ISTew Yokk Agricultural Experiment Station. 55 



mixed feeds. 



There has appeared in the feeding stuff trade during recent 

 years a class of materials which', as a rule, are mixtures either of 

 some cereal grain with certain manufacturers' by-products or of 

 two or more by-products. To these are applied a variety of 

 names, often of a proprietary character, some of which give no 

 hint of the nature of the mixture, and others, if taken for their 

 face value, indicate the sources of the ingredients. If these 

 mixtures were always made up wholly of high grade materials, 

 they would need less attention than they now really demand. 

 As a matter of fact, many of them are found to contain a con- 

 stituent of very inferior value, viz. : oat hulls, a by-product from 

 the manufacture of breakfast foods. 'Not only have large manu- 

 facturing establishments used these hulls in compounding 

 mixtures, but some local millers in the State of li^Tew York have 

 bought them to grind with corn and sometimes with mill wastes, 

 the mixed product being sold as " mixed feed," " corn and oat 

 feed," " chop feed," and so on. To quite an extent, at least, 

 farmers have been ignorant of the real nature of these feeds, and 

 as this Station has abundant evidence, have paid for them prices 

 equal to the cost of whole corn and oats. If our millers have been 

 aware of the inferiority of oat hull mixtures, and have sold such 

 goods to consumers who were ignorant of what they were buying, 

 it is charitable to say no more than that the ndes of an honorable 

 business policy have been severely violated. 



In order that there may be no misapprehension as to the real 

 character of oat hulls, attention is called to their composition and 

 their relation to the kernel. 



It was found at the Ohio Experiment Station that with 69 

 varieties of oats the hull constituted from 24.6 per ct. to 35.2 per 

 ct. of the weight of the grain, the average being 30 per ct. From 

 other sources we learn what is the composition of the dry matter of 

 the whole gi-ain, the hulls and the hull-less kernels. 



