212 THE BOOK OF CORN 



oats contain on an average 70 to 75 per cent of kernel and 25 to 

 30 per cent of indigestible hull, which resembles straw in com- 

 position. The skin or hull of maize amounts to practically 

 nothing. These facts show why horses thrive better and are 

 more apt to maintain their weight on corn than on oats. Our 

 recent experiments have demonstrated that corn can replace 

 oats in the ration of both cavalry and artillery horses, and if 

 substituted weight for weight it increases the nutritive value 

 of the ration. This is the same deduction which was drawn 

 from experiments, now more than twenty-five years old, made 

 for the two great cab companies of Paris." 



Shepperd* compared a ration consisting of equal 

 parts corn and oats with oats alone for mules at hard 

 work, with the result that the animals on corn and 

 oats made an average daily gain of seven-tenths of a 

 pound, while those on oats alone lost six-tenths of a 

 pound. He estimates that 77.5 pounds of corn is worth 

 100 pounds of oats for horses at work. 



Corn as a Food for Poultry — For the fattening of 

 all classes of fowls, corn is conceded to be unsurpassed, 

 but the almost universal advice of poultrymen to elim- 

 inate this material entirely from the ration of laying 

 fowls is perhaps based first upon the notion that the 

 egg contains a large proportion of protein, and there- 

 fore only foodstuffs rich in this group of substances 

 can be used to advantage, and second, doubtless to 

 the unfavorable results obtained in practice from the 

 exclusive use of corn for this purpose. 



Some recent experiments by Brooks and Thomp- 

 son f with several different breeds, in which complete 

 laying records were kept for the two years covered 

 by the experiment, clearly indicate that this prejudice 

 against corn, when properly combined with other food- 

 stuffs, is unfounded, and that by adding a reasonable 

 amount of corn to the ration a large increase in egg 

 production at a decreased cost will result. 



In one trial wheat, oats, bran, middlings, animal 



*North Dakota experiment station, bulletin 45. 

 tMassachusetts experiment station reports, 1899-00. 



