8 MAINE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. I9O4. 



The expenditure is greater for the piped house, for the reason 

 that colony houses should be provided in which the chickens may 

 be sheltered after they leave the brooder-house. In ordinary 

 seasons we experience no difficulty in raising April and May 

 hatched chicks in the small houses. With proper feeding, pul- 

 lets hatched in these months are early enough to do good work 

 throughout the year. 



FEEDING THE CHICKS. 



For feed for young chicks we make bread by mixing three 

 parts corn meal, one part wheat bran, and one part wheat mid- 

 dlings or flour, with skim milk or water, mixing it very dry, and 

 salting as usual for bread. It is baked thoroughly, and when 

 well done if it is not dry enough so as to crumble, it is broken up 

 and dried out in the oven and then ground in a mortar or mill. 

 The infertile eggs are hard boiled and ground shell and all, in a 

 sausage mill. About one part of ground egg and four parts of 

 the bread crumbs are rubbed together until the egg is well 

 divided. This bread makes up about one-half of the food of the 

 chicks until they are five or six weeks old. Eggs are always 

 used with it for the first one or two weeks, and then fine sifted 

 beef scrap is mixed with the bread. 



It may be that the bread is not necessary and that something 

 else is just as good. We have tried many other foods, includ- 

 ing several of the most highly advertised prepared dry chicken 

 foods, but as yet have found nothing that gives us as good health 

 and growth as the bread fed in connection with dry broken 

 grains. 



When the chicks are first brought to the brooders, bread 

 crumbs are sprinkled on the floor of the brooder among the grit, 

 and in this way they learn to eat, taking in grit and food at the 

 same time. After the first day the food is given in tin plates, 4 

 to each brooder. The plates have low edges, and the chicks go 

 onto them and find the food readily. After they have had the 

 food before them for five minutes the plates are removed. As 

 they have not spilled much of it, they have little left to lunch on 

 except what they scratch for. In the course of a few days light 

 wooden troughs are substituted for the plates. The bottom of 

 the trough is a strip of half inch board, 2 feet long and 3 

 inches wide. Laths are nailed around the edsres. The birds are 



