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associated together. Here is the point. A good many people say 

 that they ought not to feed their hens more until they begin to lay 

 more eggs. They have the "cart before the horse." We must feed 

 hens all they will eat and eat up clean of the right kind of food, be- 

 cause hens begin to increase in their food consumption several weeks 

 before they begin to lay, as is shown by this chart. They also increase 

 in weight before they begin to lay. A condition of egg production 

 is in a measure a condition of reproduction and carries with it a tend- 

 ency for the animals to become fat. The history of any domestic 

 animal bears out this statement. 



POINTERS ON FEEDING LAYING HENS. 



(Prof. H. C. Pierce, Philadelphia, Pa., U. S. Department of Agriculture.) 



What constitutes a good ration for laying hens and why should 

 we feed a hen for laying purposes? I think the cardinal points may 

 be set down in egg production as, first, have good hens; second, have 

 good feed; and, third, have a good feeder. A hen in good laying 

 condition consumes twenty times her own weight in a year. A hen 

 weighing five pounds will consume approximately one hundred pounds 

 of food during a year's time. If she lays twelve dozen of eggs in a 

 year, or one hundred and forty-four eggs, which should be reasonable 

 under good conditions, she will produce eighteen to twenty pounds 

 of eggs in that time, or four times her own weight. So we see that 

 we may consider the hen in some respects a machine into which we 

 feed perhaps one hundred pounds of feed, exclusive of water, and we 

 take out eighteen to twenty pounds of the finished product. No more 

 than you can make carpets out of steel rods or wooden sticks can you 

 get eggs out of feed that is not best adapted to producing eggs. The 

 hen must have a food which is properly balanced and which contains 

 the necessary materials to manufacture eggs. An egg contains, to 

 put it commercially, shell, white and yolk. These are the most widely 

 varying constituents of the eggs. We may take the shell to repre- 

 sent the ash part of the egg and eleven per cent of the egg is calcium. 

 We take the white to represent the protein portion of the egg. The 

 albumen of the white is one of the purest forms of protein which we 

 have and the one most easily digested. We take yolk to represent 

 food of the egg. Did it ever occur to you to ask why these things 

 occur in an egg? I don't believe that there is a hen in the United 

 States that cares whether we eat eggs or not. She is not laying eggs 

 for us to eat. She is laying eggs to reproduce her species. Therefore 

 we find in the egg the food for the developing germs during the 

 three weeks necessary for the germ to develop in the shell. The shell 

 forming an envelope to protect the developing germs and also giving 

 it a slight amount probably of ash and the white forming the food 

 formation of the muscles and yolk forming nitrogen for formation of 

 <3hick and having a surplus supply over to nourish the chick through 

 the first day or two after it is hatched. We find, no matter what the 

 hen is fed, she always tends to produce an egg of uniform composi- 

 tion. If you feed a hen regularly, wlion she can lay at all the proposi- 

 tion regarding the amount of protein, etc., will be the same, whether 



