Ok, now I understand. Thanks for the info. I guess the safe thing to do is to just go buy commercial egg laying crumbles or pellets and feed them nothing but that. Let the agribiz experts figure it all out and all I have to do is buy bags of feed from them and all is well. But if that's what I'm doing, why even bother with chickens other than because they are fun? I may as well just go buy my eggs and meat at the store. It's certainly cheaper and easier that way. I gotta say, tho, that store bought meat is tasteless and the eggs look puny. What to do... what to do?
They are your birds, you can do whatever you want with them.
The fact is, good nutrition is good nutrition, whether its provided by Agribusiness or a well designed polycultural pasture in season. For the vast majority of people, a quality commercial feed is superior nutrition, at much lower price, than anything they can produce on their own. Most don't have the land, the equipment, the storage, the climate, and the soils to produce everything needed to generate a nutritional and balanced poultry diet, even if they had knowledge of their nutritional requirements.
But like I said, your birds. If you want to feed them bread because "agribusiness bad", your call. Fact is, agribusiness knows better*. So do those of us who have done our own research.
Of course, every generation a subset of the population celebrates ignorance and rejects knowledge in favor of belief. That's unlikely to change any time soon. Which leads me to my asterisk, above.
*in spite of that knowledge, Agribusiness sometimes produces, deliberately, a substandard product to meet the demand of ignorant consumers - which is why you should do your own research and be a selective shopper. Its (mostly) not their job to protect us from ourselves. Thankfully, such products don't stand the test of time, nor do the companies that focus on making them.
