In Modern Poultry Husbandry by Leonard Robinson, published in 1948 in London by Crosby, Lockwood and Son, Robinson includes many recipes for confined and ranged birds. Unlike some earlier books these recipes were actually tested during feed trials.
What makes these recipes so useful now is that they were formulated after nutrition science had started to take off, but before the feed industry had perfected using cheap byproduct meals 'fixed up' with the addition of synthetic vitamins and medications.
Of skimmed milk, he says: 'Where skimmed milk is readily obtainable it should be given to the chicks to drink ad lib. In that event no other protein concentrate is necessary.' (My emphasis, pages 308-309.) Modern chicken forum experts often claim that 'chickens are lactose intolerant'. However this may perhaps hold true only where pasteurised, homogenised milks are concerned.
The first recipe is Robinson's chick mash (page 318). He's written it all in pounds (lbs) and pints, but it should be fairly easy to turn these into percentages.
20 lb Bran
30 lb fine middlings (wheat milling byproducts: whatever's scraped up after milling)
24 lb maize (corn) meal
10 lb ground oats
6 lb skim or buttermilk (presumably dried)
5 lb meat or fish meal
5 lb yeast
half lb salt
2 lb limestone flour
1 pint cod liver oil.
Now some personal comments: the first being that if you make up the skim milk then sour it, you can omit (in my view) the yeast. In fact, since soured milk contains vitamin B-12, it's a better ingredient than yeast for growing birds.
Secondly, as Robinson notes, if the birds have access to grass and sunlight, you can omit the cod liver oil. Most types of leafy greens will be just as useful as grass here.
You can also replace 5% of the bran with alfalfa (lucerne) meal; indeed I would do this in preference to using just bran.
I would also add some ground sunflower seed (say 4%) in replacement of some of the mix, but that's just my own preference. Robinson is quite clear that the above recipe will work.
Now his layer mash (page 320). As with the chick recipe above I would sour the milk as kefir so I could delete yeast, and add ground or whole sunflower seeds. Robinson makes it clear that the recipe below presumes access to fresh grass and sunlight, and ad lib shell grit.
20 lb bran
40 lb middlings
20 lb maize (corn) meal
10 lb ground oats
10 lb meat-and-bone or fish meal
half lb salt
Easy, huh? Middlings by the way are perhaps hard to find unless you live near a mill. Far better than either middlings or bran would be to freshly grind whole wheat and include it in the mix at the same percentage of both combined. Or you could do as I do, and swap 'middlings' for the easier-to-obtain pollard when birds are young, adding sprouted wheat as the birds become able to tolerate larger particle size. I believe sprouting is the best way to retain (and indeed enhance) wheat's vitamins.
If there is no access to grass, then you'll need to add leafy greens in some form, and if sunlight is hiding for half the year you'll have to add cod liver oil. But as I see it, these are fairly simple recipes.
One last recipe from the book (page 323): the war diet for chicks. It's simple as hell, though it's advised to peel potatoes first. I've never tried this diet, so I'm not saying it's ideal, but it's worth jotting down as backup.
80 lb potatoes (cooked, obviously)
20 lb middlings
3 lb white fish meal (presumably any fish meal would do)
2 lb dried yeast
0.4 lb cod liver oil
half lb chalk (Warning: in those days, chalk was calcium carbonate; these days it's something else...).
Again, I think you could replace the dried yeast with an equivalent amount of dried skim milk, then just before mixing you would sour the milk (for B vitamins) and use it as the only liquid in the mash. Of course you'd ignore 'chalk' and use equivalent calcium carbonate powder or crushed shell.
I would also suggest adding seaweed meal to all these mixes. The high mineral content of seaweed, while in some ways unbalanced (e.g. massive amounts of iodine in some seaweeds) should help offset some of the soil mineral depletion that's gone on since these feeding trials were done.
