134 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



Another prominent poultryman's method of dry-feeding he 

 describes as to give the chicks a mixture of assorted grains 

 and grit about the size of a pin head for their first food. With 

 a dish of beef scraps standing constantly before them, and the 

 fine ground food thrown in Htter, with plenty of green food 

 (cabbage or green grass), they have an inducement to scratch 

 from sunrise to sunset, and they take the food slowly and natur- 

 ally. With the beef scraps always within reach, they at no 

 time crave more animal food, their systems rapidly adapt them- 

 selves to a season of plenty, and nature constructs a body 

 planned for a continuation of this same diet, namely, good, 

 thick, strong leg and frame, and a chicken that looks ready to 

 eat at any stage of the game ! Long-bodied, short-legged, 

 hardy, " born-to-live " looking fellows, free from all the ills and 

 pains of chickendom, and fit to wrestle for a living through 

 thick and thin, through good weather and bad, so long as the 

 food holds out. 



" When they reach the age of six to eight weeks, we grad- 

 ually wean them from the small grains and substitute cracked 

 corn and wheat, place them in colony coops on grass range, 

 and soon discontinue the wheat, feeding cracked corn and beef 

 scraps in hoppers, feeding once a week or oftener as the size 

 of the hopper and number of chicks demand. These food- 

 hoppers should be made quite high in front, three inches at 

 least, as the birds are always trying for the larger pieces of 

 beef scraps, and with a low front to the tray of the hopper they 

 waste quite a little by throwing it out with their bills. The 

 hoppers should be covered with waterproof paper to prevent 

 the food becoming wet, if they are placed outside the roosting 

 €Oops ; an excellent plan is to have a small ' shelter ' to put 

 the food-hopper under ; this will protect it from the rain and 

 give the birds shelter also — a double advantage. This system 

 continues until the sexes are separated, and then we place the 

 males in yards sufficiently large so the birds never eat them 

 bare of grass. Putting the cull cockerels which we intend to 

 market in pens by themselves, we compound a mixture of 

 equal weights — corn, wheat, oats and barley, ground as fine 

 as flour — if we can induce the miller to reduce it to that fine- 

 ness — feed it dry and continue the beef scraps as before. 

 This method of feeding market cockerels has given us fatter 

 chickens than we have ever been able to produce by any other 

 method. 



