POULTRY RAISING. 11 
single article of diet set before them day after day, it 
stands and sours. If a quantity is thus found uneaten, 
the next meal is likely to bea light one, and the chickens, 
driven by hunger, finally devour the sour stuff. The re- 
sult is cholera or some other fatal disease sets in and their 
owner wonders why his chickens are dying off. In my 
own practice I find that small quantities of varied food, 
if given to the chickens often, produce vastly better re- 
sults than any other method of feeding. 
On no account, do I permit young chickens to be fed 
with Indian meal dough. Yor the first morning meal I 
give all my young stock boiled potatoes mashed up fine 
and mixed with an equal quantity of Indian meal and 
shorts. I find nothing so good and acceptable as this 
food, and I use only small unmarketable potatoes ; they 
prove more profitable than anything else I can employ. 
I have had many hundreds of chickens at one time in 
my houses, varying in size from those but afew days old 
to others large enough for the table, and positively no 
other article of ‘soft food ” was ever given to them ; and 
I venture to say a more healthy and thrifty lot of chick- 
ens could not be found. When, in days gone by, I used 
to feed to the young stock the traditional “‘ dough,” I 
always counted on losing a large percentage, and the 
numbers that died from cholera, diarrhoea and kindred 
diseases, were great. Nowa sick chicken is a rarity in 
my yards. After the potato mash is disposed of I give 
my chickens all the fine cracked corn they will eat up 
clean. Of course large chickens, those which are ten or 
twelve weeks old, can be fed with corn coarser cracked, 
but the young birds want it very fine. In about two hours 
after the cracked corn is eaten, I give all the wheat 
screenings the chicken will eat, and in another two hours, 
some oats. For supper they have all the -eracked corn 
and wheat they can eat. It is of the utmost importance 
that the young birds should, at the close of the day, have 
