610 IOWA DEPAIJTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



confident, however, that the investigations being conducted will ultimately 

 solve the problem. 



While there are some causes of mortality among the chicks that baffle 

 even the experts, there are other causes that are easily overcome if a 

 little care and common sense will be exercised. For instance, there is 

 no good reason why chicks should be lacking in inherited vitality, if the 

 ancestral stock has been properly bred and nourished; but some people 

 are foolish enough to imagine that they can get strong chicks from weak, 

 emaciated, anaemic, inbred stock, and are surprised when they get only 

 half a hatch (or less) of puny, weak, undersized chicks with barely 

 enough life and strength to get clear of the shell. Within twenty-four 

 hours they begin to die off, and it's dollars to doughnuts that not one of 

 them will be alive a fortnight after hatching. It takes good, rich, red 

 blood in the parent stock to produce strong offspring, and without this 

 inheritance the chicks are bound to be weaklings, totally unfit to success- 

 fully wage the battle for existence and growth and development. 



When it comes to the proper feeding of chicks there is no need for 

 anyone remaining ignorant on this subject, as it has practically been 

 reduced to a science and the poultry papers are full of it. Not all writers 

 agree in every detail, but the methods employed by the successful, up-to- 

 date poultry men and women are essentially the same. The dry feeding 

 method is the proper one today — and the successful one — although occa- 

 sionally we find those who still stick to the old methods of our grand- 

 mothers and feed mushes and mashes and other soft food. 



Something like a year ago we wrote an editorial on "Getting Back to 

 Nature," in which we advocated the rearing of the chicks along lines and 

 under conditions similar to those surrounding the young of the wild birds 

 of the prairie and forest. We said then — and still believe — that we coddle 

 and pamper the chicks altogether too much. Our very treatment of them 

 ofttimes has a tendency to make them delicate and proves a handicap 

 rather than a help to the little fellows. The newly hatched chicks of the 

 prairie hen, the grouse, the quail, etc., have no soft mashes prepared for 

 them, but pick up dry seeds, bugs, worms, tender grass shoots, etc., and 

 they live and thrive and mature into strong, healthy, vigorous birds. We 

 can imitate Nature's way of feeding by giving our chicks foods similar 

 to the above, instead of wet mashes, corn meal mush, etc., which often 

 becomes sour and unwholesome before it is eaten up, and more often 

 sours in the crops of the little fellows, causing all kinds of trouble. 



It must be borne in mind that the baby chicks are delicate little things, 

 at best, and that they need not only warmth and protection, but foods 

 that are best suited to their needs and somewhat limited powers of 

 digestion and assimilation during the first few days of their existence. 



Appreciating the importance of this subject and the value of a free 

 and full discussion of the same, the publishers of Commercial Poultry 

 have arranged with successful poultry men and women in every part of 

 the country to furnish us articles for publication, and the first installment 

 appears in this number as a symposium on "Care of the Chicks." It con- 

 sists of articles from nine different states, viz.: Maine, Massachusetts, 

 Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, Indiana, Ohio. Nebraska and Washington. In 

 our April and May numbers articles on the same subject will appear from 



