POULTRY FOR PROFIT 91 



The Nursery Feed 



Bread and hard boiled egg has been the time- 

 honored "first feed" for baby chicks, and it does no 

 harm, but it is not necessary. Chicks do exactly as 

 well when started on rolled oats or steel cut oats and 

 cracked wheat. One of the most successful poul- 

 trymen I know starts his chicks on a simple mixture 

 of steel cut oats and cracked wheat. At the Cali- 

 fornia Experiment Station the first two days a 

 grain mixture of fine cracked wheat, fine cracked 

 corn and steel cut oats is given. The Oregon Sta- 

 tion recommends rolled oats as the "first feed," and 

 this has been my own standby. I give rolled oats 

 scattered over the sand the first day, and steel cut 

 oats or commercial chick feed the second. By the 

 third day the chicks have a dish of bran to peck at, 

 and this by the end of the first week is changed to 

 the Cornell mash. A hard-boiled egg, chopped with 

 bread crumbs, is "tasty," if given occasionally, and 

 I have never seen any harm from it, but some poul- 

 trymen claim that it is constipating. Bread and 

 milk is easier to prepare, and it does make them 

 grow! 



Sample Rations 



California Method. — At the University of Cali- 

 fornia farm at Davis nothing but grain is given the 

 first five days. Beginning with the sixth day a dry 

 mash -of two parts bran, two parts shorts, one part 

 corn meal or barley meal, two parts beef scrap, one 

 part ground bone (fine) and three-tenths part 

 powdered charcoal by weight is fed at ten o'clock. 

 For the next two weeks the chicks get this dry mash 

 at ten o'clock, and the grain mixture scattered in 

 deep litter early in the morning and at two o'clock 



