1907.] DISCUSSION. y2> 



in raising chickens. I paid a great deal of attention to that, 

 and the most of my work was to test the system advocated by 

 some of the big incubator and feed companies. The great ma- 

 jority of them said, " Feed our foods, give them beef scrap, 

 fill up the hoppers, give them drinking water, use our foods, 

 and that is all you need to do." I bought in the open market a 

 chick food, a scratching food, and mash used for forcing 

 broilers, and beef-scrap, from one of the most prominent com- 

 panies, and fed it according to their directions, feeding the 

 grain in the litter, and beef-scrap in a hopper, and giving them 

 drinking water, just for my interest, and I fed another pen at 

 the same time, of the same number of chicks, side by side in 

 the sections of a long brooder house, a mixture of wheat 

 screenings, with some millet seed, and, later on, cracked corn 

 and whole wheat, as the chickens developed in size. For the 

 concentrates I used greencut bone and skim-milk. Now these 

 figures are authentic. I cannot say anything regarding the 

 amount of food that it took, although, as I remember it, they 

 were all about the same. At twelve weeks old the chicks that 

 were fed a home-grown ration were practically double in size 

 what the others were. I think they would average fully twice 

 as much as the chicks fed on this dry system. The chicks 

 would not eat the beef-scrap from the beef-hopper, although it 

 would analyze over thirty-eight per cent, protein. I lay that 

 largely to the fact that the greencut bone and skim-milk 

 seem to be so much more acceptable and palatable to the chick- 

 ens. In order to give a fair trial of a mixed food put up by 

 one of the incubator companies, we started another experiment 

 with the same kind of chickens that we had before. White Leg- 

 horns and Plymouth Rocks, and we fed them exactly the same 

 ration. This time we left out the beef-scrap, and in one case 

 gave them greencut bone, and in the other the ration which I 

 told you about, mixed up with a certain company's feed, and we 

 got a little better result by using our home-grown stuff than we 

 did from using the other. In the third experiment we used 

 beef-scrap, the grain being different, that is, the home-grown 



