No. 4.] FARM POULTRY. 13 



floor. It takes more litter on a ground floor, and in a series of 

 years, if you figure up the time and the cost of renewing the 

 earth floor, it is better to have the cement floor. Now, where 

 you use the cement floor, ordinarily you must supply some sort 

 of a dust bag in one corner of the house. If you use only a 

 little litter — say, two or three inches — then in a cold climate 

 you get into trouble with the cement floor. In addition to 

 that, never make the cement floor smooth or very rough. If 

 you make it smooth the litter will blow all round the place; if 

 you make it very rough the hens will wear their toenails down 

 to the quick. The common finish, such as you have on side- 

 walks, is about the best that we know of. We have taken out 

 practically all of our board floors and all our ground floors and 

 are using almost entirely cement floors. 



Mr. Thomas D. Govern. Can you get as many eggs by 

 feeding hard grain and dry mash as by feeding wet mash? 



Professor Graham. Where we use rolled oats we can, but I 

 doubt it with other mixtures. The backbone of our egg pro- 

 duction, in a word, depends on the rolled oats and the sour 

 milk and the green food. 



Mr. Govern. In Massachusetts, with milk at 42 cents a 

 can, we can't very well afl^ord to feed it to hens. 



Professor Graham. That is true. There is a difference in 

 different sections of the country. With us sour milk is worth 

 20 cents a hundred. That is not very high. We buy oats at 

 $28 a ton, SI. 40 a hundred. But we can't get as many eggs 

 out of beef scrap or cooked meat as we can out of sour milk. 

 If you want to use beef scrap I would strongly advise your 

 using a little bit of muriatic acid in the drinking water, for 

 the reason that the hen's digestive tract is normally acid, and 

 we frequently get into trouble when their digestive tracts be- 

 come alkaline, and with sour milk, too, you get a value beyond 

 the feeding value of the milk, largely due to its physical action, 

 which maintains the normal sour or acid digestive tract. It 

 has a value greater than its chemical composition shows. 



Mr. C. F. Whitman. You dwelt considerably on feeding 

 vegetables to poultry. Would you recommend feeding fruit, — 

 apples or pears? 



Professor Graham. Yes. I would recommend the feeding 

 of apples. 



