176 MAINS AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. I907. 



Method j. 

 When warm weather comes and the later hatched chicks are 

 able to get out on the ground they find much to amuse them, 

 and they work hard and are able to eat and digest more food. 

 Under these conditions the dry meal mixture described in 

 Method II is kept constantly before them in troughs with good 

 results. With 2 feeds a day of the broken grains in the litter 

 they have hard food enough to insure health and they can safely 

 peck away at the dry meal mixture — a mouthful or two at a time 

 — when they seem to happen to think of it, and thrive. This 

 method has been considerably used in feeding April and May 

 hatched chicks. Many times the results from it have been good. 

 At other times, when the weather was dark and raw out of doors 

 and the little things were held inside, they would hang around 

 the troughs and over eat. They would grow rapidly for a few 

 days, then commence to cripple, eat little, and seek the warm 

 hover never to recover. 



Method 4. 



This consists in feeding the cracked corn, cracked wheat, pin 

 head oats and millet seed in the litter, 4 times a day and keeping 

 a trough of fine beef sCrap within their reach all of the time. 

 Sometimes commercial chick foods have been used instead of 

 the cracked corn, wheat, oats and millet. By this system the 

 losses of birds have been small when the feeding has not been 

 so liberal as to clog the appetite. Much care is necessary in 

 adjusting the quantity of food to the needs of the birds. 



Other methods of feeding young chicks have been tried and 

 the results watched. Method I has been used for several years 

 and no other has been found that gives better growth or less 

 losses of birds. The only objection to it is the labor required in 

 preparing the food and cleaning the dishes after each meal. 



In the work at this Station, Method II is preferred and used. 

 Many weighings of the birds in comparative pens, lead to the 

 belief that the growths are as great under this dry mash system 

 as from the moist mash used in Method I. The losses of chicks 

 are small by either method. The labor in Method II is consid- 

 erably less than is required in Method I. Where either Methods 

 I or II are used the liability of injury to the chicks is much less 

 than when Methods III or IV are followed. 



