SUCCESSFUL POULTllY KEEr^;^ 



The advocates of feeding dry grain to chicks have much 

 to commend them, provided the chicks have perfect liberty to 

 roam and the numbers are limited to such a degree that they 

 secure sufficient worms and insects for the meat supply and the 

 fields furnish the new grass as their vegetable diet. When the 

 chickens are raised in large ntimbers and in limited quarters it 

 is folly to use only dry grain if we are to secure the best results. 



CARE OF HENS AND CHICKS 



Many persons teU you not to feed chicks for 24 to 48 hours 

 after hatching. This may be good advice for those who hatch 

 with incubators and rear the chicks in brooders, but with hens, 

 especially the earlier broods, the chicks often are two days in 

 hatching. It is well to place before them a saucer of crushed 

 crackers and scalded milk over which pulverized shell is scattered, 

 so that the hen and the early chicks may satisfy their hunger. 

 This wiU cause the hen to remain 12 to 24 hours longer on the 

 nest and may result in one or more doubtful eggs hatching, 

 and a strong lot when she leaves the nest. The hen with her 

 brood should be removed to a large box, the bottom of which 

 has been overlaid with a gravel sand and fine ground grit covered 

 with hay chaff, there to remain a couple of days before being 

 taken to the lawn or a field. 



The first meal in this large box should be a bread made from 

 the meal mentioned in Formula No. 1. The bread should be 

 prepared just as our wives make a corn cake, and baked thor- 

 oughly. Cnunble it into scalded skimmed milk, squeeze the 

 milk out well and give the milk as drink for the first day or two, 

 after that in the forenoons for two weeks, giving them pure water 

 in the afternoon. 



This bread and milk is the forenoon feed. In the afternoon 

 give them mixed dry feed like the standard, or prepare one for 

 yourself of 20 pounds of com, 15 pounds of hulled oats, 10 

 pounds of wheat and 2 quarts of charcoal. Crack all as fine 

 as canary sand. Sift out the flour and add two quarts of canary 

 and miUet seed and you will have the best dry food for chicks 

 you can possibly buy. Give the chicks a free run so they can 

 secure worms and young grass blades. When the chicks are 

 two weeks old they can be fed as we feed our general flocks. 

 Let the little fellows scratch in the hay seed for this dry grain. 

 If they are being reared in confined quarters they must have 

 a meat ration. Do not forget that the protein from milk and 

 meat hastens them to maturity quicker than if they have to 

 depend on the protein from grain. Fine gravel grit, sea gravel 

 and charcoal in boxes, to take at their option, must be provided. 

 Early, before the grass blades have started, sow oats in frames 

 and leave them for the chicks to harvest for grain food. This 

 is essential to perfect development. If chicks have field liberty, 

 I do not believe in meat rations for them tiU weaned, for it is 

 apt to cause too great muscle development in proportion to the 

 bone structure. The bone must be strong and well grown, then 

 put on muscle and fat. If you look out for the bone structure, 

 you will have no weak, tottering chicks. 



I believe in getting the chicks upon the ground at the earliest 

 moment after frost is out of the ground and before the brood 

 s ten days old. Before the frost is out the floor of the quarters 

 would better be covered three inches deep with a gravel loam, 

 and furnish all flocks with outside runs that they may have a 

 part of each day in open air. A damp, chilly atmosphere must 

 be guarded against. Dry, cold quarters are far better than 

 quarters that are damp and very much warmer. 



A lack of bone-forming food with an excess of protein and 

 fat-forming grains causes the tottering weakness we too often 

 see in flocks and gives us the grown chicks with weak knock- 

 knees and weak hips, which we see rising above the back as they 

 crouch upon the ground. Hulled oats, wheat with nutritive 

 salts and bone meal given when these symptoms appear, will 



soon correct the matter. When green clover is not to be had, 

 steam the dry clover and feed it until you can get them out on 

 the ground. 



DO NOT FORCE THE CHICKS 



Men tell you they can raise good chickens on cracked com 

 alone. I tell you I can raise better ones on the mixed feed and 

 I know these latter will lay earlier in hfe and produce more eggs 

 during life and a larger nmnber annually. It will take some- 

 thing more than a dam that has laid 200 eggs a year to make 

 sure the second generation will make a like record. These fowls 

 that are noted for their personal records have in most cases 

 made them by extensive forcing processes. This forcing process 

 should never be indulged in when their eggs are being used for 

 incubation. They should be kept under normal conditions, 

 and then the chances are that their chickens when forced may 

 repeat or excel their ancestors. The hen in the best physical 

 condition during the breeding season gives us the phenomenal 

 chickens both in the exhibition and in the breeding pen. Of 

 what we eat are we made. It is a well-known fact that when 

 all else fails to agree with an invald, a raw, fresh egg can be 

 taken and assimilated as a food by the most sensitive stomach. 

 The chronic invalid, the child and the hospital inmate are and 

 should be large consumers of eggs. 



If we can demonstrate that by feeding a special ration we 

 can produce eggs highly charged with beneficial salts, it wUl 

 give such eggs a great, vital value for the use of such persons 

 and any price almost will be cheerfully paid, even 50 cents to 

 one doUar a dozen. I believe if we can feed to our mated stock 

 10 grains of Dr. Dechmann's nutritive salt to each fowl, together 

 with the feed that I have recommended, nearly or quite all 

 the eggs will hatch and nearly all chicks can be raised into 

 healthy, strong and very prolific stock. 



If we can show this vital force in the egg, surely we should 

 be led to follow up the theory in the feeding and rearing of the 

 young stock up to mature age, thus giving to the purchaser a 

 better, more prolific lot of fowls. 



This is the course the thinking poultryman of the future 

 will adopt. What matters it that it adds 10 cents per dozen 

 to the cost of the eggs or 30 cents each to the chickens? The 

 purchasing public will cheerfully pay a dollar more to secure its 

 benefits. 



I will not detain you longer. If I have aroused you so you 

 will think of these things, and induced you to enter a strenuous 

 life in poultry culture, my mission has been accomplished. 



We often hear jibes at the expense of writers who try to 

 tell the novice how to set a hen and how to manage the young 

 brood. These 'criticisers were once novices themselves and 

 needed like instructions. Old writers are too prone to forget 

 that the world is ever new, that it is only they who are growing 

 old. Too many of them think they have nothing to learn. 



The young-old writer is the salvation of the rising genera- 

 tion — admitting there is little that is "new under the sun." 

 We should remember that aU things are new to the young 

 poultrymen just starting in the business and they form the 

 audiences that should hsten attentively to the things that have 

 carried the old fanciers successfully through life. 



MAKING NESTS 



So small (?) a thing as care in making a suitable nest many 

 times saves a valuable sitting of eggs. It is the little cares that 

 secure success. In the early season if a sod of earth six inches 

 thick be fitted into a fifteen-inch square box and a place seven 

 by ten inches be hollowed out but left flat at the bottom, and the 

 whole warmed to 100 degrees, the eggs also warmed to the same 

 degree before the hen has been taken to her new sitting coop, 

 in nineteen cases out of twenty she will take kindly to the nest 



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