418 BOAED OF AGRICULTUKE. [Pub. Doc. 



On most farms there are available during the fall, winter and some- 

 times well into the spring waste vegetables of various kinds, which, 

 with a little special preparation, are made more palatable to the fowls 

 than if fed in their raw state. Small potatoes, beets, turnips and 

 other vegetables, cooked and made the basis of a mash of meal and 

 shorts, can be used to good advantage and with less waste in that way 

 than in any other. It takes a little time to prepare them. Whether 

 it is best to use that time in that way must depend on how profit- 

 ably it would otherwise be employed, and the value of the food thus 

 utilized. 



From the time farm or farm garden products begin to be marketed, 

 there is on most farms considerable waste which may be fed to poultry 

 or other stock. Sometimes the articles and the amounts of them avail- 

 able for poultry are such that it is not only unnecessary but would be 

 detrimental to the fowls to feed them freely, and also to feed a wet 

 mash. At this season of the year, too, there is on most farms other 

 work more pressing and more profitable than keeping up through the 

 summer the system of feeding followed during the winter. So, with an 

 abundance of green food either supplied to the poultry in their yards 

 or ranges or fed from the field or garden, there is no need of feeding 

 ground grains, either wet or dry, and the work of feeding the poultry 

 may be reduced to occupy but a very short time. Possibly the gross 

 results may not be as good when the attention to feeding is reduced 

 to the minimum. I think the general experience of poultry keepers 

 shows that the best gross results are obtained when fowls get a great 

 deal of attention, — not fussy or annoying attention, but judicious 

 attention. It is so with all animals. By giving them a considerable 

 variety of food, prepared in a variety of ways, we tempt the appetite 

 to take the largest possible quantities of food, we avoid in no small 

 degree the dangers of overeating of a single article, and we get in 

 poultry better growth and greater egg production; but whether we 

 get enough better results to pay for the extra trouble and food required 

 is something to determine each time the question arises, in accordance 

 with circumstances at that particular time and place. 



Some poultry keepers on farms, or elsewhere, are so situated that 

 it is desirable to reduce the work of feeding the fowls as much as pos- 

 sible at all seasons of the year. To such the dry feeding methods so 

 much advocated of late years often present the most satisfactory 

 solution of the feeding problem. It has become customary to describe 

 any system of feeding which omits the wet mash as "dry feeding." 

 The advocates of dry feeding generally have made sweeping condem- 

 nation of wet mashes, and have charged against their use all the ills 

 discoverable in any flock to which a wet mash happens to have been 

 fed. As would be expected, they have also gone to the extreme in 

 claiming all sorts of beneficial results from dry feeding. I think that 

 any fair general consideration of the facts will show the same diver- 



