11 



Therefore, in feeding, we slionlcl be careful not to o^•erloa(l our 

 mashes, or rations, with so much of this fiber-laden material 

 that the hen's digestive powers will be oA'ertaxed. 



Table 5. — Amount of Droppings voided relative io Time of feeding 



M'et Mash. 



The data of this chart were taken from bulletin 122 of our 

 own station, published a number of years ago but now out of 

 print. This is the result of an experiment carried on by Dr. 

 Brooks, and its object was to determine the difference in weight 

 of droppings voided by hens fed at night on a wet mash and 

 on a whole orain ration. The first column shows the dates : 

 the second, the number of days' droppings gathered ; the third, 

 the number of hens on the roost, or, as the chart puts it, the 

 number of hen nights, i.e., on March 5 the droppings were 

 left for two davs, so the number of hens were doubled to eive 

 the number of hen nights. In the fourth column we find the 

 weight of the droppings. Colunms 5 and 6 contain data 

 similar to those of 3 and 4, except that the hens in those pens 

 were fed a wet mash in the evening, whereas the data in col- 

 umns 3 and 4 are from pens containing hens fed mash in the 

 morning and whole grains at night. It is seen that the weight 

 of the dro])pings from birds fed wet mash in the morning i3 

 (iiilv al)Out one-half of that from hens fed wet mash at niffht. 

 This, it seems to me, is quite conclusive evidence that our 

 ground grains, or mashes, are more quickly digested than the 

 whole grains. This fact has considerable bearing upon the 

 proportion of scratch feeds and mash to be fed to hens we wish 



