Can the chick balance its ration?

[saysfaa]

you could supplement the animals' feed, or ferment the chickens' feed.
"Fermented foods contain lactic acid bacteria accumulating significant quantities of selenium, similar to yeast" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6480557/ (section 7 of this rather dense article is about sources of selenium)

It doesn't take long to get really complicated...
"...Concentrations of Met, cysteine and tyrosine in breast muscle significantly increased with increasing dietary Met conc., whereas isoleucine conc. significantly decreased. Moreover, the addition of inorganic and organic sources of Se increased Se conc. in breast meat. On the other hand, the addition of Met signif. decreased Se conc. in breast meat..." and other things.

I'm moving toward accepting that they can/will balance a lot more than I realized until recently. If given enough diversity of options.

I don't know how far it goes. If the options highest in (otherwise scarce) Met are the same options in (otherwise scarce) Se, .. oh. If they are both scarce, there probably isn't enough of one to negatively affect the other ... no, that only works if the proportions to the needed amount of each are similar.

Well, every time I dig into it, I get a little further before it gets frustrating enough to leave it again.

Thankfully, I don't have to either figure it out or accept the uncertainty. Yet, anyway.

 

[Perris]

and remember that the 'target' figures are devised to produce the most eggs at the least cost full stop. (If that is your aim, you should factor in the cost of your time spent researching and calculating all this. And what's the point, if your aim is the same as commercial producers? just buy commercial feed in that case)

If that is not your aim, you need not worry about exceeding the recommended amounts, since they are reckoned precisely as the absolute minimum you can get away with while still getting maximum egg output for a year or so.

A few things can be toxic in large quantities, to us and to chickens, but if you let the chickens choose what they want to eat - and they can tell what they're eating (i.e. it's not a homogenized pellet) - they won't overdose, even if that's theoretically possible from what you've put out. And they don't need everything in every meal. So if you are really bothered about one food/nutrient counteracting another, just give them on different days.

 

[saysfaa]

A piece to the puzzle. Another kind of taste bud has been discovered. Sweet, sour. bitter, salty, umami, ... and calciumy?! (? is because it doesn't have a name; not because there is doubt it exists)

I don't think it has been looked for in chickens but..

Here is the article