18 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



Professor Graham. Well, I don't know, Mr. Proctor, 

 whether that is a habit. It is sometimes one of the symptoms 

 of worms. You could find out easily by going to your druggist 

 and getting a worm powder, or take a piece of bread and put 

 on turpentine and put it down his throat, or give him a chew 

 of tobacco. 



Professor Brooks. About the rolled oats. Are those the 

 oats from which the hulls have been separated? 



Professor Graham. The commonest kind of horse feed with 

 us is the rolled or crushed oats, in which the whole oat is run 

 through a roller and the oat comes out flat. Now, the men who 

 handle horses in the largest number are farmers, and the 

 farmers swear by rolled oats for horses. The way we started 

 to feed them to the hens was, when ordering ground oats from 

 a miller, he said he hadn't any on hand, but he sent us some 

 rolled oats. The hens took so kindly to the proposition and 

 liked it so much better than they did the chopped oats that I 

 w^as perfectly satisfied. Now, they don't eat all the hull. As 

 near as we can tell, they waste about 18 per cent of the hull. 



Professor Brooks. Would you blame them for wasting 100 

 per cent of the hull? 



Professor Graham. Yes, for this reason, which brings up a 

 very interesting point: it seems to me that there are two sides 

 to a feeding proposition, • — ■ a physiological side and a commer- 

 cial side, and a certain amount of bran or alfalfa may obviate 

 trouble in the stomach and give the juices of the stomach a 

 better chance to act. We have tried the ordinary oats along- 

 side of the common horse oats or crushed oats, and invariably 

 we have gotten for a long period of time better results from the 

 horse kind of oats than we did from the human kind of oats; 

 but for a short period of time, say ten days or two weeks, if 

 you want to fatten a chicken or get him ready for show, you 

 can get there quicker with the aid of flour or rolled oats which 

 you have for human food than you can with the crushed oats 

 as fed to horses. But in the end we lose out in that we run 

 into digestive troubles, particularly in the liver, we get a soft, 

 pink liver. The average hen with us eats 72 pounds per year, — 

 24 pounds of corn, 24 pounds of wheat and 24 pounds of 

 crushed oats. 



