220 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



being the cause of many failures with turkeys. Many farmers quit 

 raising turkeys because they had nothing to raise them from. They 

 sold the best birds they raised at market and kept the scrubs for 

 breeders, and, of course, these fizzled out. 



(See Fig. 4.) 



Male and female should not just be mated; they should match, 

 the hen, of course, being more refined than the male, as females gen- 

 erally are. But how often we see puny pullets mated to a grand 

 turkey-cock, or a miserable, immature little tom leading a flock of 

 big, rangy hens. The idea that such a one-sided mating will cover 

 a multitude of weaknesses, lack of vigor in particular, is an over- 

 worked hot-air fancy. 



"From nothing, nothing comes," is a maxim that applies to working 

 out problems in flesh and blood just the same as to the sums on the 

 blackboard. 



FEEDING STOCK TURKEYS 



Those who claim that turkeys should be fed the same as chickens, 

 show their ignorance of the subject. A comparison of their respec- 

 tive digestive systems, observation of their respective feeding habits, 

 and the large mortality among turkeys when they are fed on the 

 chicken plan, certainly prove such nature-fake methods wrong. The 

 common hen seems to have been made over into a machine to grind 

 feed, manufacture eggs and to put on flesh to meet the market de- 

 mands of this commercial age. She has a great capacity for grain 

 and a powerful digestive apparatus. Some consider her a sewerage 

 disposal plant that can work over the worst rot into the pure pro- 

 duct. It certainly is surprising what a hen can eat and yet sur- 

 vive. 



Not so the turkey. The turkey cannot be kept on the hog-pen plan. 

 When yarded with chickens and fed on the same ground, it soon 

 succumbs. It cannot be denaturalized, and its system abhors filth. 

 A post-mortem shows the turkey's crop more delicate, and the tube 

 or stomach between the crop and the gizzard, longer than that of 

 the chicken, and the gizzard and intestines also not of such strong, 

 coarse structure. 



(See Fig. 5). 



Nature thus intended that the turkey should subsist mainly upon 

 protein and not fat-producing carbo-hydrates. It needed the blood, 

 bone, muscle, stamina, thick-feathering, to stand the exposure of the 

 wild and the strength of wing and fleetness of foot to escape its 

 many enemies. These qualities are found in protein, but not in 

 grease-makers. Wild turkeys live mostly on protein found mainly 

 in worms, insects, chestnuts, pecans, wild grains, seeds, berries, and 

 green food. Many farmers instead of copying the wild turkey ra- 

 tion, by balancing protein and carbo-hydrates, have fed corn ex- 

 clusively in winter. Instead of finishing market turkeys with a 

 milk mash, they have fattened them on corn, and the majority, in- 

 stead of separating the breeders, have fattened them right along 

 with the others, and then wondered why they raised no turkeys the 

 next spring. Much corn fed to stock turkeys causes over-fat, which 

 makes a flabby fowl, blocks the digestive system, crowds the viaduct, 



