Found this on a website, seems to be like I remember, my grandfather would give all the animals cooked warm oatmeal with molasses in the winter as well...
http://www.plamondon.com/faq_feed.html
"Feeding Chickens
1. Do I have to feed free-range chickens, or can they find their own feed?
Chickens can find their own feed, but each chicken needs a lot of room if this is going to work. Also, chickens that live entirely by foraging have to have their population adjusted to match the feed supply. For example, a farmer of 100 years ago might have kept a dozen hens and a rooster through the winter, and allowed the hens to hatch a brood of chicks each in the spring, giving, say, 72 chicks plus the original 13 chickens, or 85 birds total. The old rooster would be sold after the chicks had hatched. The old hens and most of the young chickens would be sold in the fall, and one cockerel and twelve pullets would be kept through the lean months. By having 85 chickens during the fat months and only 13 during the winter, the amount of supplemental feed needed by the chickens would be minimized. A flock of 13 chickens might survive all winter on the grain spilled by a cow and a team of draft horses, plus some hay and whatever else they could find. This winter diet would be nutritionally poor (both vitamin- and protein-deficient) and the hens would lay no eggs, but they'd recover in early spring and the cycle would repeat.
Nutritional deficiencies increase with the number of chickens. I've heard estimates that you can support 1-2 hens per acre with no supplemental feeding, though probably not during the winter. As you add chickens to the farm, they first exhaust the supply of high-calorie feeds such as seeds, then the supply of high-protein feeds such as bugs, worms, and high-protein forage. Finally, they use up the supply of high-vitamin feeds such as grass. Modern poultrykeeping revolves around supplying the nutrients the chickens can't find for themselves.
In the good old days, when people didn't feed their hens at all, much of the hen's diet was provided by sheer sloppiness. People threw their garbage out into the street or the barnyard. The cows and horses spilled grain. Manure was everywhere and was full of yummy maggots. Even with all the natural bounty provided by Stone Age sanitation, the number of hens that could be supported without supplemental feeding was very limited. Flocks of over fifty hens were unusual before chicken feed was invented.
In practice, though, it always pays to provide a complete diet, compared to feeding nothing at all or supplying nothing but grain. The increased production always pays for the increased feed bill.
There are a few circumstances where the diet can be adjusted to reflect reliable forage ingredients, such as old-fashioned "range rations" which left out the vitamins that were provided in abundance by green feed. But enough dry days in a row browns off the grass and makes it unpalatable to the chickens, so this method has its risks. Also, many of the things hens eat are so tiny that we can't see them -- tiny seeds, tiny bugs, tiny worms. If we can't see them, we can't estimate how much the hens are finding, and we can't know how much supplemental feed they need on a day-by-day basis.
Fortunately for the frugal farmer, hens prefer fresh, natural feeds to dry, processed chicken feed, and will eat natural feeds in preference to store-bought feed whenever they have the chance. "........
