Believe it or not, your chickens need a diet !

Understanding why you need to manage your birds’ diet
People often tell us their grandparents raised chickens just fine by letting them run around the farmyard and throwing them a little corn every day.

We’d like to remind chicken owners that things are different now. Most yards don’t have large animals close by spilling grain and passing undigested grain in their manure for chickens to find. Modern chicken-keepers usually don’t have large piles of manure breeding a tasty crop of maggot protein for their chickens either. And when chickens are confined to a pen most of the time,
they certainly can’t find the food they need.

Grandma expected to get few eggs during the winter. She expected to raise chickens for meat for many months, unlike our broilers that are ready to eat in as little as 12 weeks. She anticipated that many birds would die over the year, many from poor nutrition. And good, nutritionally balanced chicken feed was seldom available, assuming she had the funds to buy it.

You can raise chickens like your grandparents or great-grandparents did.
Outhouses are still legal in some places, too. Or you can read this chapter and see how modern chicken owners feed their birds.