Care of the Baby Chick. ' 43 



ANOTHER METHOD.— At the Maine Experiment Station the fol- 

 lowing plan is carried out: — 



"We make bread by mixing three parts cornmeal, one part wheat 

 bran, and one part wheat middlings or flour, with skim-milk or water, 

 mixing it very dry, and salting as usual for bread. It is baked thor- 

 oughly, and when well done if it is not dry enough so as to crumble, it is 

 broken up and dried out in the oven and then ground in a mortar or 

 mill. The infertile eggs are hard boiled and ground, shell and all, in a 

 sausage mill. About one part of ground egg and four parts of bread 

 crumbs are rubbed together until the egg is well divided. This bread 

 makes up about one-half of the food of the chicks until they are five or six 

 weeks old. Eggs are always used with it for the first one or two weeks, 

 and then fine sifted beef scrap is mixed witn the bread. 



"When the chicks are first brought to the brooders, bread crumbs are 

 sprinkled on the floor of the brooder among the grit, and in this way 

 they learn to eat, taking in grit and food at the same time. After the 

 first day the food is given in tin plates, four to each brooder. The plates 

 have low edges, and the chicks go on to them and find the food readily. 

 After they have had the food before them for five minutes the plates are 

 removed. As they have not spilled much of it, they have little left to 

 lunch on except what they scratch for. In the course of a few days light 

 wooden troughs are substituted for the plates. The bottom of the trough 

 is a strip of half-inch board, two feet long and three inches wide. Laths 

 are nailed around the edges. The birds are fed four times a day in these 

 troughs until they outgrow them, as follows : Bread and egg or scrap 

 early in the morning; at half past nine o'clock dry grain, either pin-head 

 oats, crushed wheat, millet seed or cracked corn. At one o'clock dry 

 grain again, and the last feed of the day is of the bread with egg or scrap. 

 Between the four feeds in the pans or trougns, millet seed, pin-head oats 

 and fine cracked corn and later whole wheat, are scattered in the chaflf on 

 the floor for the chicks to scratch for. This makes them exercise, and 

 care is taken that they do not find the food too easily. 



"One condition is made imperative in our feeding. The food is never 

 to remain in the troughs more than five minutes before the troughs are 

 cleaned or removed. This insures sharp appetites at meal time, and 

 guards against inactivity which comes from overfeeding. Charcoal, granu- 

 lated bone, oyster shell and sharp grit are always kept by them, as well 

 as clean water. Mangels are cut in slices, which they soon learn to pick. 

 When the grass begins to grow they are able to get green foods from the 

 yards. If the small yards are worn out before they move to the range, 

 green cut clover or rape is fed to them. After the chickens are moved to 

 the range they are fed in the same manner, except that the morning and 

 evening feed is made of corn meal, middlings and wheat bran, to which 



