FEEDING 
unground grains, beef scrap and oyster shell, each in a sep- 
arate compartment, are exposed before the hen at all times, to- 
gether with the abundant use of green food, either as pasture 
or a soiling crop, is the method of feeding assumed through- 
out this book. 
The hopper feeding of so-called dry mash or ground grain 
mixture has been quite a fad in the last few years. The ten- 
dency of the hens to waste such food has occasioned con- 
siderable trouble. They are picking it over for their favorite 
foods and trying to avoid disagreeable foods. This difficulty . 
is relieved when the food be separated into its various com- 
ponents and the hen offered each separately. As a matter of 
fact, there is no occasion for feeding ground feed except in 
fattening rations and here the wet mash is desirable. 
The use of the products of wheat milling has been the chief 
excuse for such practices, but unless these get considerably 
lower in price per pound than corn they may be left off the 
bill-of-fare to advantage. The great use made of these prod- 
ucts in poultry feeding was chiefly a result of the attempted 
application of the balanced ration idea, but as has already 
been shown the efforts to raise the protein ratio with grain 
foods is generally false economy. 
The old-fashioned wet mash which the writer does not rec- 
ommend because of the labor involved, is, nevertheless, a fair- 
ly profitable method of poultry feeding. It is used in the Little 
Compton district of Rhode Island and was also used in the 
famous Australian egg laying contests elsewhere described. 
Personally I would prefer feeding ground grain wet, especially 
wheat bran and middlings, to feeding it dry. 
The scattering of grain in litter so generally recommended 
in poultry literature is all right and proper, but is rather out 
of place in commercial poultry farming. It is used on the 
large poultry plants with the yards and long houses, but is 
not used on colony farms or in any of the poultry growing 
communities. I should recommend littered houses for Sec- 
tion 6 and the northern half of Section 3 (see Chapter IV), 
but with warmer soils and climate where the snow does not lie 
on the ground it would add a labor expense that would very 
seriously handicap the business. 
The systems of poultry feeding that are commonly adver- 
tised are based either on some patent nostrum or a recommen- 
dation of green food in novel form, such as sprouted oats. The 
joke about poultry feed at 10 cents a bushel, absurd though 
it may seem, has caught lots of dollars. To take a bushel of 
oats worth 50 cents, add water, let them sprout and have five 
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