in, and all kinds of different creepy crawlies to catch and eat. There were normally different farm animals around, horses, cows, goats, sheep, donkeys and who knows what. Chickens really enjoy scratching around in their poop for really nice nutritious treats. They get to act as a flock and hatch and raise their own replacements. I don’t know how life can get any better for a chicken.
One of the potential downsides to this is predators. The farmer and his dogs had pretty good handle on this but it required eternal vigilance. Potential predators were always on their minds. How do I know? I was raised on one of these farms.
Very few people on this forum have the quality of forage necessary for chickens to do really well but even part time foraging on limited quality forage is better than nothing in my opinion.
I’m not sure the guy in that video is telling you all the itsy bitsy details but a lot of what he said makes perfect sense. A lot of people, such as Centrarchid, raise them with some differences in what I described and do it well. There are different models for this. But quality of forage is very important.
