POULTRY RAISING. 11 



single article of diet set before them day after day, it 

 stands and sours. If a quantity is thus found uneaten, 

 the next meal is likely to be a light one, and the chickens, 

 driven by hunger, finally devour the sour stuff. The re- 

 sult is cholera or some other fatal disease sets in and their 

 owner wonders why his chickens are dying off. In my 

 own practice I find that small quantities of varied food, 

 if given to the chickens often, produce vastly better re- 

 sults than any other method of feeding. 



On no account, do I permit young chickens to be fed 

 with Indian meal dough. For the first morning meal I 

 give all my young stock boiled potatoes mashed up fine 

 and mixed with an equal quantity of Indian meal and 

 shorts. I find nothing so good and acceptable as this 

 food, and I use only small unmarketable potatoes ; they 

 prove more profitable than anything else I can employ. 



I have had many hundreds of chickens at one time in 

 my houses, varying in size from those but a few days old 

 to others large enough for the table, and positively no 

 other article of " soft food " was eyer given to them ; and 

 I venture to say a more healthy and thrifty lot of chick- 

 ens could not be found. When, in days gone by, I used 

 to feed to the young stock the traditional " dough," I 

 always counted on losing a large percentage, and the 

 numbers that died from cholera, diarrhoea and kindred 

 diseases, were great. Now a sick chicken is a rarity in 

 my yards. After the potato mash is disposed of I give 

 my chickens all the fine cracked corn they will eat up 

 clean. Of course large chickens, those which are ten or 

 twelve weeks old, can be fed with corn coarser cracked, 

 but the young birds want it very fine. In about two hours 

 after the cracked corn is eaten, I give all the wheat 

 screenings the chicken will eat, and in another two hours, 

 some oats. For supper they have all the cracked corn 

 and wheat they can eat. It is of the utmost importance 

 that the young birds should, at the close of the day, have 



