38 VERMONT AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



It may be that the bread is not necessary and that something 

 else is just as good. We have tried many other foods, includ- 

 ing several of the most highly advertised prepared dry chicken 

 foods, but as yet have found nothing that gives us as good health 

 and growth as the bread fed in connection with dry broken 

 grains. 



When the chicks are first brought to the brooders, bread 

 crumbs are sprinkled on the floor of the brooder among the grit, 

 and in this way they learn to eat, taking in grit and food at the 

 same time. After the first day the food is given in tin plates, 4 

 to each brooder. The plates have low edges, and the chicks go 

 onto them and find the food readily. After they have had the 

 food before them for five minutes the plates are removed. As 

 they have not spilled much of it, they have little left to lunch on 

 except what they scratch for. In the course of a few days light 

 wooden troughs are substituted for the plates. The bottom of 

 the trough is a strip of half inch board, 2 feet long and 3 

 inches wide. Laths are nailed around the edges. The birds are 

 fed four times a day in these troughs until they outgrow them, as 

 follows: Bread and egg or scrap early in the morning; at half- 

 past nine o'clock dry grain, either pin head oats, crushed wheat, mil- 

 lett seed or cracked corn. At one o'clock dry grain again, and the 

 last feed of the day is of the bread with egg or scrap. 



Between the four feeds in the pans or troughs, millett seed, 

 pin head oats and fine cracked corn, and later whole wheat, are 

 scattered in the chaff on the floor for the chicks to scratch for. 

 This makes them exercise, and care is taken that they do not find 

 the food easily. 



One condition is made imperative in our feeding. The food is 

 never to remain in the troughs more than 5 minutes before the 

 troughs are cleaned or removed. This insures sharp appetites at 

 meal time, and guards against inactivity which comes from over 

 feeding. 



Charcoal, granulated bone, oyster shell and sharp grit are al- 

 ways kept by them, as well as clean water. Mangolds are cut into 

 slices, which they soon learn to peck. When the grass begins 

 to grow they are able to get green food from the yards. If the 

 small yards are worn out before they are moved to the range, green 

 cut clover or rape is fed to them. 



After the chickens are moved to the range they are fed in the 

 same manner, except that the morning and evening feed is made 

 of corn meal, middlings and wheat bran, to which one-tenth as 

 much beef scrap is added. The other two feeds are of wheat and 

 cracked corn. One year we fed double the amount of scrap all 

 through the growing season and had the April and May pullets well 

 developed and laying through September and October. To our sor- 

 row they nearly all moulted in December, and that month and Jan- 

 uary were nearly bare of eggs. 



